IronClaw vs Manus

IronClaw

IronClaw takes the part of personal agents everyone hand-waves, what happens to your credentials, and answers it with an encrypted enclave vault plus open source you can read. The repository is busy and drew over 12,000 stars within months of its February 2026 start. That youth is also the risk: a six-month-old agent runtime touching your inbox and GitHub is an early adopter's tool.

Pros

• +Apache-2.0 source on GitHub, so self-hosting is a real option rather than a promise
• +Secrets stay in an encrypted enclave vault instead of passing through the model
• +Model-agnostic across Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Mistral, Ollama and OpenRouter
• +Hosted plans include model credits at face value, starting at $5 a month

Cons

• −The project is only months old and moving fast, so interfaces will churn
• −Credits are the real cost driver; the subscription is largely a credit prepayment
• −Hosted tiers cap agent instances at 2 and 5, and no country or legal entity is published

Manus

Manus is for delegating a whole task — research a market, build a small site, clean a dataset — and reading the result later, with a replayable trail of what the agent did. It is strongest on bounded, verifiable jobs and weakest when the task needs judgement calls mid-way, and the credit meter makes long multi-step runs expensive to repeat: a failed run costs the same as a good one.

Pros

• +Runs in its own cloud sandbox with browser, terminal and files, so nothing is installed locally
• +Step-by-step progress and session replay make the agent's work auditable
• +Published plans: Free with daily credits, Pro from $20, Team from $20 a seat with pooled credits
• +Bring-your-own API key is supported on Team for model access

Cons

• −Credits are consumed by run time and tool calls, so cost per finished task is hard to predict
• −The original Basic and Plus plans were folded into Pro, and the pricing page itself shows no figures without JavaScript
• −Operator is a Singapore entity with disputes under SIAC arbitration, which matters for enterprise procurement

Is IronClaw cheaper than Manus?

On published entry prices, IronClaw starts lower — $5/mo against $20/mo for Manus. Entry price is the lowest paid plan as we last verified it; what each plan includes differs.

Does IronClaw or Manus have a free tier?

Both: IronClaw has a free tier, and Manus has a free tier.

Which has a public API, IronClaw or Manus?

Manus ships a public API, as of our last verification. A public API for IronClaw is not confirmed by us — check its developer docs before you plan an integration.