Graded C+ on resilience. In Vannus's assessment it has not disclosed which model it runs — acceptable, with limits worth knowing.
Open-source coding agent (Apache 2.0) that runs in VS Code, JetBrains and the terminal, or embedded as a runtime. Model-agnostic: users bring their own API keys, endpoints or local models across Anthropic, OpenAI, Google Gemini, AWS Bedrock, Azure, GCP Vertex, Ollama, DeepSeek, xAI, Mistral, Cerebras, OpenRouter and any OpenAI-compatible API. Integrates with VS Code, JetBrains and the CLI.
Not disclosed. Cline does not publish which model it runs, so this criterion is excluded and the grade rests on what we could verify. We say so rather than guess.
Not yet assessed. We publish a sovereignty position only where the vendor documents one — we do not infer it from a domain or a company name.
Vannus grades Cline against nine dimensions of trust — data sovereignty, training privacy, compliance posture, operational resilience, exit portability, and more. The heaviest criterion asks whether the tool builds its own AI or resells someone else's model; where the vendor discloses it, the grade cites the vendor's own documentation. No paid placements — scoring is walled off from affiliate revenue. See the methodology →