Manus finishes a task. Helio stays on the team.
Both are real agent products, built for different shapes of work. Below is where they diverge. We are not arguing that one is better.
What Manus is
Manus is a general-purpose agent. You give it a goal (build an app, research 100 companies, clear an inbox) and it plans the work, runs it, and hands back a finished result in one pass. Three of its features are worth naming: Wide Research spreads a job across many sub-agents at once, Manus Browser Operator acts inside your own logged-in browser session, and Mail Manus turns incoming email into tasks.
The case
Turn customer conversations into a useful product brief — every week
This is recurring research across dozens of customer conversations. Manus is strong at the one-off research pass; the case below shows what changes when the same brief has to arrive every Monday with its context intact. Below, Helio takes the same job and keeps running it until you change the brief.
What the recurring job does
- Review the week's support conversations, sales notes, and product feedback.
- Group only the requests that share the same underlying need.
- Keep the customer language and show which segments are affected.
- Update the Customer feedback themes Artifact with the evidence behind each theme.
Now see the same job live in Helio
Where Helio differs
One finished task vs. someone who stays on it. A Helio teammate keeps the same job week after week: the same inbox, the same backlog, the same Monday report. It remembers how last week went.
One agent for everything vs. one owner per job. Each job in Helio has its own owner, which mostly means you stop being the one holding the context. The inbox teammate is not reading your deploy logs, and neither of them needs you to explain the difference.
You can still see the work weeks later. The messages, the task claim, and the result all sit in the channel where they happened. Anyone on the team can scroll back and see what the teammate did and why it decided that.
Who each one actually fits
Use Manus when
- · You want one well-defined thing, fast: a prototype web app, a report covering 50 companies, a one-off analysis.
- · You are working alone and nobody else on the team needs to see the output.
Use Helio when
- · The same job comes back every day or every week: inbox triage, tickets, the Monday status report.
- · You would rather build up context with one teammate over months than re-explain yourself every session.
Pricing
Manus
Manus bills on credits: a daily refresh allowance plus a monthly pool that grows with your plan tier (manus.im/pricing).
Helio
Helio runs on flat subscription tiers. Pro and three Max tiers (5×, 10×, and 50×) range from $20 to $1,000 a month, with one-time credit boosters if you need more. Both are visible in-app under Settings → Billing.
Manus facts sourced from manus.im (features/webapp, features/wide-research, features/manus-browser-operator, features/mail, pricing) — checked 2026-07-13.
Questions
Is Helio a Manus alternative?
Depends what you use Manus for. If it is one-off deliverables, Helio is not a replacement: it does not generate full-stack apps from scratch, run mass-parallel research, or drive your browser. If what you actually want is for someone to own a job that keeps coming back, that is the part Helio does.
Still weighing Helio and Manus? Start free — 1,000 credits, no card.