back
90 comments
Does anyone here use Manus actively?

I found it worse than alternatives in the similar space (Claude, genspark, kagi research, etc.) and slightly baffling they were being acquired at a $2B valuation in the first place.

ChatGPT Work and Claude Cowork (and OpenClaw) are established now - they weren't at all in December 2025 when Meta tried to buy Manus.
In what bubble ChatGPT Work and Claude Cowork are established? I don't know anyone using it regularly and I'm in a bubble of people using lots of AI tools.
Claude CoWork absolutely dominates - I use it continuously now when connecting to mail, calendar, jira, google docs - any type of knowledge work. Almost everyone I know (at work) who does "Knowledge work" type stuff (as opposed to coding) uses it as their primary pane-of-glass now.

I have 15+ years of top 1 percentile knowledge using awk to process complex unstructured documents - and I don't even bother anymore - just dump the dataset into CoWork and ask it to do the analysis, cross check its work.

I did it last night during a call for a reasonably complex 10,000 node cluster with all sorts of jobs/allocations/memory constraints. I didn't even attempt to throw together a quick awk script (which would have taken me 7-8 minutes - it was a beast) - just did a nomad-job-inspect of a couple hundred jobs, and dumped all the data at CoWork (real time, while talking on the zoom) and said, "Get me the Memory/CPU requirements based on job/datacenter/SKU constraints and give me a summary Table".

Any normal person would have take 3-4 hours, minimum - futzing with google sheets and such (lots of task/taskgroup independent counts). Even I would have taken a minimum of 10 minutes. Cowork had it for me in under 30 seconds - I didn't even have to really look away from the zoom.

I haven't use the Atlassian Jira interface to manage my sprints/issues in 6+ weeks. All that cognitive drain is gone - I just ask CoWork to update the sprints, link issues to change-notices, comment and change status, set epics, etc... Zero need to find the damn field in Jira.

CoWork is legit.

> In what bubble ChatGPT Work and Claude Cowork are established? I don't know anyone using it regularly and I'm in a bubble of people using lots of AI tools.

I have lots of highly-educated knowledge worker friends who aren't particularly techie but who swear by Claude Cowork.

By "established" I meant more that they now exist as products and are being first developed. I agree that most people still don't really understand what they are for - but I expect they already have way more exposure than Manus ever did.
Manus did a lot of harness work to make up for gaps in Opus 4.5 tier models. I tried it for a time - they had a great deep research/PDF generation pipeline, parallelization, etc. The bitter lesson has now come for them: the latest models no longer have these gaps and the entire premise of having a unique product focus on this area is no longer relevant. Even Ant/OAI have let their "Deep Research" capabilities fall by the wayside, you can largely get the same result by asking for subagents or simply "keep going" style prompting.
IMO I disagree. I find the built in harness (database, browser use, etc.) quite good.

The only downside (and a big one) is that by not being natively offered by OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. you're paying @ API billing and not plan billing, which makes it less appealing. (Of course Manus has a wrapper around this w some token system, but it ends up being expensive)

Interesting, what does your tasks & workflow look like with them?

I generally found the quality decent (say, similar to other competitors), but the speed of task completion was very slow. I think because they would depend too much on Sonnet as a core backend, and relied on big/expensive models more than other harnesses.

Valuations are significantly leveraged compared to actual user metrics. My impression of Manus was that, like Perplexity, some users were using it to get around firewalls/regulation.
I use it alot. It's great for like researching deep on a topic. I also accidentally found that it's better at taking my directions and transferring that well to image generation especially with iteration. When I try my own iterations directly it never really lands
I found there Deep Research quite good in terms of browsing the web, better than Gemini's. Though it blew through ~40$ in one task so it was very expensive, probably running at insane margins.
What was the task that cost $40?
I like it and use it regularly. Maybe I don't get other harnesses, but in my experience Manus gets shit done, whereas I have to constantly babysit other tools.
I use it for when I am on my iPad and am not at my computer. It is very good for computer use. That along with Minimax agent.
In my experience, Manus is a very capable agent for daily non-coding tasks. Their cron job ability also shined out
Too expensive & unpredictable credit system.
This has to be one of the most flash in the pan, 5 minutes of fame company in a long time

