First-party only — a session id and where you arrived from, so we can tell which pages are worth writing more of. No advertising, no third-party trackers, nothing that follows you off this site.
Both are on this list because they are genuinely good at something. The question is which something you need. Below is the factual comparison, then the honest answer about who each one is for.
Reviewed July 25, 2026 · pricing changes often, check the vendor
| Aider | Cline | |
|---|---|---|
| Made by | Paul Gauthier / community | Cline / community |
| Where it runs | Terminal | IDE plugin |
| Models | Provider-agnostic — Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, local models | Provider-agnostic, including local models via OpenRouter/Ollama |
| Pricing | Free and open source · you pay your own model costs | Free and open source · bring your own API key |
| Open source | Yes | Yes |
| Best for | People who want the agent's output to arrive as reviewable commits and want control over which model runs. | Working inside VS Code on changes you want to see approved step by step rather than in one big diff. |
Commit-per-change makes review and rollback the normal git workflow instead of a special case
Genuinely model-agnostic, including local models
The repo map keeps token spend sane on large codebases
No inline completion — it is a conversation, not an editing assistant
You manage your own keys, costs and model selection
Less polished than the commercial options, by design
Plan-then-act is the right default and it is built into the interface, not a prompt you have to remember
Every file write and command is shown before it runs
MCP support makes it extensible to your own systems
Step-by-step approval is safe and slow; long tasks mean a lot of clicking
Token spend can climb quickly without careful model selection
VS Code only
Pick Aider if people who want the agent's output to arrive as reviewable commits and want control over which model runs.
Pick Cline if working inside VS Code on changes you want to see approved step by step rather than in one big diff.
And a thing worth saying plainly: the gap between these two is smaller than the gap between a repo that tells an agent what it is and one that does not. If you are choosing between them to fix inconsistent output, the tool is probably not the variable. The free Foundations track covers the part that is.