Cline can be used with the majority of LLM providers on the market, including open source ones.
What if Cline was the answer to code template launch chaos? Since the start of the year, not a month has passed without a major player presenting a new model claiming unprecedented performance in code generation. An excitement that forces developers to test models via code agents specific to each publisher, without being able to define a unified strategy. It is precisely on this point of friction that Cline positions himself. The open source tool allows most existing models to be tested and used without changing the working framework. Its main advantage: the ease of integrating local suppliers.
Cline, an agnostic LLM agent
Launched at the end of 2024 by Saoud Rizwan, Cline is entirely open source. The code agent integrates directly into the majority of IDEs: VS Code (also Insiders), Cursor, WIndsurf, JetBrains. Like Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or Codex, the agent can create or edit files locally, execute shell commands, use tools (browser, etc.) in total autonomy. The principle is simple: a prompt and the AI acts according to the degree of autonomy granted. Cline also supports the MCP protocol, so you can provide it with additional tools or databases to use. Finally, like Claude Code, Cline has recently had a plan mode to plan complex actions before implementing them.
Cline’s strong point lies in its very operation. The agent allows you to use the inference services of the main LLM providers on the market, whether xAI, OpenAI, OpenRouter, Anthropic, Amazon Bedrock, DeepSeek, Vertex AI from GCP, Mistral (the list is long). Simply provide your API key and Cline will directly query the API endpoint of the selected provider. Billing is therefore managed with each provider, individually.
Even if Cline claims an open source and free model, the platform has also developed a commercial offer for businesses. For the latter, Cline offers paid plans including advanced functions: centralized account and billing management, access control, priority support or even single sign-on (SSO) and service contracts (SLA).
Recently, Cline also offers a CLI agent (available on Mac and Linux). The latter is in every way similar to Claude Code, Codex CLI or Gemini CLI. Only the configuration is slightly more complex (from a JSON file). Cline CLI enters the growing market of command-line code brokers. The latter are often popular because the experience is more native. Cline CLI thus appears to be the real alternative to proprietary CLIs.
The perfect combo: Cline with an open source model
But the real interest of Cline lies, in our opinion, in the possibility of using local model providers. Cline supports Ollama and LM Studio. Concretely, developers can thus operate an inferred model directly on their machine, or, for larger models, on a remote server. The requests then become unlimited and do not generate any costs, apart from that of the infrastructure. The promise is attractive: no more need to pay sometimes astronomical sums for subscriptions (often around $200 per month with most model editors for intensive use) or in API credits for simple code agents.
If on-device execution still remains marginal, with PCs having to be powerful enough to infer cutting-edge models via Ollama or LM Studio, the use of an inference server dedicated exclusively to a code model is particularly relevant for businesses. For example, it is possible to use Qwen3-Coder, GLM-4.5, Kimi K2 or even gpt-oss-120B, whose performances are at a level comparable to those of proprietary models on SweBench, the reference benchmark for evaluating the capabilities of models in agentic code.
Certainly, infrastructure costs can be significant depending on the quantification and the model chosen, but they remain much lower than those of a proprietary subscription, in the majority of cases. And above all, there is no need to redevelop a complete scaffold: just use Cline. However, it should be noted that many developers remain attached to the Claude Code or Codex CLI scaffold, whose ergonomics and precision of results remain difficult to match, including via Cursor and Windsurf.
By focusing on openness and interoperability, Cline therefore stands out as a simple response to the fragmentation of the code agent market. Its agnostic approach gives it flexibility that proprietary solutions struggle to match. It now remains to be seen whether this open source philosophy will be able to bring together a community large enough to ultimately compete with the giants of the sector. But the bet seems well underway: the company raised $32 million in July, a moderate success for an American start-up certainly, but already a sign of interest in its model.
