Pricing read from Cline's and OpenAI's own pages
Cline vs Codex: Codex vs Cline Pricing, ChatGPT Plans and API Cost Compared
Most comparisons say Cline is free and Codex locks you into OpenAI pricing. Put GPT-5.6 behind both and every token costs the same, and Cline can even sign in with your ChatGPT plan. What you are really choosing is the meter.
Flat $29/mo billed yearly · No API key · No usage meter
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The short answer
Cline is free to install and bills you for whatever model you connect, while Codex comes with a ChatGPT plan from $20 a month. Run GPT-5.6 through either on an OpenAI API key and the tokens cost the same, and even Codex credits bought past the cap follow OpenAI's API rates. So the real choice is the meter: a capped ChatGPT plan suits anyone who codes most weeks, and Cline can use that same plan through its OpenAI Codex sign-in or switch to non-OpenAI models.
Cline vs Codex at a glance
Cline is an open-source agent that does nothing until you connect a model. Codex is OpenAI's own agent, sold inside ChatGPT plans and reachable from the terminal, your editor, the web and your phone. That makes the software price comparison easy and the bill comparison much less obvious.
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| Cline | Codex | |
|---|---|---|
| What you pay for the tool | Nothing for individuals. The extension, CLI and SDK are open source. | Included with ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise. Free and Go get a lighter version. |
| What you pay for the model | Your own API key, Cline credits at cost, a $9.99 ClinePass for open models, or your ChatGPT plan. | Your ChatGPT plan allowance, then credits, or OpenAI API rates if you sign in with a key. |
| Cheapest paid way in | $9.99 a month ClinePass, open models only | $8 a month ChatGPT Go, for lightweight tasks |
| Models | GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi, GLM and local models | OpenAI models: GPT-6 Astra and the GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra and Luna family |
| Where it runs | VS Code extension, CLI, SDK, desktop app, and ACP clients such as Zed and JetBrains | CLI, IDE extension, web, desktop and iOS, plus GitHub code review and Slack |
| How much it asks you | Approval per tool call by default, with Auto Approve per category | Approval and sandbox modes, from read-only to full access |
| Spend ceiling | Only the one you set with your provider | A five-hour window and weekly limits on a plan, none on an API key |
| Team plan | Enterprise, custom quote, bring your own inference | ChatGPT Business from $20 a user annually, premium $100 seats on Pro 5x limits, and Enterprise |
Cline pricing when the model you want is OpenAI's
Cline's pricing page says the open-source version is free for individual developers and you "pay only for AI inference on a usage basis". There is no seat fee. If GPT-5.6 is what you want Cline to drive, there are five ways that inference can be paid for, and two of them go straight to OpenAI.
OpenAI API key
OpenAI list rates
Per token, no cap unless you set one
Paste a key from the OpenAI Platform. Cline adds nothing on top, so GPT-5.6 Sol costs $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output, exactly what OpenAI charges anyone.
OpenAI Codex sign-in
Whatever your ChatGPT plan costs
Your ChatGPT plan limits
Cline's OpenAI Codex provider signs in with your OpenAI account through the browser and uses your subscription instead of a key. Cline notes that the models on offer depend on your OpenAI plan.
Cline credits (usage-billing)
Pay as you go, at cost
Prepaid credit balance
One sign-in and one balance across 100+ models, OpenAI among them, instead of a separate key and invoice per vendor.
ClinePass
$9.99 a month
5-hour, weekly and monthly limits
2 to 5 times the usage of standard API rates on curated open models such as GLM, Kimi, DeepSeek and Qwen. No GPT or Claude model is included, so it is a way to spend less on routine work, not a cheap route to GPT-5.6.
Cline Enterprise
Custom quote
Your own inference contract
SSO, role-based access, limits on which providers developers can use, a team dashboard, authentication logs, centralized billing and OpenTelemetry export, running on your OpenAI, Azure, Bedrock or Vertex contract.
The second card is the one almost every Cline vs Codex article misses. Cline's OpenAI documentation offers two paths: an API key, or "OpenAI Codex (Subscription OAuth)", which signs in with your OpenAI account and uses your subscription with no key to manage. So "Cline or Codex" is not always a choice between two bills. For someone on ChatGPT Plus it can be a choice between two interfaces on one bill.
