Cline vs openrig: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of Cline and openrig — features, pricing, and ideal use cases — to help you decide which AI tool fits your workflow.
Cline
Cline Bot Inc
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
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openrig
mvschwarz
OpenRig is open-source software to define a team of Claude Code and Codex agents in YAML and run them as one persistent, managed system.
Key features
- YAML Rig Definitions: Describe an agent team with roles in YAML and boot it with a single command.
- Mixed Harnesses: Run Claude Code and Codex agents together in the same rig, managed as one system.
- Lead Agent Coordination: Talk to a lead agent that coordinates specialists across teams and reports back decisions needing attention.
- Persistent Teams: Keep team work and context at stable addresses instead of a pile of terminal sessions.
- Terminal UI: View the rig as a graph or a table of seats showing runtime, model, context and state, with per-seat detail.
- Guided First Use: A getting-started path installs, launches a two-agent team in your repository and produces one reviewed change.
- Permission Allowances: Optionally lets your agent add scoped native rules so OpenRig commands run without repeated prompts, with an undo.
- CLI Install: Distributed as @openrig/cli on npm, requiring Node.js 22 or 24 and tmux on macOS or Linux.
Best for
- Multi-Agent Coding Teams: Stand up a persistent team of coding agents with defined roles for a repository.
- Cross-Harness Workflows: Combine Claude Code and Codex strengths within one coordinated team.
- Outcome-Driven Delegation: Describe a desired outcome to a lead agent and let it split work among specialists.
- Agent Monitoring: Watch seats, models, context and state of many agents from one terminal UI.
- Reviewed Changes: Have agents produce a change in a repo and another review it before you merge.
- Agent Research Experiments: Prototype and study networks of cooperating agents on your own machine.