Manus
The general-purpose autonomous agent that carries out complete tasks.
Olya's profile
- What sets it apart
- Manus isn't a chatbot you talk to, but an agent that takes a goal and carries it out on its own inside a dedicated virtual machine: it browses, writes and runs code, and hands back the finished file. Since late 2025 it has been part of Meta, and the subscription service has continued without interruption. Version 1.6 splits a Chat Mode for quick answers from an Agent Mode with three tiers (Lite, standard, Max), plus Wide Research, which spawns many sub-agents in parallel on the same topic.
- Strengths
- It delivers artefacts rather than summaries: decks exportable to PowerPoint, spreadsheets, sites published via Auto-Publish, long investigations through Wide Research. Paid plans handle twenty concurrent tasks and twenty scheduled ones, so you can leave it working while you do something else, and Plan Mode lets you read and correct the plan before it starts. There are desktop and mobile apps, a browser operator, connectors such as Slack and Mail, and an API.
- When to use it
- It makes sense when the work is long, repetitive and ends up inside a file: pulling data from dozens of pages, assembling a report, drafting a first set of slides or a web prototype you can show someone. It also pays off when you can describe the goal well and then walk away, because a serious task takes minutes or hours. The free plan, with 300 credits a day and one task at a time, is there to tell you whether this way of working suits you.
- When to avoid it
- If you need an immediate answer or have a single question, a conversational assistant costs less and gets there sooner: here every action the agent takes burns credits, and the final bill for a task is hard to predict. Treat the code it produces as a prototype, not as software to ship without review. And the free tier only gives you the Lite variant in Agent Mode, so judging it properly means moving up to at least twenty dollars a month.