Roo Code vs Kilo Code (2026)
Side-by-side comparison of Roo Code vs Kilo Code: pricing, capabilities, integrations, deployment complexity, and ratings. Last updated August 14, 2026 by The AI Agent Index Editorial Team.
Data sourced from The AI Agent Index
Roo Code Inc. shut this extension down on May 15, 2026. That is the company's own word for it, published in the repository's own disclaimer, and it is a stronger statement than "archived". The repository is read-only, the final release is v3.54.0, and the roocode.com domain now redirects to Roomote, a source-available cloud coding agent from the same team. The extension is still installable from the VS Code Marketplace and still runs, under an Apache-2.0 license nobody can revoke. What it no longer gets is bug fixes, security patches, or adaptation to future VS Code API changes. So the honest framing is not which of these is better. One of them is finished. Read the table above with that in mind, because several of its rows flatter the product that stopped shipping. Where the vendor itself points you. Roo Code Inc. names two successors and only two: Zoo Code, which it describes as a fork started by the Roo Code community, and Cline, the upstream project Roo Code was itself forked from. Zoo Code has been developed continuously since the shutdown and is well past the version Roo Code froze at. Kilo Code is not on that list, which is worth knowing and is not a mark against it, because Kilo is itself a fork of Roo Code. A Roo Code user moving to Kilo is moving to a descendant of the extension they already know rather than to a stranger. The three products are one lineage: Cline, then Roo Code, then Kilo Code. Ownership, which the table cannot show. Anaconda's acquisition of Kilo Code closed in July 2026, so a buyer evaluating Kilo today knows who stands behind it and can read that company's own commitments. Roo Code has no such answer available at any price. Kilo also rebranded from kilocode.ai to kilo.ai during 2026, which matters if you go looking for older reviews or documentation and cannot find them under the current name. Licensing is a real difference and no row of the table carries it. Roo Code is Apache-2.0 and Kilo Code is MIT. Both are genuinely open source and both permit commercial use and forking, which is the whole reason a community fork of Roo Code was able to exist at all. Read the review row carefully, because it shows the smallest corpus available and it points the opposite way from the largest. On the VS Code Marketplace, where both extensions are actually installed and where each has accumulated several hundred ratings, Roo Code is rated materially higher than Kilo Code. Handle that honestly rather than as a gotcha. Roo Code's ratings are historical and stopped accumulating when the product did, and a frozen extension cannot disappoint anyone with a bad release. It is still a real signal about how the extension was received, from a far larger sample than the row above rests on. The security certification row reads as a tie and is not one. Neither product carries a certification our column admits, and the reasons are opposite. Roo Code once published a trust portal, and that portal now returns a not-found page with its contents withdrawn, so the blank is a withdrawal rather than a position. Kilo Code publishes a genuine SOC 2 Type I report through its trust center, which the column does not admit because we list Type II only. On documented security posture Kilo is further along than the row can show, and Roo Code's blank is the more meaningful of the two. MCP is the same badge on both sides and here it genuinely means the same thing. Both connect out to other people's servers and neither exposes one of its own, so if you want a coding agent that another application can drive, neither of these is the tool. Data handling differs, and the difference is not architectural. Both are bring-your-own-key, so your code goes wherever your model provider takes it. Kilo publishes an organization-level opt-out that stops providers using your code for training, and states plainly that the setting hiding prompt-training models is off by default. Roo Code makes no statement about training at all, and the surfaces that might have carried one went down with the company. Neither position amounts to your code is private. One is documented and one is simply unavailable. What the entry figures do not buy. Kilo Code's platform is free forever for an individual under an MIT license, and it stays free if you bring your own API keys. The figure in the table is Kilo Pass, an optional managed inference subscription, and it is the same in either billing cycle: an annual commitment raises the credit allowance rather than moving the rate. The per-seat Teams plan is a third axis again and buys administration rather than agent capability, so a solo developer never needs it. Kilo states that from September 1, 2026 at the earliest it will add a 5 percent processing fee on card purchases of credits and begin billing for awake cloud compute time. The vendor states that this fee will not apply to payment by invoice, wire, or ACH. Roo Code's extension was free with your own keys. Roo Code Inc. also ran a paid product, and its shutdown notice still directs former paying customers to a billing address, but no rates for it are documented on any surface the company still publishes. Setup time on both sides of this table is an editorial estimate rather than a figure either vendor publishes, so read that row as an impression rather than a measurement. The recommendation is not close. For anyone choosing a coding agent today, Kilo Code is the one still being built, and it reaches well beyond the single editor Roo Code was confined to. Existing Roo Code users are in no danger this week and the extension will keep working for a while yet. But migration is a question of when rather than whether, and the vendor's own two names for where to go next are Zoo Code and Cline.
