Agentic Index
Augment Code vs Cline (2026)
Augment Code documents 12 of 14 and Cline 12.5, coordinating multiple coding agents, and one is free. That verdict is the Agentic Index coverage score, graded from each vendor's own published materials.
Cline is an open source VS Code agent with first class MCP support, multi agent team coordination, persistent team state, model portability and a confirmed action safety model. Augment's Cosmos adds specialized agent teams coordinating across the development lifecycle with shared memory and MCP and webhook integrations, at a hundred dollars a month flat. Half a point separates them, so the question is whether a hundred dollars a month buys you something Cline does not already give away.
On the Agentic Index coding agent ranking, neither Augment Code nor Cline clears the bar, which asks for all five merge loop capabilities documented in full. Neither documents testing, debugging and optimization in full, nor observability and auditability. 4 of the 63 vendors in the lane clear it. See the coding agent ranking
This comparison is published by Agentic Index, an independent agentic AI vendor research platform. Augment Code and Cline are each graded against the same 14 capability Agentic Index taxonomy, from the vendor's own public materials under the Agentic Index verification standard, alongside 969 researched vendors. No vendor pays for placement and no vendor has reviewed this page. How this evidence is graded
Choose Augment Code if
- Lifecycle coverage beyond the editor is what you are paying for.
- Webhook integrations mean agents react to events in your systems.
- A commercial vendor with support is what your organization requires.
Choose Cline if
- Free and open source, at coverage within half a point of the paid option, is hard to argue against.
- Model portability keeps you independent of any provider's pricing decisions.
- A confirmed action safety model is the default control your team wants.
| At a glance | Augment Code | Cline |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Coding agent | Coding agent |
| Entry price | From $100/mo flat · Business (up to 50 seats) | Free / OSS |
| Free / trial | 30,000-credit trial (card required) | Free (OSS self-host) |
| Pricing confidence | public partial | public exact |
| Feature | A Augment Code |
C Cline |
|---|---|---|
| Action & orchestration | ||
|
Integrations & Tool Calling Ability to connect agents to real systems through native integrations, OAuth-authenticated actions, custom tools, APIs, webhooks, or MCP-compatible tools. |
Full / Explicit | Full / Explicit |
|
Workflow Orchestration Ability to sequence, branch, retry, route, and combine deterministic workflow nodes with autonomous agent steps. |
Full / Explicit
Cosmos (June 2026) introduces an agentic SDLC platform with specialized agents coordinating across triage, spec, implementation, review, testing, deployment, and feedback. |
Full / Explicit |
|
Triggers & Channel Coverage How agents wake up and where they work: schedules, webhooks, message events, CRM events, inbox events, chat, email, voice, and collaboration tools. |
Full / Explicit
Upgraded from P: headless CI invocation, GitHub Actions, ACP clients, service accounts for scheduled and automated runs, and pipeable stdin are five distinct paths beyond the IDE. Recurring automations are documented as a solution. |
Full / Explicit
Upgraded from P: invocation spans IDE, CLI, SDK, headless CI, cron schedules, and four chat surfaces including Slack, Discord, Telegram and Linear. That is breadth rather than an editor sidebar. |
| Knowledge & context | ||
|
Knowledge Grounding & RAG Ability to ground agent behavior in company data through document ingestion, retrieval, external knowledge APIs, semantic search, or RAG layers. |
Full / Explicit | Full / Explicit |
|
Memory & State Persistence Ability to persist context across a run, conversation, workflow, user, team, or longer-term memory layer. |
Full / Explicit
Cosmos (June 2026) introduces shared memory across coordinating agents in the agentic SDLC platform. |
Full / Explicit |
| Control & trust | ||
|
Human Oversight & Guardrails Approval steps, consent checkpoints, escalation rules, structured guardrails, policy constraints, and pause/resume controls. |
Full / Explicit
Prior N said oversight was not documented as first class; the CLI product page names Tool Permissions and User & Repo Rules as shipped features, and the dependency review workflow shows a documented risk threshold routing work to a human. That was a retrieval failure rather than an absence. |
Full / Explicit |
|
