What Is Manus?

It’s March 2025…everyone is obsessed with ChatGPT, Trump hasn’t invaded Iran and made my flight home cost 2x as much… and every AI-enthusiast is talking about one thing.

Twitter, LinkedIn, every smug-tech-part of the internet, people were going on about this new tool that had swept in from China and was going to change the face of Agentic AI as we know it.

Manus.

Now just to be completely honest with you, I personally don’t remember any of this hype. I wasn’t interested in AI back then and my social media was mostly funny animals and toddlers falling over.

Manus promised a whole new way of interacting with AI and slick teaser videos showed incredible use-cases which made Silicon Valley (rightly) sit up straight.

But what was about Manus that got everyone so excited?

What are they up to now?

And did they really get acquired by Meta??

Lots of questions, time for some answers!

Let’s get going with:

Manus is a general-purpose AI agent, built by a Chinese startup called Monica.

PS: If you aren’t familiar with AI Agents, you can take a look at my article on AI Agents here for a basic overview before we dive into Manus more.

It launched in early March 2025 and went viral almost instantly, largely because it was doing something that most AI tools weren't doing at the time.

Actually doing things.

So opening files, creating documents, linking to tools…everything without requiring any further input from a human. Full task completion from start to finish.

Now, writing this in April 2026, this might not sound like such a “wow” thing. After all, nowadays there are many AI Agent products on the market for users to choose from, or use n8n to build their own.

But back in early 2025, most AI tools were purely conversational LLM models.

You say something. They say something back.

So there was a big race to be the first to create truly autonomous agentic tools. Tools that could perform real-life tasks from start to finish and actually start taking over real life tasks from human beings.

Manus then SWEPT on to the scene (creating a lot of drama) and promised an AI Agent that could do real tasks like: screening resumes, creating trip itineraries and analyzing stocks.

In true Berlin fashion, they also hyped it up even MORE by making the initial access “invite only”.

Alongside the excitement was a good deal of skepticism and caution…

More on this later in the post.

So Manus is sounding interesting? I think so too! Let’s see what kind of things you can actually do with it:

According to the hundreds of hyped up YouTubers I scrolled through, Manus can do a lot and is maybe the best thing in the world since sliced bread.

(A fair few of these YouTubers were sponsored by Manus though, so you really have to filter to get to the honest stuff)

Of course it has all of the chatbot style features that we are used to by now from ChatGPT or Claude - you can ask it questions and it can answer them for you.

That’s straightforward enough.

But where Manus really comes into its own is performing full tasks from start to finish. Some use-cases that stand out are:

For me, while I was testing Manus, I asked it to do a full SEO and general review of this learning platform. It ran for quite a while but with zero input from me, the output was a finished PDF file with a full SEO analysis of my site, with pretty useful suggestions of how I could improve it.

I was fairly impressed!

You can get started right away with Manus by going to their site at https://manus.im/ and creating a free account.

As I write this, new users get 1000 tokens free to play around with, which is nice, and they do technically offer a free version (but with only a small number of tokens each day).

I would say, create an account, play with the 1000 free tokens and you will get a fairly good idea of what Manus can do.

The good new first, as my mother would say:

One of the things that makes Manus really stand out is its transparency feature.

(It’s very cool to see it in action for the first time, I was very impressed to see a company taking transparency to such another level as this)

It works like this: As it works through your task, you get a live log of every step it's taking.

You can watch it actually open a browser tab, run a search, read a page, write a bit of code, commit it to git…

This is quite a cool feature because most AI tools really work like a black box. You never get to really see what they are doing and this (at least for me) can lead to distrust of how they really got to the end result.

With Manus you can scroll back through and see exactly which steps it took and why.

Quite a unique an interest feature!

For research-heavy work especially, Manus is impressively capable.

Give it a chunky task and it will just crack on with it, rather than stopping every two minutes to ask a clarifying question.

Personally this bothers me a fair bit with Claude… it asks me for my opinion wayyy too much. Just do it already!!

This is really cool for having tasks run in the background or in parallel, without having to keep checking or reviewing the next steps.

The lack of coding required is a big plus for a lot of users. If you are capable of typing a task in plain English, you can still do an awful lot with Manus.

Manus’ biggest competitor n8n is very cool and effective but it still requires a fair amount of setup and technical know-how.

Manus really is a type-and-watch-me-roll tool.

Here is where I could write a book but let’s just pick out the big ones:

Manus is built by a Chinese company, and your tasks, files, and data are being processed on their servers.

If you are working with anything sensitive, personal data, confidential work documents, anything you wouldn't want sitting on a foreign server, you should maaaaaybe talk to your lawyers before doing anything remotely sensitive here.

For anyone just doing basic tasks that they don’t mind the Chinese government knowing about - it’s all good!

Because Manus operates inside its own computer environment and can browse the web, run code, and interact with files, the question of what you give it access to matters.

(It is sandboxed, which helps, but no system is completely immune.)

This means that for your average Joe, maybe there’s no problem, but for a corporation who is handles millions of lines of sensitive user data? Hmm… I would be slightly more careful here.

(PS: As I write this Manus is in the middle of a fight-for-the-soul battle between Meta - who want to aquire it - and the Chinese government who don’t want the tech falling out of their control. Spicy stuff)

Manus is not free and according to the reviews I have been extensively reading…it’s EXPENSIVE

People seem to complain that Manus eats up tokens very quickly and this can lead to the costs quickly racking up.

For my small task of “SEO analysis of a website”, it used nearly 200 tokens of my free 1000 token limit. Eeeeek.

I could imagine this getting very hungry, very fast when it comes to really complex multi-agent tasks.

My final thoughts on my experiences with Manus. I think that this is definitely a tool to keep an eye on in the future.

As I write this, Manus AI are caught in a fierce battle between the Chinese Government and Meta, the latter who have being trying to aquire it for over a year and the former who don’t want their technology being handed over to a US company.

And imagine what an AI Agentic tool could be capable of, if given free access and integration to all of Meta’s tools and platforms.

If this acquisition does go ahead, I think it could spell big changes for the world of content generation, using AI Agents.

In short - a useful tool to check out and keep an eye on in the future!

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