What is Manus AI? Benchmarks & How it Compares to Operator and Computer Use

Yusuf Ishola· March 13, 2025

Another day, another AI agent. You've probably heard of Manus AI—the new player that's really turning heads.

Even with limited public access, Manus has generated quite a buzz for its seemingly unprecedented capabilities. But beyond the tweets and videos, what's actually possible with this tool, and why should developers care?

This article cuts through the noise to analyze Manus AI's real capabilities through concrete examples, assess its performance against competitors, and evaluate if developers should consider adding it to their toolkit in the future.

Let's break it down.

What is Manus AI?

Manus AI is an AI agent that bills itself as "the first general AI agent"—a bold claim in a field already crowded with assistants, agents, and copilots. Currently, it is in beta and invite-only.

It can perform various tasks autonomously—from building games and websites to performing research and creating reports.

TL;DR

What can Manus do?

• Autonomous browsing with full web page navigation and interaction
• Code generation and execution within its own sandboxed environment
• Research capabilities to look up and draw insights from multiple sources of information
• Data visualization and analysis with interactive outputs
• Web deployment functionality that publishes directly to subdomains

How Manus Works

Under the hood, Manus employs a sophisticated multi-agent architecture that separates responsibilities across specialized AI components:

1. Executor Agent - This is the front-end agent users communicate with directly. It manages task orchestration but doesn't have detailed knowledge of what other specialized agents are doing.

2. Planner Agent - Breaks down complex tasks into manageable sub-tasks and creates execution plans.

3. Knowledge Agent - Handles information retrieval and synthesis from multiple sources.

4. Sandbox Environment - Each user session gets an isolated Linux-based sandbox with:

   • Full browser capabilities via the browser-use framework
   • Python interpreter with common libraries pre-installed
   • File system access for reading/writing data
   • Terminal access for command execution

5. Tool Integration - Manus has access to 29 different tools covering web browsing, coding, data analysis, and media creation.

The architecture uses Claude as its primary LLM, with a critical optimization: context length is carefully managed by having specialized agents handle different aspects of the task.

This mitigates the common issue of context overflow that plagues many AI systems when handling complex, multi-step tasks.

When a user submits a request, the system:

1. Analyzes the task via the Executor Agent
2. Creates a visible to-do list with the Planner Agent
3. Executes steps sequentially, visible to the user in real-time
4. Provides updates as sub-tasks are completed
5. Delivers final results, often with deployable artifacts

Performance & Benchmarks

On the GAIA benchmark (designed to evaluate General AI Assistants on real-world tasks), Manus achieved state-of-the-art performance across all three difficulty levels, surpassing OpenAI Deep Research and SOTA.

Image Source: Benchmark Results on Manus.im

Real-World Use Cases of Manus

In terms of real-world performance, Manus has been rather impressive. Early users have praised the tool's remarkable ability to perform complex tasks end-to-end with little to no help and minimal instruction.

Let's take a look at a few examples:

1. Game Development

Manus showed impressive game-creation abilities that go beyond what most AI agents (even ones designed for coding) can produce.

ThreeJS Infinite Runner

With a single prompt ("make a three.js endless runner game"), Manus created a complete, playable 3D browser-based game:

Super Mario Clone

Another impressive example is a Super Mario-style platformer created in the "Minecraft visual style." Though slightly buggy, it's still very playable—complete with enemies and score tracking.

2. Web Development

Manus's Spaces allows users to easily push code to publicly-accessible websites—shows strong capabilities in creating functional, visually appealing websites.

Apple Website Clone

With the simple prompt "clone the Apple website," Manus created this:

The result closely resembled Apple's actual site, though images and some other elements were faulty.

Interactive Learning Platforms

Manus created a "Quantum Computing Learning Hub", a content-rich educational platform that features various modules and a functional interactive lab.

3. Research and Reports

Beyond creative projects, Manus also excels at research-heavy analytical tasks.

Comprehensive SEO Optimization Report

With the prompt "run a thorough SEO audit on [website] and deliver a detailed optimization report with actionable recommendations.", Manus crawled the website, performed necessary analysis, and delivered a detailed SEO report with recommendations.

Tesla Stock Analysis Dashboard

When asked for a thorough analysis of Tesla stock, Manus researched and presented findings in a detailed dashboard with key financials, analyses, and investor recommendations.

Manus AI's Strengths and Weaknesses

While Manus shows some impressive capabilities, it has a few flaws. The following table provides a quick summary:

How Manus Compares to Other AI Agents

Here's how Manus compares to similar AI agent tools:

Head-to-Head Comparison

When given the same prompt to conduct an SEO audit for a website:

• Perplexity AI: Completed the task first with the most comprehensive technical SEO recommendations and competitive analysis. The content was presented in a basic text format but contained more detailed information.

• Manus AI: Finished second with a visually polished report. While the SEO recommendations weren't as comprehensive as Perplexity's, the presentation included better formatting and visualization elements.

• Deep Research: Took significantly longer to complete but produced a more thorough report.

• OpenAI Operator: Failed to complete the task, got stuck in browsing loops, and required manual intervention to proceed.

Open Source Alternatives to Manus

If you can't access Manus yet or want something you can deploy yourself, consider using one of these open-source alternatives:

• OWL (Optimized Workforce Learning for General Multi-Agent Assistance): Top-ranked open-source framework (58.18 on GAIA benchmark) built on CAMEL-AI. Supports multiple LLM backends and 20+ toolkits for search, browser automation, document parsing, and code execution.

• ANUS (Autonomous Networked Utility System): Quite possibly the most memorable name in AI tools. Features hybrid agent architecture, flexible model support (OpenAI and open-source), comprehensive tools, and cross-platform compatibility. Highly extensible for developers wanting customization.

Conclusion

Manus AI is a pretty meaningful advance in AI agent capabilities—not because it introduces fundamentally new technology, but because it integrates existing components into a seamless system that delivers impressive results.

Manus's impressive capabilities suggest that the path to better AI agents might lie in better orchestration and use of the tools we already have, rather than the development of more powerful ones.

You might also like

• The Best Web Agents: Computer Use vs Operator vs Browser Use
• Claude Code: A Complete Setup Guide and Honest Evaluation
• OpenAI Deep Research: How it Compares to Perplexity and Gemini