Security, Identity & Governance RBAC, SSO, auditability, encryption, least-privilege tool access, compliance posture, and data handling policy. |
Full / Explicit |
Partial
Held at P. Architecture is a genuine strength here, since bring your own key and local weights mean code need never leave the customer's control, but architecture is not controls. An enterprise page exists and was not retrieved on this pass, so a governance surface or attestation may exist; recorded as a limit rather than asserted absent. Same shape as aider and opencode in this lane. |
|
Observability & Auditability Traces, logs, execution histories, metrics, audit events, and debugging detail for production agent behavior. |
Partial
Downgraded from F. Streaming output, session sharing and markdown export are visibility into a live session, and enterprise service account usage monitoring is billing and volume telemetry; neither is a retained per action execution trace or audit log. The Sec cell separately credits audit logging as a governance control, and the same fact should not do work on both axes. |
Partial
Held at P. Per tool call checkpoints and screenshot-after-every-browser-action give unusually granular visibility into what happened, and the whole runtime is inspectable open source, but there is no retained audit log or organisation level record of agent actions. |
|
Deployment & Data Residency Deployment modes and options, including SaaS, dedicated cloud, VPC, on-prem, hybrid, local runtime, and self-hosting. |
Full / Explicit | Full / Explicit |
| Solution readiness | ||
|
Prebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs Ready-made workflows, packaged employees, templates, blueprints, industry solutions, and role-specific agents that reduce time-to-value. |
Full / Explicit
Upgraded from P: Custom Commands build reusable specialised agents, and the site publishes ten named solution workflows plus a workflows library, which is a shipped catalogue rather than customer authored templates alone. |
Full / Explicit
Upgraded from P: the MCP Marketplace is a browsable catalogue with one click install and automatic configuration, which is the axis. Servers are third party contributed but the marketplace itself is a vendor operated distribution surface, comparable to kiro Powers and Claude Code plugins. |
| Platform extensibility | ||
|
Model Flexibility & Routing Ability to work across multiple foundation models, route tasks to different models, or let buyers bring their own providers and keys. |
Full / Explicit | Full / Explicit |
|
APIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility Composability layer: stable APIs, SDKs, MCP tool consumption/serving, custom tools, and integration into internal systems. |
Full / Explicit | Full / Explicit |
|
Testing, Debugging & Optimization Testing, debugging, scoring, retries, fallbacks, quality gates, and optimization loops for improving agent workflows before and after deployment. |
Partial
Held at P per the axis rule applied across this lane. Test coverage and CI failure workflows are the agent acting on the customer's code and verifying its own output; no harness for evaluating or regression testing agent behaviour is documented. |
Partial
Held at P per the lane wide axis rule. Linter monitoring, test execution and browser verification are the agent checking its own output against the customer's code; no harness for evaluating or regression testing agent behaviour is documented. |
| Specialist automation | ||
|
Browser & Computer Use Browser, desktop, or remote/local computer control for workflows that cannot be handled through stable APIs alone. |
No / Not documented |
Full / Explicit
Corrected from N, which contradicted the record's own longDescription. browser_action is a documented first class tool with its own docs page; the agent drives a real browser through the human interface, which is the axis test. Remote mode reuses existing authentication tokens and session cookies, so it reaches authenticated applications with no programmatic interface exposed to it. |
Pricing snapshot
Sourced from the Index pricing dataset · open each vendor's profile for full detail.
| Pricing | A Augment Code |
C Cline |
|---|---|---|
|
Entry price Lowest public entry point |
From $100/mo flat · Business (up to 50 seats) | Free / OSS |
|
Pricing confidence How public the numbers are |
Public, partial | Public, exact |
|
Billing Primary billing axis |
hybrid | usage |
|
Variable cost Workload / overage exposure |
High variable cost | Medium variable cost |
|
Free tier / trial Try before you buy |
No free tierTrial
|
Free tier
|
|
Buying motion Self-serve vs sales call |
Mixed | Self-serve |
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