What Codex costs
Codex has no price of its own. It comes with a ChatGPT plan, and the plan decides how much you can use it in each five-hour window. The message ranges are OpenAI's estimates for local messages on GPT-5.6; cloud tasks run on Sol and draw on the same allowance.
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| Plan | Price | Messages per five hours | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT Go | $8/mo | Not published | OpenAI pitches it for "lightweight coding tasks" and prints no per-model message figures for it. |
| ChatGPT Plus | $20/mo | 10 to 100 Sol, 25 to 200 Terra | The full product: CLI, IDE extension, web, iOS, GitHub code review and Slack, plus extra credits when you run out. |
| ChatGPT Pro 5x | $100/mo | 50 to 500 Sol | Five times Plus at five times the price, so the same cost per message in a bigger bucket. |
| ChatGPT Pro 20x | $200/mo | 200 to 2,000 Sol | Twenty times Plus for ten times the price. The only tier that lowers the cost per message. |
| Business, standard seat | $20/user annual, $25 monthly | Same as Plus | For 2 or more users. Adds SAML SSO, MFA, admin controls and no training on business data by default. |
| Business, $100 seat | $100/user | Pro 5x figures | OpenAI's pricing doc states this seat uses the Pro 5x estimates, the only Business seat with more coding capacity. |
| OpenAI API key | Sol $4 in, $20 out per million tokens | Metered, no window | CLI, SDK and IDE extension only. OpenAI lists "No cloud-based features", so no GitHub code review or Slack. |
Two dates matter if you are buying now. OpenAI retires GPT-5.5 from ChatGPT and Codex on every plan on October 14, 2026, and it says GPT-5.6 Sol's promotional pricing runs at least through November 21, 2026, so a budget built on today's Sol rate should be rechecked after that. Install commands, the full limits table and what counts against the window are on our Codex CLI pricing and limits page.
Same GPT-5.6 tokens, same price: the tool is not the bill
OpenAI publishes two price lists for the same models. The Codex credit rate card charges GPT-5.6 Sol 100 credits per million input tokens and 500 per million output. The API price list charges $4.00 and $20.00. Terra and Luna line up the same way, and OpenAI's desktop voice price of $0.05 a minute, or 1.25 credits, confirms the ratio: a credit is worth four cents.
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| Model | Codex credits per million | API price per million | Available in |
|---|---|---|---|
| GPT-6 Astra | 250 in, 1,250 out | $10.00 in, $50.00 out | Both tools |
| GPT-5.6 Sol | 100 in, 500 out | $4.00 in, $20.00 out | Both tools |
| GPT-5.6 Terra | 50 in, 300 out | $2.00 in, $12.00 out | Both tools |
| GPT-5.6 Luna | 5 in, 30 out | $0.20 in, $1.20 out | Both tools |
| Claude Sonnet 5 | Not in Codex | $2.00 in, $10.00 out (Anthropic) | Cline only |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash (peak) | Not in Codex | $0.44 in, $1.32 out (ClinePass reference) | Cline only |
So a GPT-5.6 task costs the same per token through Cline on an OpenAI key, through Codex on an API key, and through Codex credits after your plan runs out. Harnesses differ in how many tokens a task burns, but none of the three adds a margin. The question that decides the bill is whether you pay per token or buy a capped plan, and OpenAI publishes the figure that answers it: GPT-5.6 usage "averages 5-30 credits per message", which is 20 cents to $1.20.
ChatGPT Plus
$20/mo
Same money as metered
17 to 100 messages
Plus includes up to 100 Sol messages in every five-hour window. Two busy sessions a month and the plan has already paid for itself.
ChatGPT Pro 5x
$100/mo
Same money as metered
83 to 500 messages
The same price per message as Plus. Buy it for headroom when Plus keeps stopping you mid-afternoon, not to save money.
Business $100 seat
$100/mo
Same money as metered
83 to 500 messages
Pro 5x capacity on a company workspace with SSO and admin controls, for the one or two developers who hit the standard cap.
ChatGPT Pro 20x
$200/mo
Same money as metered
167 to 1,000 messages
Up to 2,000 Sol messages per window. For someone running an agent all day, nothing metered comes close.
The message counts are our arithmetic on OpenAI's published 5 to 30 credit average and its rate card. Your own average depends on model, context size and how much the agent reads, so check a week in the Codex usage dashboard, or with /status in the CLI, before committing.
Can you use a ChatGPT Plus or Pro plan inside Cline?
