On price and control, the free agents win. OpenHands is MIT-licensed and free to run, so a solo developer or a small team pays only model API costs, while Devin's self-serve tiers start at a paid subscription and its Teams plan runs $80/month plus $40 per developer seat (devin.ai/pricing). In the editor, Cline beats Cursor for anyone who wants bring-your-own-key billing and an Apache-2.0 licence with no editor subscription at all.
The paid tools still win a narrower case. Devin is the pick for teams that want a managed cloud agent running work in parallel with enterprise controls, and Cursor is the pick if you want polish out of the box, Tab completion, and predictable managed limits rather than a metered API bill.
TL;DR
- OpenHands — free, MIT, 88,085 GitHub stars (repo). You pay only for model tokens.
- Devin — self-serve Free, Pro $20/month, Max $200/month, Teams $80/month plus $40 per dev seat (pricing).
- Cline — free, Apache-2.0, 68,148 stars (repo). BYOK via OpenAI, Anthropic, OpenRouter, or local models.
- Cursor — Pro $20/month, Ultra $200 (cursor.com/pricing); India-only Start plan at Rs 649/month.
- Verdict: free wins on price and privacy; paid wins on managed convenience and support.
- Last verified: 2026-09-16.
What does cline vs cursor actually cost in 2026?
Cursor is a closed-source VS Code fork sold as a subscription. Pro is $20/month and includes $20 of other-model usage, Pro+ is $60/month, Ultra is $200/month, and Teams runs $40/user/month for Standard or $120/user/month for Premium (cursor.com/docs/models-and-pricing). Cursor's own documentation notes that daily agent users typically total $60-100/month and power users exceed $200/month, which is the number most people miss when they budget for a single Pro seat.
Cline is an Apache-2.0 extension, SDK and CLI with no subscription layer (github.com/cline/cline). You supply keys for OpenAI, Anthropic or OpenRouter, or point it at a local runtime such as Ollama or LM Studio, and your bill is exactly the tokens you burn. On a light week that can be a couple of dollars; on a heavy refactor it can exceed a Cursor Pro seat, because agentic loops re-read files.
The practical difference is shape, not just size. Cursor is a fixed monthly cost with soft limits inside a polished editor. Cline is a variable cost with no ceiling and no floor, inside the VS Code you already run. If you want to see how the same tradeoff plays out against Google's entrant, our Antigravity vs Cursor vs Claude Code comparison covers it, and the Claude Code pricing breakdown shows how Pro, Max and raw API billing diverge.
Is OpenHands good enough to replace Devin?
For most self-hosted work, yes. OpenHands, previously OpenDevin, now ships as Agent Canvas plus Agent Server and runs locally via npm or Docker, with optional OpenHands Cloud or Enterprise hosting if you want someone else to operate it (docs.all-hands.dev). The core is MIT-licensed, so there is no seat cost and no vendor lock on the agent itself.
On benchmarks, a peer-reviewed analysis of the SWE-Bench leaderboards records OpenHands at 41.67 percent on SWE-Bench Lite and 65.8 percent on SWE-Bench Verified for the CodeActAgent submission (Martinez and Franch, arXiv). Treat that as a signal about scaffolding quality rather than a promise about your codebase; benchmark repositories are small, well-tested Python projects and your monorepo is not.
Devin's case is operational. Cognition restructured self-serve billing in April 2026, retiring the old Core and Team plans in favour of Free, Pro, Max, Teams and Enterprise, and moving self-serve overage to dollar billing at API pricing instead of ACUs, with Enterprise still on ACUs (cognition.com blog). Individual plans support up to 10 concurrent sessions (devin.ai/pricing). If you want ten agents working tickets in parallel without building the infrastructure yourself, that is what you are paying for.
How do the four tools compare side by side?
| Tool | Licence / model | Price | You pay for |
|---|---|---|---|
| OpenHands | MIT, self-hosted (repo) | Free | Model API tokens, your compute |
| Devin | Closed, managed cloud | Free, Pro $20/mo, Max $200/mo, Teams $80/mo + $40/seat (pricing) | Subscription plus usage at API pricing |
| Cline | Apache-2.0, VS Code / CLI (repo) | Free | Your own API keys, or local models |
| Cursor | Closed, VS Code fork | Pro $20/mo, Pro+ $60, Ultra $200, Teams from $40/user (pricing) | Subscription with included usage pool |
Why do specific pairings matter more than "best AI tools" lists?
Because that is what people actually search. Our own keyword corpus measurement (kw_corpus, n=656, measured 2026-09-14, via DataForSEO) priced 656 keywords in the AI and developer-tooling space, and only 72 (11.0%) cleared a winnable bar of 150-6,000 monthly searches, difficulty 20 or below, a genuine technical term, and at least three words (method).
The keywords that clear that bar are almost always a named pair. Someone has narrowed the field to two options and wants a decision. The same pattern shows up across the open-versus-paid boundary: local runtimes in our Ollama vs LM Studio comparison, search in Perplexica vs Perplexity, and voice in Breeze TTS 2 vs ElevenLabs.
What are the real limitations of the free options?
Three, none small.
Operational burden. Self-hosting OpenHands means you own the Docker runtime, the sandbox, the secrets and the upgrade path. That is unpaid engineering time, and it is the reason managed agents sell.
Cost unpredictability. BYOK looks cheap until an agent loops on a large repository. Cursor's own guidance that heavy users land at $60-100 or more per month (cursor.com/docs/models-and-pricing) is a useful calibration for what agentic coding costs at any vendor, because the underlying tokens are the same tokens.
Missing features. Cline does not ship Cursor's Tab completion model or its managed indexing, and OpenHands does not ship Devin's enterprise controls. Licence freedom is not feature parity.
One licence caveat worth carrying across the category: "open" does not always mean permissive. Open WebUI, for example, is free to self-host but ships a custom branding-restricted licence rather than MIT, which matters if you plan to rebrand it internally.
FAQ
Q: Is OpenHands really free?
A: Yes. The core project is MIT-licensed and free to run yourself (repo); you pay only your model provider for tokens. OpenHands Cloud or Enterprise hosting is the paid option if you do not want to operate it.
Q: What do you actually pay when using Cline?
A: Only your model usage. Cline is Apache-2.0 with no subscription; connect your own OpenAI, Anthropic or OpenRouter key, or a local model via Ollama or LM Studio (repo).
Q: Does Devin have a free plan?
A: Yes. Self-serve includes a Free tier alongside Pro at $20/month, Max at $200/month, and Teams at $80/month plus $40 per developer seat (devin.ai/pricing).
Q: Is Cursor cheaper in India?
A: There is an India-only Start plan at Rs 649/month, tax inclusive, which includes the Cursor Models pool and Cloud Agents (cursor.com/pricing). Cline with your own API keys can still come in below that on light usage, but it is not a managed product.
Q: Which should a two-person team pick?
A: Start with Cline plus your own keys and measure a month of token spend. If the bill gets unpredictable or you need Tab completion and managed indexing, move to Cursor Pro; pick Devin only for parallel cloud agents you do not want to operate.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Read more about our process on how we work.
Top comments (0)