Manus: review, pricing, security and alternatives

What Manus does

Manus belongs to the personal assistants family: general-purpose agents, often self-hosted and driven from a messaging app, that act for you on your files, accounts and services. The directory lists 46 agents in this family.

You use it from: web app, desktop app, mobile app, and API.

Who is Manus for?

It targets individuals and freelancers who want an assistant able to act for them day to day, often from a messaging app. Typical tasks people give it:

• sort e-mail and draft replies
• manage a calendar and reminders
• look up information and summarise it
• run small recurring tasks

It is a good candidate if you prefer doing everything in a browser, with no install and you want to try for free before paying.

Access and human control

According to its documentation, Manus can:

• run commands in a terminal
• read and edit files
• drive a web browser
• control the screen, keyboard and mouse

We could not establish whether it asks for human approval before sensitive actions: test it first on an unimportant account or folder.

Manus pricing

The cheapest paid plan that gives access to Manus costs $20 per month, according to the official pricing page checked on October 25, 2026.

Agent prices change often and frequently depend on usage (credits, tasks, steps): check the pricing page before committing, especially for a team.

Getting started with Manus

1. Create an account on the official website: the free tier is enough for a first try.
2. Pick the platform: web.
3. Give it a first playground with nothing at stake: a test folder, a secondary account or a throwaway project. Only open your real accounts once you have seen how it behaves.
4. Give it a short, checkable task, review the result and its action log, then raise the difficulty step by step.

Security: risk level

A personal assistant often combines access to private data, reading outside content and sending messages: the combination that enables data leaks through prompt injection.

Points found for Manus:

• Sensitive access: it can run commands in a terminal and control the screen, keyboard and mouse, with no established default human approval.
• Outside content: it reads web pages or API responses, which may contain booby-trapped instructions (prompt injection).

Three habits: least privilege (minimal rights, dedicated keys), human approval for irreversible actions, a sandbox for code execution. The AI agent security check reviews your setup in a few minutes.

Manus's price vs other services

Of the 4 services in the family that publish a monthly price, 1 is cheaper than Manus.

Note: at the same price, included quotas (credits, tasks, messages) vary a lot between services. The entry price tells you what access costs, not how much work it buys.

Manus and other personal assistants at a glance

The 7 best-ranked agents in the same family, 7 of them open source. The score out of 100 only applies to open-source projects; for proprietary services we show the published entry price. A dash marks information the documentation does not state.

How we rated it

We do not give proprietary agents a score out of 100: there is no public adoption or activity data for them comparable to open-source repositories, and we will not make up a number. This page relies on the vendor's documentation and pricing page, checked on October 25, 2026.

The risk level follows the same rule as for open-source projects: access granted, default human approval and where data is processed. Details on the method page.