Cline vs Devin — Which AI Agent Is Better?
An in-depth comparison of Cline and Devin across output quality, autonomy, reliability, speed, value, and ease of use. Vote for your favorite.
An in-depth comparison of Cline and Devin across output quality, autonomy, reliability, speed, value, and ease of use. Vote for your favorite.
Pick a winner in each category — you can change your vote anytime.
ClineDevinChoose Cline if you are developers who want a powerful, safety-gated agent inside the editor they already use. Choose Devin if you are teams that want to delegate well-scoped engineering tickets end-to-end.
In our editorial scoring, Cline leads in 3 of six categories (reliability, speed and value), while Devin leads in 2 (autonomy and ease of use). On price, Cline runs free (byo api key) and is open source; Devin runs $20/mo entry + usage (acus) and is proprietary.
Cline is the open-source coding agent that defined the in-editor agent category, with 5M+ installs across VS Code, JetBrains, and Cursor itself. Its Plan/Act modes separate thinking from doing — the agent proposes a plan you approve before it touches files or runs commands. Apache-2.0 licensed with full bring-your-own-key model freedom, MCP integration, and deployment options up to on-prem and air-gapped for enterprises.
Devin is Cognition's fully autonomous software engineer: give it a task in Slack, Linear, or the web IDE and it plans, writes code, runs tests, and opens a pull request in its own cloud sandbox — including several sessions in parallel. It shines on well-scoped, repetitive engineering work (migrations, test coverage, small features) and improved markedly through its 2.x releases, but it remains weaker on ambiguous, novel tasks, and ACU-based usage pricing means heavy use costs real money. Cognition also acquired Windsurf in 2025, folding its IDE technology into the same product family.
Both work with any OpenAI-compatible provider. Point the base URL at Standard Compute and get unlimited frontier-model compute from $9/mo flat — no per-token billing, no 429 rate limits.
Whichever AI agent you choose, Standard Compute gives you unlimited LLM compute at one flat monthly price. No rate limits, no per-token billing.