Yes. In Cline's settings, choose OpenAI Codex as the API provider, click Sign in with OpenAI, finish the browser sign-in and pick a model. There is no key to create or rotate. It is worth knowing exactly what that gets you and what it does not.
What you keep
Your plan's price ceiling
Work runs against the subscription you already pay for, so a busy week shows up as reaching the cap sooner rather than as a bigger invoice.
What limits it
Models follow your plan
Cline says the models available depend on your OpenAI plan, so check the model list after you sign in rather than assuming Pro and Plus look the same.
What you give up
Codex's cloud extras
Cloud tasks, automatic GitHub code review and the Slack integration live in Codex itself. Cline gives you its own interface, approvals and checkpoints instead.
One more practical point. The allowance is shared, so a morning in Cline and an afternoon in the Codex CLI come out of the same five-hour window and the same weekly limit. If a team is trying Cline on top of Codex, expect caps to arrive earlier, not later.
Which is better to work in, day to day?
Cline was built as a VS Code agent that asks before it acts. Every file read, edit, terminal command or browser action is a tool call it can stop on, Auto Approve waves through the categories you trust, Plan and Act modes separate thinking from doing, and checkpoints let you roll code back. It also added a CLI, but its center of gravity is the editor.
Codex started in the terminal and spread into an IDE extension, the web, a desktop app and iOS, with approval and sandbox modes that run from read-only to full access and a codex exec command for scripts and CI. On a ChatGPT plan it also reviews pull requests on GitHub and takes requests from Slack. If you want OpenAI's harness everywhere under one subscription, that reach is the reason to pick it.
You already pay for ChatGPT Plus or Pro
Codex, or Cline on its OpenAI Codex sign-in
The plan already covers Codex in the terminal, the IDE and the cloud. If you prefer Cline's step-by-step approvals in VS Code, its OpenAI Codex provider can draw on the same subscription, and the usage counts against the same limits.
You code with AI most weeks
A ChatGPT plan, in either tool
At OpenAI's average of 5 to 30 credits a message, $20 of metered GPT-5.6 buys 17 to 100 messages. Plus includes up to 100 Sol messages in every five-hour window, so a regular user pays far less on a plan.
You use AI a few times a month
Either tool on an API key
Light use is where metered tokens win: no subscription sitting idle. Pick Cline if you want to approve each action in VS Code, Codex if you want the terminal and OpenAI's own harness.
You want to mix model vendors
Cline
Codex runs OpenAI models. Cline can send hard tasks to GPT-5.6 Sol or Claude and routine edits to an open model on a $9.99 ClinePass, which is the one cost lever Codex does not offer.
You want PR reviews and Slack in the bundle
Codex on a ChatGPT plan
Automatic GitHub code review, cloud tasks and the Slack integration come with Plus and above. They are not available on an API key, and Cline does not include them.
You want finished pull requests, not a pair session
A repo agent on a flat bill
Both tools sell time at the keyboard. If the job is a described task handed back as a tested pull request on GitHub or GitLab, with no key and no window to manage, that is a different purchase.
Cline Enterprise vs ChatGPT Business and Enterprise
For one developer the decision is a meter. For a team it is governance plus a meter, and the two vendors package them in opposite ways.
Cline Enterprise is a custom quote for the control layer: SSO, role-based access, limits on which providers developers may use, a team dashboard, authentication logs, centralized billing and OpenTelemetry export. Inference runs on a contract you already hold with OpenAI, Azure, AWS or Google, at the rate you negotiated.
OpenAI sells capped seats instead. ChatGPT Business is $20 a user a month billed annually, or $25 monthly, for two or more users, with SAML SSO, MFA and no training on business data by default. A standard seat has the same Codex limits as Plus. The seat that adds capacity is the $100 Business seat, which OpenAI's pricing doc puts on the Pro 5x estimates. So a ten-person team can put eight people on $20 seats and two heavy users on $100 seats for $360 a month on annual billing, with a hard ceiling on all of it. Enterprise and Edu add SCIM, audit logs through the Compliance API and data residency, and with flexible pricing they drop fixed limits for credits. We ran the same seat arithmetic for Anthropic in what Claude Code for teams really costs.
Where we fit, and where both tools beat us
The losses first. Cline and Codex are both strong interactive agents that sit where you already work and hold a conversation about your code, which is what you want for exploratory work. Cline's model freedom is something we do not offer, and Codex's bundle of CLI, editor, cloud tasks and PR review on one ChatGPT plan is broader than ours.
