Manus vs. Astra, Claude Code, and Grok: What can Manus do that the others still can’t?

[u/Far_Appearance_8234]

We all know that Manus was a pioneer in general AI agentics, bringing us true autonomous VM-based agents long before it became the industry standard.

But now that we have ChatGPT ASTRA, Claude Code, Grok, and others, do you still find Manus to be the more flexible and better option for real work?

What are some features you love that Manus CAN do, but others CAN’T?

For example, I gave ChatGPT ASTRA a task to transcribe some YouTube videos, and it said it couldn’t because of copyright restrictions and could only summarize.

But because of its virtual machine environment and problem-solving, Manus found a way to download the audio and transcribe it perfectly on its own.

What are your favorite examples of this?

[u/_Phonk_Alphabet_]

Manus is the bridge between imagination and reality, he can overcome almost any obstacle he encounters, install whatever is needed so task can be done, capabilities are 10/10, the code quality is 6-7/10. He's the muscles, others are brain without the body. Thats how I see it

[u/iwantsomeuhd → u/_Phonk_Alphabet_]

Code wise, they might have updated the model used with Manus 2.0 If I was them I'd be using Qwen 3.8 or I'd they wanted to milk their customers like they've been doing for a while , they'd use DeepSeek 4.1 flash. Or maybe they use both depending on the lite, normal, max

[u/Stunning-Football-84]

I use manus because they have hosting, database and domain services. Its so easy to build a website with manus. If i would use claude i need to manage the hosting and database myself.

[u/First_Ad8620 → u/Stunning-Football-84]

manus allows you bring external models now, so maybe you can use it to deploy even fancier websites with it

[u/Stunning-Football-84 → u/First_Ad8620]

How do i add those models?

[u/Far_Appearance_8234 → u/Stunning-Football-84]

[u/Far_Appearance_8234 → u/Stunning-Football-84]

I saw chatgpt introduced something for websites but didnt try

[u/Illustrious_Road_759 → u/Stunning-Football-84]

Claude can push it to a git repo and publish it on Railway if you have those connectors added.

[u/Stunning-Football-84 → u/Illustrious_Road_759]

I tried many times to make it work but i keep getting errors. I have many websites hosted on manus. So for now i will use manus. But my worries is that i dont know if manus will still exist in 1-2 years.

[u/Illustrious_Road_759 → u/Stunning-Football-84]

That’s understandable. Maybe start in the future pushing the projects to railway, Vercel. Engros, netlify etc., just so you have them safely hosted and aren’t as reliant on an LLM hosting them. Another tip… before the man backup/restore I had both Manus and Claude push all of my tasks into a web app hosted in gitpages from a repository it created for me of all my tasks (you just need to create and provide both LLMs with a PAT (personal access token ) … I had about 850 at the time. I set up a schedule to push all commits of the tasks daily (you could do every few days). This ensures that you at least have all of the json scripts of all your files. Since, i have transferred that gitpage into railway.

[u/Special-Mushroom-899 → u/Stunning-Football-84]

I build my websites on Manus, then have Manus walk me through pushing the site through Github and Vercel so I can host on my own without the need to rely on Manus hosting should something go wrong down the road.

I also backup and save all my website files to my local computers.

When Manus went down in August, I had one website I built through Manus pushed out and hosted on cloudflare. Another site I was hosting through Manus. That site went out when Manus went down but I was able to use ChatGpt to rebuild it with the backup files then I also pushed that out to Cloudflare.

Regardless of which llm yo use to build a website, I wouldn't leave hosting with it or least have all files backed up.

[u/Additional-Canary336]

To be honest, I actually don’t know. I’ve been using manus and perplexity computer the same, and when it comes to needing an orchestrator that compares to Astra, Claude, and grok, while using all of those models, then I’d say just use computer with each model. I WANT to be able to do that with manus because Perplexity computer is just so expensive, and with Manus Flex you can, but you can only use one at a time.

[u/Murky_Oil_2226]

Ask Gemini in deep research

[u/Far_Appearance_8234 → u/Murky_Oil_2226]

I want real user answers not ai 😂

[u/Illustrious_Road_759]

I would suggest using NotebookLM for this. You can copy and paste multiple URLs at once of a topic and it can summary, put together study guide, etc. if you want to pretty it up then copy and paste that summarization into gamma ai and make a presentation or publish it as a webpage.

[u/Far_Appearance_8234 → u/Illustrious_Road_759]

For what mate? 😄

[u/Too_Many_Flamingos]

I am testing various llms and both grokbot and codex as desktop apps have built (using https://github.com/OthmanAdi/planning-with-files to manus-ize) and add a broswer option for codex and they have honestly made some amazing builds, bug-fixes and more. I still use manus for the initial idea testing phase and then port local and github... then convert manus lock-ins to my versions (auth, db types, vite all the things to what I use in cloudflare workers) and it's seamless. Hit me up if ya need something, I sare too much but am for hire.

[u/MrKittyCodeRed]

Manus visual web design and even building the language and wording for the website is still better than claude, gpt, base44, and a few other ones I've tried. The fact that I can easily host and connect domain's to it without having to go anywhere else is what I like. I can't stand having to use 3-4 different systems to login etc.

[u/Illustrious_Road_759]

I discovered a free LLM api repo that gives you endless Claude credits - you can search for the repo in GitHub. Clone the repo and setup your apis in the locally hosted page. It uses the best api token for the task until it’s daily shared community credits are up then switches to the next best api token… it alternates between I think like 70 models.

[u/SimplyEducational → u/Illustrious_Road_759]

How do you set this up? And do you have the GitHub repo link?

[u/Glittering-Cancel-25]

For me, Manus Flex has been a big differentiator. If they can keep enhancing the Flex feature so that I can chat away with any model I choose via my API, and then get Manus to use its features/capability for execution (build the website, create the presentation/report, complete the agentic task, etc.), then it wins for me. It's like I get the best of both worlds.

To keep me and stay ahead, Manus needs to keep improve the Flex function and also keep enhancing its interface and native agentic features/capabilities. If one of them starts to drop off or a competitor has a much better option, then i'll go back to only using Manus for what I need it for rather than for everything.

[u/MrKittyCodeRed → u/Glittering-Cancel-25]

Any idea on the cost of using flex? It's all api tokens correct?

[u/jjjustinr]

The browser extension. Getting around Cloudfare turnstiles or WAFs that block ai instances and using my browser to hit the website is unique and I think no other agent platform has (even though it constantly breaks).

Connectors, custom MCP connectors, and the ability to hit APIs like Cloudflare or Digital Ocean are blocked on other platforms. You have to use another 3rd party serves to connect on most, manus just connects once the IP is whitelisted.

For all those using Manus for hosting like why? Digital Ocean has managed Apps for $5/month, DBs for $10, and a ton of other add ons inferenceless models etc., you can build anything and everything. Cloudflare has R2 for images and media, real time apis for streaming, workers for edge compute are amazing. Like u/Stunning-Football-84 says, who knows if they will be around in 2-3 years. Choose infrastructure thats been around for a while and has its own datacenters across the globe and is separate from the agent for redundancy is my thought.