Claude Code vs Roo Code
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 Roo Code if you want open-source ai coding agent for vs code (a cline fork), now archived (Supervised agent, free).
| Claude Code | Roo Code | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Anthropic's agentic coding agent that lives in your terminal | Open-source AI coding agent for VS Code (a Cline fork), now archived |
| Type | agent | agent |
| Autonomy | Supervised agent | Supervised agent |
| Pricing | subscription · Included in Claude Pro ($20/mo); also pay-as-you-go via API tokens | free · Free (open source); pay your own model providers |
| Best for | developers, enterprise, mid-market | developers |
| Deployment | saas, api | self-hosted |
| 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, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google Gemini, OpenRouter, AWS Bedrock |
| 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)
Roo Code
- +Open source and model-agnostic with no inference markup (bring your own keys)
- +Multi-mode architecture (Architect/Code/Debug/Ask/Orchestrator) with per-mode tool permissions
- +MCP support and customizable modes gave fine-grained control over the agent
- -Shut down and archived on May 15, 2026; the extension is no longer maintained
- -Was VS Code-extension only, so it depended on your IDE and local environment
Which should you choose?
Claude Code is anthropic's agentic coding agent that lives in your terminal, best for developers, enterprise, mid-market. Roo Code is open-source ai coding agent for vs code (a cline fork), now archived, best for developers. The right choice depends on the autonomy level you want, your existing integrations, and your budget, all compared above.