Manus AI vs Perplexity Comet vs AutoGLM Comparison

Manus AI vs Perplexity Comet vs AutoGLM: AI Agents for Everyday Tasks

The next wave of artificial‑intelligence tools goes beyond answering questions – they can take real actions for you. Instead of just chatting, these systems can navigate websites, use apps, fill out forms, run code, or even build an entire application. Three notable products illustrate how far these agents have come: Manus AI, Perplexity’s Comet browser and AutoGLM. Each aims to be a digital helper for everyday people, but they take different approaches. This article compares their interfaces, capabilities and strengths.

Manus AI: a general‑purpose autonomous agent

Manus AI positions itself as a “general agent” that turns thoughts into actions. It combines several large‑language models (reportedly including Anthropic’s Claude, Alibaba’s Qwen and other specialist models) with a library of tools to break down a goal into concrete steps. After you give Manus a prompt, it plans the work and executes it autonomously. You can watch what it’s doing in a virtual desktop, intervene if needed and then let it continue. The user interface is a clean chat window and a feed of running agents; you delegate tasks and track their progress.

What makes Manus impressive is the breadth of its capabilities. It includes dozens of integrated tools for browsing, scraping data, writing and executing code, creating documents, building websites and deploying them. In demos, Manus has:

• built a multi‑page website from a single sentence prompt, complete with HTML/CSS/JS, images and hosting, in minutes;
• planned a 30‑day trip to New York City with day‑by‑day itineraries, hotel options, packing checklists and cost estimates; and
• generated a full lead‑generation web application, including login, dashboard and data visualisation, and deployed it live.

Manus can also run several agents in parallel, so you could ask one agent to code an app, another to research a topic and a third to create a presentation at the same time. Once tasks are complete, Manus delivers a finished result rather than just a suggestion. All of this power comes with caveats: the service is in closed beta with long waitlists, and reports suggest it will be priced as a premium subscription. Because it operates in its own cloud environment, it doesn’t have direct access to your personal accounts unless you provide credentials, which limits some tasks such as posting to social media or sending emails on your behalf. Still, for complex multi‑step jobs, Manus is the most autonomous of the three tools compared here.

Perplexity Comet: an AI‑first web browser

Perplexity’s Comet isn’t a separate assistant so much as a smart overlay on the browser you already use. Built on Chromium, Comet integrates an AI assistant into your browsing session. You can ask questions in natural language and get cited answers from the web, just like using Perplexity’s search engine. More importantly, Comet can act on pages: it can click links, fill forms, apply filters, scroll through long documents and summarise or explain whatever you’re reading.

The UI is familiar – it looks like Chrome or Edge with an additional sidebar that houses the assistant. You might say, “Find me a cheaper price for this laptop,” and Comet will compare your current shopping tabs and show alternatives. If you’re reading a paper, you can highlight text and ask the assistant to summarise it or explain key points. You can also issue multi‑step commands such as, “Book a flight from Lisbon to Taipei on 15 August, avoiding 737 Max aircraft, preferably with KLM or EVA,” and Comet will carry out the search, apply filters and present options inside the browser. It can even interact with your webmail to find unread emails and draft responses when you ask it to “check my Gmail for important messages I missed.”

Comet uses a combination of Perplexity’s owme processing happens locally for privacy, while heavier tasks call out to cloud models. The product is designed to be hands‑on: you browse and do your work as usual, but whenever you need help the assistant is right there. The aim is to collapse many of the small steps involved in online tasks into a single instruction. Because it operates within a real browser, Comet inherits the same security and permission models as your own computer; you stay logged into sites and can see exactly what the AI is doing. The product is still in invite‑only beta and is currently available to paying Perplexity subscribers, but it hints at a future where every browser has an integrated agent.

AutoGLM: a mobile and multimodal agent

AutoGLM, developed by China’s Zhipu AI, takes the idea of an agent a step further. Rather than operating only in a browser, AutoGLM is meant to control both mobile apps and desktop software. It does this by running a “cloud phone” and a “cloud computer” – standardised virtual devices with pre‑installed apps (30 or more on the phone, plus office software and a browser on the computer). When you issue a command, AutoGLM interprets it, opens the necessary apps on the cloud device, navigates the interface using computer‑vision models, and performs the actions. You can watch the agent’s progress on your own device and step in if a login or two‑factor code is required.

AutoGLM is pitched as a personal concierge for daily life as well as work. You could tell it to “order 20 bubble teas from the nearest shop using a coupon,” and it will open the delivery app, search for the item, add it to the cart, apply the coupon and proceed to checkout. You could ask it to “book me a flight next Monday evening to Los Angeles,” and it will search a travel app or website, choose flights matching your criteria and hold the booking. In a professional context, AutoGLM can pull information from a Q&A forum, summarise it and create a report or video, then post it directly on socn models and third‑party models like GPT‑4 or Claude to interpret queries and generate responses. So