It's crazy how short it's hype cycle lasted

Perhaps unfairly my interest suddenly dropped to zero when the acquisition was announced. The hype also seemed gone?
Absolutely. Haven't heard anyone talk about recently.
What does this product do? There's absolutely nothing on the main screen of the app except a chat box.
Money. They have AI on the pitch deck and therefore make obscure amounts of money.
Anyone have info on whose regulatory restrictions they are referring to?
The Chinese government blocked Meta’s acquisition.

https://archive.is/yFCIt

The Chinese government may not be a bastion of the rule of law, but they at least seem to still have a functioning antitrust enforcement.
Interesting to know that Meta has business in China and needs the government's approval.
Almost certainly Chinese national-security and technology-transfer restrictions around strategic AI tech. China’s NDRC formally prohibited the acquisition and ordered the transaction unwound.
What is "strategic AI" in Manus? Not like they make models.
China prevented the founders from leaving the country
I think they were talking about the part,

> As part of our transition back to independent operations and to comply with regulatory requirements in specific jurisdictions, data generated by certain users on/after December 29, 2025, will be deleted from 8:00 a.m. on August 23 through August 24, 2026 (SGT). Affected users will be able to back up their data from now until 7:59 a.m. on August 23, 2026 (SGT) and restore it starting from 8:00 a.m. on August 25, 2026 (SGT).

I would guess EU? Technically a bunch of countries don't allow data to be with Manus aka Chinese cloud services.

For instance, India has quite literally banned Alibaba Cloud and related.

No it’s Chinese state who is preventing founders from leaving China https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2026/06/12/meta-reportedly-begins-d...
Why guess? This is trivially Googleable information.
Puzzling that Meta didn't see this one coming. Wonder if there was a break up fee.
I don’t actually care about this flash-in-the-pan company, but the name Manus is the reason startups should have a branding designer or branding agency do branding work before they’re too recognizable to change without throwing people off, but not large enough for anyone to learn about it organically (e.g. Meta, X). I can’t help but read it like ‘anus’ with an M in front of it.

People on the technical side of the business often insist people don’t care things like that, but when non-technical people are looking at a few services that seem roughly equivalent to them, even subconsciously, appeal plays a big role. And M’Anus is not appealing.

The fantasy that you’re building something so useful it will sell itself is magical thinking. Yet another reason AI will never replace designers— just screw up the job market for them.

> I can’t help but read it like ‘anus’ with an M in front of it.

Duck Duck Go is really what's wrong with modern dating culture.

If Manus was as common a word as Duck, it would read pretty differently.
I expect this decupling will affect certain users. Can certain users speak up about this? I'm certain that certain users use Manus and are users on this certain site.
Likely a bad translation from the original Chinese version?

That being said it’s the first time I see Manus, they seem to have the perfect AI startup tagline for a new season of HBO’s Silicon Valley:

“Our Mission - To extend human reach by giving everyone the code to leverage their life. Our Product - We build general AI agents as the Action Engine for life.”

> Likely a bad translation from the original Chinese version?

No, most likely they're referring to users who created accounts etc on the meta infrastructure which is being spun down and erased and accounts created prior were never in their purview.

Switched to avi.run already. But loved Manus initially.
It looks interesting, but to be honest - when I wanted to connect Google apps I got warned that the developer is not verified. That's a bad look.
Got a notice they're in the Google Review process and getting a CASA. Takes forever because you have to hire a third party firm for several thousand...
I bet Demis wishes the UK had blocked the DeepMind acquisition by Google. He will have a lot of time to think now that he has been kicked out of his own company
He needed Google money to run the company.
Bro I remeber manus private beta miss it