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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

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.

alansaber 1mo ago
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.
simonw 1mo ago
ChatGPT Work and Claude Cowork (and OpenClaw) are established now - they weren't at all in December 2025 when Meta tried to buy Manus.
- brazukadev 1mo ago
  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.
  - primitivesuave 1mo ago
    My non-technical teammates use Claude Cowork extensively. We set up MCP servers to give them audited access to certain internal services, while they just have to think of MCP as a "connector" which they can configure in the GUI.
  - throw03172019 1mo ago
    My accountant friend says it’s amazing (he does check the work but says it’s amazingly accurate).
    - grey-area 1mo ago
      This is deeply troubling.
      - ashdksnndck 1mo ago
        Maybe for the accountants! I have always done my own taxes, but used arcane custom spreadsheets that accumulated cruft each year. I told cowork to pretend it was an accountant and reorganize them using best practices, and the result is much better than what I had before. It also helped me complete a task I had been deferring for years (tracking down the history of money in my IRAs that had been transferred between different institutions, plus withdrawals conversions etc). Obviously I’m responsible for any errors Claude makes, but it seems to do a good job, and I don’t want to pay an accountant every year.
        SOLAR_FIELDS 1mo ago
        I’ve been having Claude do my business books for the past year or so, operating on a beancount ledger and it’s worked quite well
      - ldng 1mo ago
        Indeed, what could possibly go wrong ?
        hluska 1mo ago
        Considering that broken Excel formulas have killed off companies, the risk has already been priced in.
        ldng 1mo ago
        We'll see, crash will tell.
      - hluska 1mo ago
        What’s troubling about it? Accounting is a huge space; many of which would be an excellent fit for an LLM. We’ll need specifics.
  - csallen 1mo ago
    > 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.
  - ghshephard 1mo ago
    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.
    - blahblaher 1mo ago
      nice advertisement Claude..
    - mbrumlow 1mo ago
      I just do all that with Claude CLI :/
    - Dayshine 1mo ago
      How much does it cost? ChatGPT costs ~$2 per message; if Anthropic have a similar pricing model don't you find lots of small changes and up fast?
      - Computer0 1mo ago
  - simonw 1mo ago
    By "established" I meant more that they now exist as products and are being first developed. I agree that most people still don't really understand what they are for - but I expect they already have way more exposure than Manus ever did.
  - ericfr11 1mo ago
    I guess your bubble is limited. Maybe you know that already?
meric_ 1mo ago
IMO I disagree. I find the built in harness (database, browser use, etc.) quite good. The only downside (and a big one) is that by not being natively offered by OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. you're paying @ API billing and not plan billing, which makes it less appealing. (Of course Manus has a wrapper around this w some token system, but it ends up being expensive)
- trouve_search 1mo ago
  Interesting, what does your tasks & workflow look like with them? I generally found the quality decent (say, similar to other competitors), but the speed of task completion was very slow. I think because they would depend too much on Sonnet as a core backend, and relied on big/expensive models more than other harnesses.
thm 1mo ago
Too expensive & unpredictable credit system.
jatins 1mo ago
I found there Deep Research quite good in terms of browsing the web, better than Gemini's. Though it blew through ~40$ in one task so it was very expensive, probably running at insane margins.
- jrflowers 1mo ago
  What was the task that cost $40?
  - jatins 1mo ago
    Go through job boards and careers pages of various companies and make a job search tracker for personal use.
potato66 1mo ago
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
extr 1mo ago
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.
choutianxius 1mo ago
In my experience, Manus is a very capable agent for daily non-coding tasks. Their cron job ability also shined out
SpyCoder77 1mo ago
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.
adamhepner 1mo ago
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.

alansaber 1mo ago

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.

simonw 1mo ago

ChatGPT Work and Claude Cowork (and OpenClaw) are established now - they weren't at all in December 2025 when Meta tried to buy Manus.

brazukadev 1mo ago
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.
- primitivesuave 1mo ago
  My non-technical teammates use Claude Cowork extensively. We set up MCP servers to give them audited access to certain internal services, while they just have to think of MCP as a "connector" which they can configure in the GUI.
- throw03172019 1mo ago
  My accountant friend says it’s amazing (he does check the work but says it’s amazingly accurate).
  - grey-area 1mo ago
    This is deeply troubling.
    - ashdksnndck 1mo ago
      Maybe for the accountants! I have always done my own taxes, but used arcane custom spreadsheets that accumulated cruft each year. I told cowork to pretend it was an accountant and reorganize them using best practices, and the result is much better than what I had before. It also helped me complete a task I had been deferring for years (tracking down the history of money in my IRAs that had been transferred between different institutions, plus withdrawals conversions etc). Obviously I’m responsible for any errors Claude makes, but it seems to do a good job, and I don’t want to pay an accountant every year.
      - SOLAR_FIELDS 1mo ago
        I’ve been having Claude do my business books for the past year or so, operating on a beancount ledger and it’s worked quite well
    - ldng 1mo ago
      Indeed, what could possibly go wrong ?
      - hluska 1mo ago
        Considering that broken Excel formulas have killed off companies, the risk has already been priced in.
        ldng 1mo ago
        We'll see, crash will tell.
    - hluska 1mo ago
      What’s troubling about it? Accounting is a huge space; many of which would be an excellent fit for an LLM. We’ll need specifics.
- csallen 1mo ago
  > 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.
- ghshephard 1mo ago
  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.
  - blahblaher 1mo ago
    nice advertisement Claude..
  - mbrumlow 1mo ago
    I just do all that with Claude CLI :/
  - Dayshine 1mo ago
    How much does it cost? ChatGPT costs ~$2 per message; if Anthropic have a similar pricing model don't you find lots of small changes and up fast?
    - Computer0 1mo ago
- simonw 1mo ago
  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.
- ericfr11 1mo ago
  I guess your bubble is limited. Maybe you know that already?

meric_ 1mo ago

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)

trouve_search 1mo ago
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.

thm 1mo ago

Too expensive & unpredictable credit system.

jatins 1mo ago

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.

jrflowers 1mo ago
What was the task that cost $40?
- jatins 1mo ago
  Go through job boards and careers pages of various companies and make a job search tracker for personal use.

potato66 1mo ago

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

extr 1mo ago

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.

choutianxius 1mo ago

In my experience, Manus is a very capable agent for daily non-coding tasks. Their cron job ability also shined out

SpyCoder77 1mo ago

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.

adamhepner 1mo ago

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.