Most three-way tool comparisons are about which option wins. This one is about a family — and the most useful fact in it is a funeral.
Cline, Roo Code, and Kilo Code are not three independent products that happen to look alike. They are one project's bloodline. Cline came first. Roo Code is a fork of Cline — it was literally named Roo-Cline before it rebranded. Kilo Code forked Roo, then declared itself a superset of both. They share file-edit conventions, the same plan-then-execute instinct, even overlapping UI vocabulary. Comparing them is less like comparing Postgres to MySQL and more like reading a will.
The middle child died — and that's the data point
On 2026-05-15, Roo Code archived its GitHub repository. The extension, Roo Code Cloud, and the Roo Code Router were all discontinued; the team announced the wind-down in April. At shutdown Roo had something like three million installs. It did not die of neglect or get out-competed on features.
It quit on purpose. The stated reason, from CEO Matt Rubens, was that the team had concluded the in-IDE extension is the wrong place to build — and pivoted the whole company to cloud-based agents ("Roomote") that take a task end to end without living in your editor. Read that again, because it reframes the entire comparison: the most feature-rich, mode-driven member of this family looked at where coding agents are going and bet against the editor itself.
Roo Code didn't lose a feature war. Its makers decided the category was wrong and walked out the front door. That's the question the other two are quietly answering with "no."
So the practical guidance for anyone on Roo today is short: it's archived, it's still Apache-2.0, and you should migrate. Kilo even publishes an official Roo-to-Kilo migration guide. The interesting part isn't where you go — it's that the question got asked at all.
Cline: the conservative original (with a war chest)
Cline is the one that started it, and it has aged into the safe default. Its model is control: a plan/act split where the agent first proposes a plan, then executes it with every file edit and terminal command gated behind your approval (auto-approve is opt-in, not the default). It reads your repo, edits across files, runs commands, can drive a browser. It's the most-installed of the three by a wide margin — 5M+ on the VS Code Marketplace, under its original "Claude Dev" extension id — and it's Apache-2.0.
The thing people miss: Cline is not a hobby project. It's built by Cline Bot, Inc., which raised $32M in seed and Series A (the A led by Emergence Capital) to push agentic coding into enterprises. That funding is a feature and a caveat at once — it means active development and an SDK/CLI roadmap, and it means a company with monetization pressure stewarding your default coding tool. If your priority is maximal control and the most battle-tested option, this is the pick. It pairs naturally with the same approval-first philosophy you see in Aider and OpenHands.
Kilo Code: the consolidator
Kilo is the opposite temperament: absorb everything. It forked Roo, drew from Cline, and markets itself explicitly as a superset of both. It's MIT-licensed, claims ~1.5M users, and raised an $8M seed in December 2025 (Cota Capital), co-founded by GitLab's Sid Sijbrandij.
Two features set it apart from its ancestors. First, it runs in JetBrains as well as VS Code — the only one of the three that escapes the VS Code box, which matters a lot if your team lives in IntelliJ or PyCharm. Second, it ships inline autocomplete (ghost-text, tab to accept) layered on top of the agent — something neither Cline nor Roo offered, since they focused purely on the agentic loop. Add an Orchestrator mode that decomposes a task and routes sub-pieces to specialist modes, and Kilo reads as "what Roo was building, plus Cline's reach, plus autocomplete." If you want the broadest feature surface — or you're a Roo refugee — it's the natural home.
How to actually choose
It collapses to three sentences. If you're on Roo Code, migrate; the repo is archived. If you want the most-installed, control-first default and you live in VS Code, take Cline. If you want the widest feature set, JetBrains support, or autocomplete baked in, take Kilo.
But hold onto the deeper split, because it outlives this year's star counts. All three of these tools — and the broader in-editor agent field — are answering one wager: does the coding agent belong inside your editor? Cline and Kilo are doubling down on yes. Roo's team bet no and left to build agents that work without you watching. The comparison you can run today is which extension to install. The comparison that will matter in a year is whether the people who killed the best extension were early.
