Cline vs Cursor: open source extension or the IDE

Cursor is an editor. Cline is an extension you install into an editor, including into Cursor itself. That single fact explains most of the comparison: Cursor sells you a product with usage bundled in, Cline gives you an open source agent and sends the bill to your model provider.

At a glance

• Cline: Apache 2.0, about 67k GitHub stars, from Cline Bot Inc. VS Code extension, JetBrains plugin, CLI with headless mode. Free for individuals; pay inference with your own keys across Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, OpenRouter, Bedrock, Vertex, Groq, Cerebras, DeepSeek and more. Enterprise custom.
• Cursor: a proprietary IDE built on VS Code. Hobby is free with limited agent requests; Pro is $20 a month, with Pro+ at 3x and Ultra at 20x Pro's agent limits; Teams is $40 per user per month with a Premium tier at 5x Standard limits; Enterprise is custom. Every plan includes a set amount of model usage, and on-demand usage past that is billed in arrears.

How you pay

With Cline the meter is the provider's meter. With Cursor the meter is Cursor's: a bundle of included usage per plan, then on-demand. That is why "cursor usage", "cursor usage limits" and "cursor usage dashboard" are among the most searched Cursor phrases; the constraint people hit is the bundle.

Agent features

• Cline: Plan and Act modes, per-edit and per-command approval until you enable auto-approve, checkpoints to undo, MCP servers for databases, APIs and cloud infrastructure, and the same agent as an SDK for your own tooling.
• Cursor: the Agent inside the editor, cloud agents that run outside your machine, a CLI agent, Bugbot for automated review, MCPs, skills and hooks, and on paid plans access to Grok models and Grok Bot. Teams add shared cloud agents, agentic code review, usage analytics and SSO.

Model choice

Cline is provider agnostic and can run against a local model. Cursor offers frontier models from several vendors inside its bundle, chosen per turn by you or by the agent, but through Cursor's billing rather than your own keys.

Which to pick

• Pick Cline if you want open source, your own keys, your choice of editor (including Cursor), and a bill that is exactly your token usage.
• Pick Cursor if you want the integrated editor experience, cloud and background agents, Bugbot, and predictable bundled usage with the option to go on-demand.
• Cline inside Cursor is common: Cursor for the editor and its agent, Cline when you want to pay a specific provider directly.

One honest note about control

ClawMetry observes both with no extension of its own. Cline tasks show up per project with the full transcript and cost per task across providers. Cursor sessions show up with per-turn tokens and per-turn model routing. One difference the Cursor page states plainly: a Cursor CLI session is a real process and can be paused or killed, but a Cursor editor conversation shares the one IDE process and cannot. ClawMetry tells you which one you are looking at rather than offering a button that would do nothing. Cline details are on the Cline page.

Sources

• Cline pricing, cline/cline on GitHub
• Cursor pricing