Roo Code
by Roo Code
Open-source VS Code AI coding agent with Code, Architect and Debug modes. Shut down May 15, 2026 and frozen at v3.54.0, but still installable. Continued by the Zoo Code community fork. Apache-2.0, BYOK.
Best for
Existing users of the shut-down extension who want a familiar Apache-2.0 setup to keep working short-term while planning a move to Zoo Code, Cline, or Kilo Code
Kilo Code
by Anaconda
Open-source AI coding agent for VS Code, JetBrains, CLI, Cloud, and Slack with parallel agents and 500+ models. 3M+ users. Free tier, with optional Kilo Pass inference from $19/mo.
Best for
Developers who want an actively maintained open-source agent with bring-your-own-key model access across VS Code, JetBrains, CLI, cloud, and Slack, plus parallel subagents and a named corporate owner
Capabilities
Roo Code
Kilo Code
Pros & Limitations
Editorial assessmentRoo Code
Pros
- ✓Specialized mode architecture produces more focused results than general-purpose AI, because Code, Architect and Debug modes each carry tailored prompts, tool permissions and context strategies rather than a single general chat.
- ✓Fully model-agnostic through BYOK, with 24 documented provider integrations including Anthropic, OpenAI, Google Gemini, DeepSeek, Bedrock and Vertex, plus OpenAI-compatible endpoints and local models via Ollama and LM Studio.
- ✓Apache-2.0 licensed with more than 3,400 forks, so the full codebase stays available for audit, self-hosting and community-led continuation, and it is carried forward by the Zoo Code fork.
Limitations
- ⚠Roo Code Inc. shut the extension down on May 15, 2026 and archived the repository the same day. It is read-only, with no further development, bug fixes or security patches from the original team. The company points users to the Zoo Code community fork and to Cline.
- ⚠No commercial support, SLA or compliance certifications. Community support ran through GitHub Issues and Discord, and with the original team no longer active, help for new issues comes only from community forks and the existing documentation.
- ⚠The original team has moved on. Roo Code Inc. now builds Roomote, a separate cloud coding agent, so continuity, licensing and commercial questions can no longer go to the original team. The community-run Zoo Code fork is the maintained path.
Kilo Code
Pros
- ✓Open-source MIT-licensed and model-agnostic with 500+ models: connect any provider through BYOK with no markup, or use Kilo Pass managed inference from $19 per month. 26.9k GitHub stars and 3M+ users validate broad developer adoption.
- ✓Multi-mode architecture with parallel agents across 6+ surfaces: Architect, Code, Debug, Ask, and Orchestrator modes handle planning and execution as separate concerns with subagent delegation across concurrent git worktrees. Cloud Agents, Slack, and Code Reviewer extend beyond IDE-only workflows.
- ✓Trusted by developers at Meta, Amazon, Airbnb, PayPal, Square, and Red Hat with $8M seed funding and Product Hunt #1 Open Source Product of the Month award. Over 40 trillion tokens processed across the platform.
Limitations
- ⚠Enterprise governance features (SSO, granular audit logs, RBAC) are less mature than GitHub Copilot or Cursor for procurement-heavy enterprise organizations that require formal security review before deployment.
- ⚠Setup complexity for advanced features including Memory Bank, custom modes, and MCP tool configuration has a real learning curve compared to Copilot or Cursor which require near-zero configuration for basic agentic coding.
- ⚠Local model performance depends heavily on available hardware: expect uneven results without sufficient GPU compute for larger open-source LLMs, which limits local-first deployments on standard developer machines.
- ⚠Code sent through Kilo Gateway can reach model providers that use prompts for training: an organization-level code training opt-out and a provider data-policy filter are available, but the setting that hides prompt-training models is disabled by default.
- ⚠Review sentiment splits sharply by corpus: its rating on the VS Code Marketplace, by far the largest independent review base, sits well below its G2 and Product Hunt scores, which rest on much smaller samples.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between Roo Code vs Kilo Code?
