Manus AI Review: Is It Worth the Credits?

Manus AI oneshots research presentations better than their in-house Open Claw agent, but it's now a Meta product, not an independent Chinese tool.

Why Boxmining switched back to Manus

The team ran the same prompt — "can you do a deep research into deerflow which is a competitor and compare it main features with open claw, make a full web presentation" — on both Manus and their tuned Open Claw agent. Manus delivered a clean, page-by-page deck on the first run. Open Claw sometimes returns an .md file instead of a website, and sometimes "the presentations come up a little bit wonky." Michael frames Manus as "emergency use" — when you don't want to debug your agent pipeline for a oneoff task.

The price they're willing to pay

Michael puts the cost at "bit less than a lunch" for the tasks they throw at it, and notes that despite his instinct to save money, "manus does cost money but that being said the oneshot work seems to work well." The 500-credit invite link in the video is the entry point. He recommends the pro tier only if "your wallets are loaded."

The catch: Meta owns it now

At the login page, Michael discovered "I totally forgot that Manus was bought by Meta." The team's reaction: "Mark Zuckerberg can't do AI, but he can buy AI." Combined with the unreleased Manus Computer feature that "directly accesses files on your computer," Michael says "I don't know if I trust Zuckerberg with my computer." He hedges by calling it "choosing the lesser of two evils now" — and counts at least four AI agents competing for the same workflow.

How to beat Manus without paying

Michael concedes the gap is partly his team's laziness. If you "really specify down the details" in your agent's skill — slide layout, SVG style, page-by-page structure — "then it performs really well and it does it every day." The shortcut of saving prior prompts and pasting them into Open Claw also closes most of the quality gap, just not as fast.

What's next

Manus Computer, the desktop-control feature announced alongside the Meta acquisition, was untested in this video. A head-to-head with Perplexity Computer and a Deep Flow review are queued for the next upload.