Roo Code shut down. Here's where its users actually went

I wrote about Roo Code archiving the VS Code extension in May to go all-in on Roomote, their cloud agent product. What I didn’t get into there is what people who don’t want a cloud product actually did instead — because Roo’s own team, to their credit, left a specific answer in the README rather than a vague “check the community” note.

ZooCode is the first one named, and it matters that it’s not some outside project — it’s a fork started by the Roo Code community itself, by contributors who wanted the extension’s development to keep going after the core team stepped away. If what you liked about Roo Code was the actual day-to-day experience — the multi-mode setup, the UI, the specific workflow — ZooCode is the closest thing to “Roo Code, still maintained” that exists right now.

Cline is named right alongside it, which makes sense once you remember Roo Code was forked from Cline in the first place — this is less a migration and more a return to where the lineage started. Cline has a much larger, more established community behind it at this point, model-agnostic BYOK support, and its own SDK that now also powers a CLI, a JetBrains plugin, and a web-based Kanban board for running several agents in parallel. If you liked Roo’s core loop but never leaned hard on the multi-mode, model-per-stage feature that made it distinct, Cline covers most of the same ground with more people actively building on it.

Kilo Code is worth knowing about too, even though it’s not the one Roo’s own README points to. It’s a separate fork that pulled ideas from both Cline and Roo Code, and in April 2026 it shipped a full rebuild on top of OpenCode’s portable server core — the same engine now runs its VS Code extension, a JetBrains plugin, and a CLI. MIT licensed, BYOK across 500+ models through a router with no markup, and actively shipping. If neither ZooCode nor Cline quite fits, it’s a reasonable third option, just don’t mistake it for Roo’s official pick — it isn’t.

If you want the least disruptive move and don’t have a strong opinion either way, start with whichever of ZooCode or Cline your current setup is closer to: ZooCode if you want the interface to feel unchanged, Cline if you’d rather join the bigger, faster-moving community.