About
Cline builds an open-source AI coding agent that helps individual developers and engineering organizations plan, edit, test, and automate software work across IDEs. It differentiates through model, provider, and IDE agnosticism, client-controlled infrastructure, enterprise security, and an open-source core.
Market
Cline competes in the AI coding-assistant and autonomous software-engineering market, positioning itself as an open-source coding agent that works across models, providers, and IDEs. Its differentiation is a combination of agentic capabilities—planning, file editing, terminal operations, browsing, and MCP extensibility—with client-side control, enterprise-grade security, and direct use of customers' existing provider contracts without markup. This gives Cline a transparency, portability, and governance-oriented position against proprietary or more tightly coupled coding-agent alternatives.
Cline targets individual software developers as well as engineering teams and large enterprises that need AI-assisted coding, debugging, refactoring, and software-creation workflows. Enterprise buyers are likely engineering leaders, developer-platform teams, and security/IT administrators who value governance, auditability, and keeping code and model usage under organizational control.
At a Glance
Problem
Cline addresses the gap between lightweight AI code completion and an agent that can understand and change an entire software project. Developers need help navigating unfamiliar codebases, coordinating multi-file edits, running commands, testing, and deploying, while platform teams need control over how AI is used at scale. Cline identifies the operational pain clearly: scattered API keys create security risks, compliance gaps, and cost overruns.
The killer use case is turning a software-maintenance event into an executable workflow. Cline can coordinate work across large codebases and automate recurring checks, updates, and custom workflows; in an enterprise example, a Sentry webhook can trigger the agent to analyze an issue, fix it, test the change, and open a pull request automatically. The economic value is reduced engineering effort and more consistent execution of repetitive, multi-step development work, while usage-based inference avoids adding a separate software subscription on top of model costs.
Product / Service
Cline is an open-source AI coding agent delivered across IDEs, the terminal, and an embeddable SDK. It can inspect a codebase, make coordinated multi-file changes, execute Bash commands, react to live output, and operate on long-running development servers, tests, and deployments. Its Plan and Act modes let developers agree on an approach before execution, with step-by-step approval or automated operation, while checkpoints, diffs, linter-aware fixes, and undo reduce the risk of agent-generated changes.
The product is model- and infrastructure-agnostic: users can bring their own API key, endpoint, or model weights, and connect databases, APIs, and infrastructure through MCP servers and plugins. Cline is free for individual developers and charges only for AI inference on a usage basis, with no subscription or vendor lock-in; enterprise capabilities add centralized control and integrations while preserving the familiar open-source developer experience.
Market
Cline competes in the AI coding-agent and AI developer-tools market, with a positioning centered on open source, model choice, and an agent that works across the IDE, terminal, and automation infrastructure. Its competitive set includes mainstream coding assistants and agents such as Amazon Q Developer, GitHub Copilot, Gemini Code Assist, Kiro, and Claude Code, alongside open-source alternatives such as OpenCode and Aider.
Cline is not pre-revenue according to an external estimate: Sacra reported approximately $5 million in ARR in August 2025, though that figure is not presented as a company disclosure. The company reports more than 8 million developers and 8 million installs across platforms, its GitHub repository shows roughly 64.7 thousand stars, and Cline says it has raised $32 million in combined Seed and Series A funding. Those figures indicate substantial developer adoption and meaningful venture backing while the company expands from an open-source extension into CLI, SDK, and enterprise products.
Founders & Leadership
Funding History
Not separately disclosed publicly
Emergence Capital, Pace Capital
Recent News
Cline announced ways to extend its agent loop with plugins and hooks, enabling custom behavior, lifecycle logging, and enforceable guardrails.
Cline introduced its upgraded SDK and agent runtime, positioning it as an open-source and fully extensible foundation for building on Cline's capabilities.
Cline announced an integration with CoreWeave's W&B Inference and full-stack AI cloud. The partnership is intended to provide scalable, production-ready infrastructure for running autonomous coding systems.
Snyk and Cline announced a strategic partnership embedding Snyk security intelligence into Cline's autonomous coding loops through MCP. The integration supports real-time scanning, policy enforcement, and automated vulnerability remediation.
Cline reported more than five million installations across multiple editors and announced a $1 million open-source grant program. Grants are intended for useful open-source developer tools, AI infrastructure, and agentic systems, with individual awards ranging from $1,000 to $10,000 in credits.
Cline announced comprehensive Jupyter Notebook support, extending its AI-assisted coding experience to data-science workflows designed around notebooks.
Cline and LG CNS announced a partnership integrating LG CNS's DevOn AI-Driven Development technology with Cline. The companies are developing a knowledge foundation that maps client requirements to proven implementation patterns, with an intended on-premises rollout.
Cline published an update concerning its open-source commitment and the zAI GLM 4.6 integration. It emphasized that reporting successes, failures, and unexpected behaviors helps improve the integration pipeline.
Cline introduced its enterprise offering, connecting to customer-controlled providers including Bedrock, Vertex, Azure, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cerebras. The offering emphasizes no provider markup, model and provider flexibility, observability, and custom tooling through CLI and lifecycle hooks.
Press coverage reported that Cline had raised $32 million in total seed and Series A funding, with the latest Series A led by Emergence Capital. The financing supports Cline's open-source AI coding agent and enterprise expansion.
Active Roles
2Business Model
Cline is free for individual developers and monetizes AI inference on a usage basis rather than charging individual subscriptions. It also sells team and enterprise offerings, with team pricing of $20 per user per month after the free allowance and enterprise pricing scaled to organizational size.
Products
Customers
Tech Stack
Similar Companies
Competitors
Key Investors
Emergence Capital, Pace Capital, 1984 Ventures, Essence VC