# Sistava vs Manus

*AI Workforces*

Sistava vs Manus

Manus is a general autonomous agent from Chinese startup Butterfly Effect, now Singapore-headquartered, that went viral after its March 2025 beta drew a 2.6M-person waitlist within weeks. You give it a goal in plain language and it plans, browses, codes, and produces a finished output largely on its own, now including a desktop app that lets it operate your actual computer with per-command approval gates. Independent reviews put its task success rate around 70-80% on well-defined work, dropping on complex or ambiguous requests, a genuinely different tradeoff than Sistava's approval-gated, role-based employees built for repeatable business work rather than one-off general tasks.

> **Bottom line:** Sistava employees are role-based and persistent, an SDR, a marketer, an ops specialist, with memory and duties that carry across weeks. Manus is a general-purpose agent you hand a one-off task to; it does not hold a role or a job history.

## Profile

- **Pricing:** Free (300 credits/day, 1 task). Paid from $20/mo (4,000 credits) up to $200/mo (40,000 credits); Team seats from $20/mo (2-seat minimum).
- **Founded:** 2022, originally Beijing/Wuhan, China; relocated to Singapore in 2025
- **Funding:** About $85M raised (ZhenFund seed 2023; Sequoia China and Tencent Series A, Nov 2024; $75M Series B led by Benchmark, Apr 2025) at a roughly $500M valuation. A $2-3B Meta acquisition announced Dec 2025 was blocked by Chinese regulators in April 2026 and was still being unwound as of mid-2026.
- **Focus:** A general-purpose autonomous agent that plans and executes multi-step tasks (research, code, browser, documents) with minimal supervision

## Why Sistava

- Sistava employees are role-based and persistent, an SDR, a marketer, an ops specialist, with memory and duties that carry across weeks. Manus is a general-purpose agent you hand a one-off task to; it does not hold a role or a job history.
- Sistava asks for approval before sensitive actions by default. Manus's desktop 'My Computer' feature requires per-command approval too, but independent reviews report a 70-80% task success rate on well-defined work, with more failures on complex, ambiguous requests, worth knowing before you hand it something business-critical.
- Honest concession: Manus's general-purpose range is genuinely impressive, research, coding, browser work, documents, all from one agent, and its viral traction and funding, including a since-blocked $2-3B Meta acquisition, reflect real product strength. If what you want is one flexible agent for varied one-off tasks rather than a team of role-based employees, that is what Manus is built for.

## Feature Comparison

| Feature | Manus | Sistava |
|---|---|---|
|  | ✗ | ✓ |
|  | ✗ | ✓ |
|  | ✗ | ✓ |
|  | Desktop actions only, per-command | ✓ |
|  | One-off general tasks (research, code, docs) | Repeatable business roles (sales, marketing, support, ops) |
|  | Free (300 credits/day) to $200/mo | Free + $49/mo |