Roo Code Inc. shut this extension down on May 15, 2026. That is the company's own word for it, published in the repository's own disclaimer, and it is a stronger statement than "archived". The repository is read-only, the final release is v3.54.0, and the roocode.com domain now redirects to Roomote, a source-available cloud coding agent from the same team. The extension is still installable from the VS Code Marketplace and still runs, under an Apache-2.0 license nobody can revoke. What it no longer gets is bug fixes, security patches, or adaptation to future VS Code API changes. So the honest framing is not which of these is better. One of them is finished. Read the table above with that in mind, because several of its rows flatter the product that stopped shipping. Where the vendor itself points you. Roo Code Inc. names two successors and only two: Zoo Code, which it describes as a fork started by the Roo Code community, and Cline, the upstream project Roo Code was itself forked from. Zoo Code has been developed continuously since the shutdown and is well past the version Roo Code froze at. Kilo Code is not on that list, which is worth knowing and is not a mark against it, because Kilo is itself a fork of Roo Code. A Roo Code user moving to Kilo is moving to a descendant of the extension they already know rather than to a stranger. The three products are one lineage: Cline, then Roo Code, then Kilo Code. Ownership, which the table cannot show. Anaconda's acquisition of Kilo Code closed in July 2026, so a buyer evaluating Kilo today knows who stands behind it and can read that company's own commitments. Roo Code has no such answer available at any price. Kilo also rebranded from kilocode.ai to kilo.ai during 2026, which matters if you go looking for older reviews or documentation and cannot find them under the current name. Licensing is a real difference and no row of the table carries it. Roo Code is Apache-2.0 and Kilo Code is MIT. Both are genuinely open source and both permit commercial use and forking, which is the whole reason a community fork of Roo Code was able to exist at all. Read the review row carefully, because it shows the smallest corpus available and it points the opposite way from the largest. On the VS Code Marketplace, where both extensions are actually installed and where each has accumulated several hundred ratings, Roo Code is rated materially higher than Kilo Code. Handle that honestly rather than as a gotcha. Roo Code's ratings are historical and stopped accumulating when the product did, and a frozen extension cannot disappoint anyone with a bad release. It is still a real signal about how the extension was received, from a far larger sample than the row above rests on. The security certification row reads as a tie and is not one. Neither product carries a certification our column admits, and the reasons are opposite. Roo Code once published a trust portal, and that portal now returns a not-found page with its contents withdrawn, so the blank is a withdrawal rather than a position. Kilo Code publishes a genuine SOC 2 Type I report through its trust center, which the column does not admit because we list Type II only. On documented security posture Kilo is further along than the row can show, and Roo Code's blank is the more meaningful of the two. MCP is the same badge on both sides and here it genuinely means the same thing. Both connect out to other people's servers and neither exposes one of its own, so if you want a coding agent that another application can drive, neither of these is the tool. Data handling differs, and the difference is not architectural. Both are bring-your-own-key, so your code goes wherever your model provider takes it. Kilo publishes an organization-level opt-out that stops providers using your code for training, and states plainly that the setting hiding prompt-training models is off by default. Roo Code makes no statement about training at all, and the surfaces that might have carried one went down with the company. Neither position amounts to your code is private. One is documented and one is simply unavailable. What the entry figures do not buy. Kilo Code's platform is free forever for an individual under an MIT license, and it stays free if you bring your own API keys. The figure in the table is Kilo Pass, an optional managed inference subscription, and it is the same in either billing cycle: an annual commitment raises the credit allowance rather than moving the rate. The per-seat Teams plan is a third axis again and buys administration rather than agent capability, so a solo developer never needs it. Kilo states that from September 1, 2026 at the earliest it will add a 5 percent processing fee on card purchases of credits and begin billing for awake cloud compute time. The vendor states that this fee will not apply to payment by invoice, wire, or ACH. Roo Code's extension was free with your own keys. Roo Code Inc. also ran a paid product, and its shutdown notice still directs former paying customers to a billing address, but no rates for it are documented on any surface the company still publishes. Setup time on both sides of this table is an editorial estimate rather than a figure either vendor publishes, so read that row as an impression rather than a measurement. The recommendation is not close. For anyone choosing a coding agent today, Kilo Code is the one still being built, and it reaches well beyond the single editor Roo Code was confined to. Existing Roo Code users are in no danger this week and the extension will keep working for a while yet. But migration is a question of when rather than whether, and the vendor's own two names for where to go next are Zoo Code and Cline.
Which is best for my team: Roo Code vs Kilo Code?
Roo Code is best for: Existing users of the shut-down extension who want a familiar Apache-2.0 setup to keep working short-term while planning a move to Zoo Code, Cline, or Kilo Code. Kilo Code is best for: Developers who want an actively maintained open-source agent with bring-your-own-key model access across VS Code, JetBrains, CLI, cloud, and Slack, plus parallel subagents and a named corporate owner.
How does pricing compare between Roo Code vs Kilo Code?
Roo Code uses a free model with pricing on request. Kilo Code uses a freemium model, starting at $19 per month.
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