Claude Code vs Continue
Read from each vendor’s own pages last night, so it does not go stale the way a written comparison does.
Before you read on · Acquired since 2 August 2026
Continue was acquired by Cursor and is no longer independent.
continue.dev now reads "Continue has joined Cursor · Continue was acquired by Cursor" and the pricing page is gone. The Apache-2.0 repository is still public and was still being pushed to on 2 August 2026. No announcement date is published, so the date here is when it was first observed.
CLI agent
Claude Code
Anthropic's terminal coding agent. The highest-adoption CLI agent by developer survey share.
Free, then $20 / mo
IDE extension
Continue
Open-source, configurable IDE assistant for VS Code and JetBrains. Acquired by Cursor; the open-source codebase remains available.
Not published as tiers
| Compared on | Claude Code | Continue |
|---|---|---|
| Asserted — what each vendor publishes about itself | ||
| Category | CLI agent | IDE extension |
| Vendor | Anthropic | Continue |
| Status | Active | Acquired |
| How it charges | Subscription | Hybrid |
| Entry price | Free, then $20 / mo | Not published as tiers |
| Plans |
| Continue publishes no pricing page for Continue since the Cursor acquisition, so there are no tiers to compare. |
| Default model | anthropic/claude-opus-4.8 | None — you choose |
| Your own key | Yes | Yes |
| Source | Proprietary | Open source · Apache-2.0 |
| Measured — counted on the last nightly run | ||
| Stars | 140.1K | 35.3K |
| Maintenance | 92/100 | 100/100 |
| Days since last push | 9 | 0 |
| Top model in it | Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.8 · $10.00 | not measured |
| Its volume | 747B tokens | not measured |
What has changed on either of them
2 entries| What changed | Kind | Was, and is now | Confidence | Occurred |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Code changed the quota wording on its pricing pageClaude Code | Quota change | limits 24 hourslimits 20x more usage, 20x the usage, 24 hours, 5x more usage, unlimited projects to organize chats | low | |
| Continue acquired by CursorContinue | Acquisition | Acquired · acquired by Cursor | high |
