OpenHands vs Cline: two open-source coding agents, and where open-source Kortix takes over

What each tool is built to finish

OpenHands is a self-hosted control center for coding agents and automations. It opens a conversation with an agent, connects to one or more agent servers, and runs the agent you point it at, including its own OpenHands agent, Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Pi, or OpenCode. Its unit of work is a coding conversation, or an automation that ends in a pull request.

Cline is one open-source agent runtime in three places at once. It runs as an editor extension in VS Code or the JetBrains family, as a command-line assistant that also works headless in a pipeline, and as an SDK you can embed in your own product. It reads the project, makes coordinated multi-file changes, watches the linter and compiler as it works, and shows every edit as a diff you can review, modify, or revert. Its unit of work is a task in the repository you have open, and each file edit and terminal command waits for your approval unless you switch on auto-approve.

When Cline is the right pick

Choose Cline when the developer wants to stay in the editor or the terminal and see each change before it lands. The loop is short: a plan mode to agree on a strategy, an act mode to execute, checkpoints so one step can be rolled back, and .clinerules files that carry a team's conventions to the CLI, the editor, and the JetBrains plugin alike. Where a team works inside VS Code and also wants the same agent in CI, Cline's headless mode runs it inside the pipeline.

When OpenHands is the right pick

Choose OpenHands when the team wants coding agents running around the clock away from any laptop. Agent Canvas runs agents on a dedicated server, in Docker, or in OpenHands Cloud, and it fires them from a GitHub issue, a Slack message, a Jira ticket, or a schedule. The agent does the work and opens a pull request an engineer reviews. Where Cline is the agent beside one developer, OpenHands keeps several agents busy on the team's repositories with nobody watching the editor.

Where a team outgrows a coding-agent harness

Both tools end the work at code and both keep an engineer in the review. That suits a team whose reviewers are engineers. It stops fitting when a finance lead, a support manager, or a marketer wants an agent to finish a job, because that job has no source diff to read, and the agent has to act in a CRM, a billing tool, or a ticket system rather than in a repository. The other options are grouped on OpenHands alternatives, compared.

How open-source Kortix covers the work past code

Kortix is built for the work past code: your agents, their skills, your company memory, and every connector live in one git repo you own. A project is a git repo with a kortix.yaml at its root, and one session runs one agent on its own cloud computer and branch. The session id, the sandbox, and the branch name are one string, so a run traces to the diff it produced, and session work reaches main through a change request a person approves. Merge is default-deny for agents.

The reach is wider than an editor agent. The same agents start from the web app, Slack, Microsoft Teams, the CLI, or a cron schedule, and they reach 3,000+ apps in a click, plus MCP, OpenAPI, Postman, GraphQL and raw HTTP. Connector credentials are brokered server-side and never enter the machine. Run it on Kortix Cloud, in your VPC, or on your own on-prem network. Self-host is free. Open source: read it, fork it, audit it.

OpenHands vs Kortix works through the move project by project, and the product-side version of that decision is on Kortix.