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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
by trouve_search 2mo ago
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.
- adamhepner 2mo agoI 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 2mo agoValuations 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 2mo agoChatGPT Work and Claude Cowork (and OpenClaw) are established now - they weren't at all in December 2025 when Meta tried to buy Manus.
- brazukadev 2mo agoIn 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 2mo agoMy 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 2mo agoMy accountant friend says it’s amazing (he does check the work but says it’s amazingly accurate).
- grey-area 2mo agoThis is deeply troubling.
- ashdksnndck 2mo agoMaybe 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 2mo agoI’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 2mo agoIndeed, what could possibly go wrong ?
- csallen 2mo 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 2mo agoClaude 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.
- simonw 2mo agoBy "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 2mo agoI guess your bubble is limited. Maybe you know that already?
- meric_ 2mo agoIMO 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 2mo agoInteresting, 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 2mo agoToo expensive & unpredictable credit system.
- jatins 2mo agoI 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.
- potato66 2mo agoI 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 2mo agoManus 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 2mo agoIn my experience, Manus is a very capable agent for daily non-coding tasks. Their cron job ability also shined out
- SpyCoder77 2mo agoI 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.