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Build With Claude vs Cline: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)

A side-by-side comparison of Build With Claude and Cline — features, pricing, and ideal use cases — to help you decide which AI tool fits your workflow.

B

Build With Claude

Dave Poon

Free

A plugin marketplace and discovery hub for Claude Code to browse, install, and contribute agents, commands, hooks, skills, and plugin collections.

Key features

  • Plugin Marketplace & Discovery: A web UI and index where users can browse curated plugins, agents, commands, hooks, skills, and bundled plugin collections for Claude Code.
  • Community Indexing: Aggregates and indexes thousands of community resources (reported repository metrics include 20k+ community plugins, 4,500+ MCP servers, and 1,100+ external marketplaces) to surface third-party integrations and reusable components.
  • Plugin Format & Validation: Defines standardized formats for Agents, Commands, and Hooks and provides contributing guidelines and npm test-based validation to ensure plugins meet repository conventions.
  • Hooks & Event Automation: Supports hooks that run automatically on events (e.g., PreToolUse, PostToolUse, session start, tool calls) to enable event-driven automation like notifications, git operations, or formatting.
  • Curated Collections & Packaging: Maintains curated collections and bundled plugin packages by category to help teams adopt opinionated stacks of agents and skills quickly.
  • Integration with Claude Ecosystem: Designed to extend Claude Code, Claude Desktop, the Agent SDK, and OpenClaw, enabling seamless installation and use across developer surfaces.
  • Web UI and CLI Workflow Support: Offers a web UI at buildwithclaude.com for discovery and documentation, plus repository-supplied assets and quickstart guidance for installing and using plugins within Claude Code workflows.
  • Browse and search curated collections of Agents, Commands, Hooks, Skills, and Plugins via web UI (buildwithclaude.com)
  • Repository of bundled plugin packages and community-discovered plugins with metadata and README documentation
  • Support for plugin formats (agents, commands, hooks) with contribution guidelines and validation tests
  • Integration references and documentation links for Claude Code, Agent SDK, Claude Desktop, and OpenClaw
  • Indexes large external ecosystem: 20k+ community plugins, 4,500+ MCP servers, 1,100+ plugin marketplaces (community-sourced counts)
  • Hooks system: event-driven automation for events like tool calls and session start
  • CLI/Web/UI workflows: quickstart snippets, install instructions, and examples for using marketplace plugins
  • Repository contains CI workflows, Dockerfile, tests, and web-ui source for building and deploying the marketplace
  • Open-source MIT license enabling free use and community contributions
  • Contributor tooling and build steps (bun, tauri, Rust, Cargo) and platform build guidance included in related repos

Best for

  • Extending Claude Code Workflows: Install agent plugins and commands to automate common development tasks like generating commits, creating documentation, or running tests from within Claude Code.
  • Assembling Specialized Agents: Combine curated agent skills (e.g., Python, DevOps, Security) to create domain-specific experts for code reviews, vulnerability scanning, or automated refactoring.
  • Event-Driven Automation: Use hooks to trigger workflows on session start or tool calls—e.g., auto-formatting code, posting notifications, or syncing changes to issue trackers.
  • Team Marketplaces and Collections: Create and share bundled plugin collections for a team or organization to standardize agent capabilities and onboarding.
  • Discovering Community Integrations: Search the aggregated index to find plugins that add tool integrations (databases, APIs, CLIs) or MCP servers to enrich agent context and capabilities.
  • Contribute and Publish Plugins: Follow repository contributing guidelines to add new agents, commands, or hooks, validate them with provided tests, and publish them to the community marketplace.
  • Discover and install Claude Code agents to extend coding assistants for domain-specific workflows (DevOps, Security, Language-specific experts)
  • Add slash commands and automation (e.g., /commit, /docs, /tdd) to streamline developer tasks
  • Create and attach hooks for event-driven integrations (notifications, git operations, formatting) in Claude sessions
  • Aggregate and reuse skills across projects to share capabilities between agents and workflows
  • Integrate marketplace plugins into CI/CD pipelines, IDEs (VS Code, JetBrains), and terminals for automated code tasks
  • Serve as a community index for integrating external MCP servers and marketplace collections into Claude ecosystems
View Build With Claude details
Cline logo

Cline

Cline Bot Inc

Freemium

Open-source coding agent runtime that runs in your IDE, your terminal or embedded via SDK, works with any model, and asks approval on every step.

Key features

  • One runtime, three surfaces: The same agent runs as a VS Code extension, a terminal CLI, or embedded in your own product through the SDK
  • Model agnostic: Works with Claude, GPT, Gemini, local Ollama or LM Studio models and any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, using your own key or weights
  • Plan then Act: Align on a strategy in Plan mode before execution, then approve each step in Act mode or flip on auto-approve
  • Multi-file edits with undo: Coordinated changes across a project with linter-aware fixes, diffs, checkpoints and one-click undo on every step
  • Live terminal execution: Runs bash commands and reacts to output as it appears, handling dev servers, test runs and deploys
  • Rules and Skills: Ship .clinerules with the repo so the agent follows your coding standards, architecture and deployment conventions
  • Multi-agent teams: Coordinator agents delegate to specialists with their own tools and context, and can run on cron for recurring automation
  • MCP and integrations: Register MCP servers and custom tools, chat from Slack, Discord, Telegram or Linear, and run headlessly in GitHub Actions or GitLab

Best for

  • A developer onboarding to an unfamiliar codebase and asking the agent how files, dependencies and behaviour fit together
  • Refactoring across a large repository while keeping imports, types and behaviour consistent
  • Running recurring maintenance — dependency bumps, lint sweeps, scheduled checks — from cron or a CI pipeline
  • A team that must keep code on self-hosted or local models for compliance reasons, pointing the agent at its own endpoint
  • Embedding an agent loop inside an internal developer platform via the SDK instead of building one from scratch
  • Encoding team conventions in .clinerules so every engineer's agent produces consistent, review-ready changes
  • Triggering a coding task from Slack or Linear and having the agent open the resulting change
View Cline details