Claude Code vs Continue
A side-by-side comparison of capabilities, autonomy, integrations, and pricing to help you choose.
Short answer: choose Claude Code if you want anthropic's agentic coding agent that lives in your terminal (Supervised agent, subscription); choose Continue if you want open-source ai code assistant and agent for vs code and jetbrains (Supervised agent, freemium).
| Claude Code | Continue | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Anthropic's agentic coding agent that lives in your terminal | Open-source AI code assistant and agent for VS Code and JetBrains |
| Type | agent | agent |
| Autonomy | Supervised agent | Supervised agent |
| Pricing | subscription · Included in Claude Pro ($20/mo); also pay-as-you-go via API tokens | freemium · Free (open source); Hub from $10/mo (reported) |
| Best for | developers, enterprise, mid-market | developers, mid-market, enterprise |
| Deployment | saas, api | self-hosted, saas |
| Modalities | text, code, api | text, code |
| Models | claude | model-agnostic |
| Protocols | mcp, rest-api, function-calling | mcp, function-calling, rest-api |
| Integrations | GitHub, GitLab, VS Code, JetBrains IDEs, GitHub Actions, MCP servers | VS Code, JetBrains, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google Gemini, Ollama |
| Capabilities | 4 documented | 4 documented |
Claude Code
- +True terminal-native agent: reads, edits, runs, and commits across a whole codebase rather than autocompleting lines
- +Flexible autonomy, from per-action approval to auto mode to fully headless runs for CI
- +Deep ecosystem: MCP support, subagents, plugins, GitHub Actions, and IDE extensions, plus a public Agent SDK
- -API-token usage on heavy tasks can get expensive and hard to predict
- -Locked to Anthropic's own Claude models (no model choice)
Continue
- +Open source and model-agnostic, including fully local models for private coding
- +Covers autocomplete, edit, chat, and agent in one configurable plugin
- +Continue Hub adds team rules, governance, and shareable assistant blocks
- -Acquired by Cursor in 2026 with the original repo reported read-only; standalone future is uncertain
- -Heavily configuration-driven, which adds setup overhead versus turnkey tools
Which should you choose?
Claude Code is anthropic's agentic coding agent that lives in your terminal, best for developers, enterprise, mid-market. Continue is open-source ai code assistant and agent for vs code and jetbrains, best for developers, mid-market, enterprise. The right choice depends on the autonomy level you want, your existing integrations, and your budget, all compared above.