Agentcode is narrower on purpose. You connect a GitHub or GitLab repository, describe a task, and the agent plans it, edits the code, runs your tests and opens a pull request for a person to review. It never merges on its own. There is no API key, no five-hour window and no credit balance to watch: it is $29 a month billed yearly.
If the meter is the problem you are trying to solve, how the agent runs a task end to end shows what a flat price buys instead.
Cline vs Codex: the questions people search
Is Cline better than Codex?
Neither is better outright. Cline is better if you want to choose between model vendors and approve each action inside VS Code. Codex is better if you already pay for ChatGPT, because the plan covers the CLI, IDE extension, cloud tasks and GitHub code review, and at regular use a plan costs far less than metered tokens.
Can I use my ChatGPT subscription in Cline?
Yes. Cline has an OpenAI Codex provider: choose it in settings, click Sign in with OpenAI and finish the browser sign-in, with no API key needed. Requests then use your ChatGPT plan instead of API billing. Cline notes that which models you can pick depends on your OpenAI plan, and the usage counts against your normal Codex limits.
Is Cline cheaper than Codex?
Only if you use AI lightly or switch to cheaper models. On the same GPT-5.6 model the tokens cost the same in both, because Cline adds no margin and OpenAI's Codex credits follow its API price list. Using OpenAI's average of 5 to 30 credits a message, $20 of tokens buys 17 to 100 messages, while Plus includes up to 100 Sol messages every five hours.
How much does Codex cost?
Codex has no separate price; it comes with ChatGPT. Go is $8 a month, Plus $20, Pro $100 for 5x or $200 for 20x the Plus limits, and Business $20 a user a month billed annually or $25 monthly for two or more users. With an API key you pay OpenAI's token rates instead, such as $4 in and $20 out per million GPT-5.6 Sol tokens.
How much does Cline cost per month?
Cline itself costs nothing for individual developers; the monthly cost is your model usage. On an OpenAI key that is OpenAI's list rate, on its Codex sign-in it is your ChatGPT plan, and on ClinePass it is a flat $9.99 a month for open models within 5-hour, weekly and monthly limits. Teams needing SSO buy Cline Enterprise on a custom quote.
Codex CLI vs Cline: what is the difference?
Codex CLI is OpenAI's terminal agent, built around OpenAI models and sold with ChatGPT plans, with approval and sandbox modes and a codex exec command for scripts. Cline started as a VS Code agent that asks before each tool call and later added its own CLI. The practical split is OpenAI depth and bundled cloud features against model freedom.
Does Cline work with GPT-5.6?
Yes. With an OpenAI API key or Cline credits, Cline can call GPT-5.6 Sol at $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output, or the cheaper Terra and Luna models. Through the OpenAI Codex sign-in it offers whichever models your ChatGPT plan includes.
What happens when you hit the Codex usage limit?
On Plus or Pro you can buy more ChatGPT credits and keep working without upgrading, switch to a smaller model such as Terra or Luna to stretch the allowance, or wait for the five-hour window to reset. Any user can also run extra local sessions on an API key at standard API rates. OpenAI says weekly limits may apply on top.
Is ChatGPT Business worth it for Codex?
A standard Business seat gives the same Codex limits as Plus, so buy it for SAML SSO, admin controls and the no-training default, not for more coding. OpenAI's pricing doc says the $100 Business seat uses the Pro 5x estimates, which makes it the seat to give developers who keep reaching the cap.
What does Cline Enterprise cost compared with ChatGPT Business?
Cline does not publish an Enterprise price; it is a custom quote for governance, and inference runs on your own OpenAI, Azure, Bedrock or Vertex contract. ChatGPT Business is priced per seat at $20 a user annually and includes usage up to its limits. One sells a control layer over a token bill, the other a capped seat.
Keep researching
The OpenAI side in more depth: Codex CLI install, pricing and limits, which plan pays for the Codex VS Code extension and Codex against Claude Code.
The Cline side: Cline against Claude Code, Cline against Cursor on price and Agentcode against Cline.
A repo agent with no meter to pick
Connect a GitHub or GitLab repository, describe a task, and review the pull request it opens. Flat $29/mo billed yearly, no API key, no usage window, and nothing merges without you.