The best Manus alternatives in 2026

The closest Manus alternative is Grok Bot: agents on a persistent cloud computer that run routines on a schedule or trigger, for a flat $30 a month. If you’d rather pay your model provider directly than buy credits, use Rakazo or the free, self-hosted Hermes Agent. If your Manus jobs end in documents, analyses or software, dots is the strongest hosted option, at a higher price.

Disclosure: Rakazo, ranked second, is made by the company that runs this site. It is ranked by the same criteria as the rest.

Why people look for Manus alternatives

Manus is good at turning a single request into a finished thing, from a research report to a website, a slide deck, a video or a playable game, and Manus 2.0 added event-triggered Automations and Cloud Computers. The complaints are mostly about what it costs and who is behind it.

• Unpredictable credits. Manus charges by task complexity, so you don’t know what a job will cost until it’s done, and runs that go wrong still use credits.
• A limited free plan. Free users get 300 credits a day, capped at 1,500 refreshed credits a month, and those daily credits only work in the Lite mode.
• Confusing plans. Three paid plans are all called Pro and differ only by credit amount.
• Privacy controls only for teams. A built-in training opt-out is listed only on the Team plan.
• Corporate uncertainty. Manus had its sale to Meta blocked by China in April 2026 before raising new money as an independent company in Singapore.

How we ranked them

Every tool here does Manus’s core job: take a goal, work on it in the background on a computer of its own, and come back with results. The first three are the highest rated here; our rating is in the table above and weighs the checklist (acts in your accounts, works while you’re away, messages you first, lives in your chat apps, runs several bots) along with setup effort, price and availability. Between equally rated tools, the one that’s easier to start comes first, since Manus needs no setup. The last three are ordered by how much of Manus’s deliverable work they cover, not by rating: dots covers the most, though its price, single dot and region limits rate it lowest.

1. Grok Bot: closest hosted agent, flat price

Grok Bot gives you named Bots that work on a persistent cloud computer with a browser, files and a terminal, sign in to your tools, and run routines on a schedule or after an event, the same job as Manus Automations. Several Bots can work in parallel and message each other. It is an app you install, with nothing to configure, and it does everything on our checklist.

Pricing is a subscription rather than per-task credits: Grok Bot comes with The X Subscription from $30 a month.

What you give up: the free plan and visibility. Usage comes from a weekly pool shared with Grok and Cursor whose size isn’t published, and over Halloween weekend users ran out days early, so the budgeting problem moves rather than disappears. You can’t choose the model, and Grok Bot is built around ongoing routines rather than one-off deliverables.

2. Rakazo: open source, priced by computer hours

Rakazo runs persistent bots that each get a computer, memory and routines, triggered by schedules, webhooks or GitHub events. You bring the model, including an existing Claude or ChatGPT subscription, so model costs follow that provider’s pricing rather than a per-task credit rate. Hosted plans are sold by computer hours, from 25 a month for $15, and self-hosting is free. It also does everything on our checklist.

It ranks below Grok Bot because it takes more setup: you connect a model, or buy Rakazo credits, before a bot can work.

What you give up: Manus’s one-prompt deliverables. Rakazo is built for ongoing jobs, not slide decks and videos, and it is in beta.

3. Hermes Agent: free, self-hosted and self-improving

Hermes Agent is an MIT-licensed agent from Nous Research that writes reusable skills after complex tasks and refines them as it goes, so the jobs you repeat can improve over time. You bring any model, and an optional $20 Nous Portal plan bundles models, hosted tools and one cloud agent. It runs scheduled jobs and talks to you on Telegram, Slack, WhatsApp and more.

What you give up: ease. Without the Portal plan it runs on your own computer or server, setup expects the command line, and there is no native mobile app.

4. dots: best for documents, analysis and software

dots is OpenAI’s always-on agent inside ChatGPT. It runs on its own cloud computer, connects to over 4,000 apps, and hands work to Codex and ChatGPT Work to research, analyze data, prepare documents and build software, which covers much of what people use Manus for. You can reach it in ChatGPT, Slack and Microsoft Teams.

What you give up: price and choice. It needs ChatGPT Pro from $100 a month, isn’t on Pro in the EEA, the UK or Switzerland, you get one dot per user, and the model is fixed.

5. Perplexity Teammates: several agents for long projects

Perplexity Teammates split a goal into tasks that agents run in parallel, each teammate on its own isolated computer and browser, and you pick the model per teammate or task. If you used Manus for long research-led projects, this is the closest structure.

What you give up: the credit problem stays. Teammates need Perplexity Max at $200 a month, usage draws on credits with no published cost per task, and it is a web-only research preview.

6. Claude Duet: if you already pay for Claude

Claude Duet works on a cloud computer with its own browser and turns larger jobs into editable briefs, decks and dashboards. It comes at no extra cost on Claude Pro ($20 a month) during the preview, and it asks before sending, paying, signing or deleting anything.

What you give up: availability. It is a waitlisted, US-only preview, shares Claude’s usage limits, runs on one model, and works in a single ongoing thread rather than parallel projects.

Which one should you pick?

• You want hosted agents and a flat subscription: Grok Bot.
• You want to bring your own model and pay for computer hours, not credits: Rakazo.
• You want free and self-hosted: Hermes Agent.
• Your jobs end in documents, analyses or software, and you’ll pay for it: dots.
• You run long research-led projects with several agents: Perplexity Teammates.
• You already pay for Claude in the US: Claude Duet.

For more on Manus itself, see our Manus review.