Cline vs Roo Code: same lineage, different direction

The fork matters less than you think

Roo Code started as a fork of Cline. In practice that means the approval loop, the key handling and the general shape of the interaction are close enough that switching between them is measured in minutes, not days.

What a fork changes is governance: who decides the roadmap, how fast security fixes land, and whether the maintainers have a commercial reason to keep the free client healthy.

Where they differ

Cline has grown into multiple surfaces — a VS Code extension, a CLI, a desktop app and a hosted cloud option — which is useful if you want the same agent in more than one place.

Roo Code's distinguishing idea is modes: predefined behaviours with their own tool permissions, so an architecture-review mode does not get write access. If your team wants per-task permission scoping without building it, that is the practical argument for the fork.

The Roomote question

As of late 2026, roocode.com redirects to roomote.dev — a self-hosted cloud agent from the same team, free for up to ten users and licensed per band above that. That is a strong signal about where the maintainers' attention goes.

It does not mean the extension is dead, but it does mean you should look at commit activity in the GitHub org before making it a team standard. A free client with a commercial sibling tends to get maintenance, not momentum.

How to decide

Pick Cline if you want the biggest community, the widest surface coverage and the least explanation needed when onboarding someone.

Pick Roo Code if mode-scoped permissions are a requirement and you are comfortable being a smaller ecosystem.

Pick neither if the real need is a shared team environment — that is Roomote's problem to solve, not either extension's.