head to head · open source
OpenHands vs Cline
OpenHands has 88,312 GitHub stars, 11,598 forks, 713 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Cline has 68,517 stars, 7,409 forks, 1,288 open issues and last shipped yesterday. OpenHands leads on adoption by 29% (88,312 vs 68,517 stars). OpenHands is written in TypeScript under MIT; Cline is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0. OpenHands has attracted 13% as many forks as stars, Cline 11%. Cline was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| OpenHands | Cline | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 88K | ★ 69K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 7.4K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick OpenHands if
- You weight community size — 88K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick Cline if
- You want the Cline feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and Cline fits your workflow better
About OpenHands
OpenHands is an open source platform that provides a self hosted control center—Agent Canvas—for managing and orchestrating autonomous AI coding agents. It lives in the developer tools and AI assisted coding ecosystem, designed to turn local or remote agents into a persistent, automated engineering team. The platform supports multiple agent backends and integrates with third party services to enable scheduled or event driven automation workflows.
read the full OpenHands overview →
About Cline
Cline is an open source AI coding agent that operates across multiple interfaces: as a CLI tool, desktop application, VS Code extension, JetBrains plugin, and SDK. It lives in the developer tooling ecosystem and is built with TypeScript under the Apache 2.0 license. The project solves the problem of fragmented AI assisted coding workflows by unifying agent capabilities—code generation, command execution, project wide edits, and human in the loop approval—into a single extensible engine that works consistently across environments.
read the full Cline overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is OpenHands or Cline more popular?
OpenHands has 88,312 GitHub stars and Cline has 68,517. OpenHands has the larger community by that measure.
Are OpenHands and Cline free?
Both are open source. OpenHands is licensed under MIT and Cline under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between OpenHands and Cline?
OpenHands is written in TypeScript and Cline in TypeScript. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, OpenHands or Cline?
Choose OpenHands if you want the larger community (88,312 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose Cline if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.