Kortix vs Manus: the open-source agent you can own

Manus is hosted. Kortix is one you can own.

Manus is a hosted general agent: you sign in, state a goal, and it plans and executes the steps in Manus's cloud (Manus documentation). Kortix is the open-source AI Operating System. Your agents, their skills, your company memory and every connector live in one git repo you own, and each session runs on its own cloud computer.

What a team keeps with Kortix

Four parts of the system stay on your side.

• Your configuration is a file. Agents and skills are Markdown, memory is files, and connectors and triggers are declared in kortix.yaml, so the whole system is text a person reads, diffs and rolls back.
• The model is a choice. Any model provider with your own keys. Or the ChatGPT plan you already pay for. Or sign in with your OpenCode Console account for OpenCode Zen and Go.
• There is a review gate. Session work reaches main through a change request. Merge is default-deny for agents, so a person reads the diff before it lands.
• The infrastructure is yours. Run it on Kortix Cloud, in your VPC, or on your own on-prem network. Self-host is free.

curl -fsSL https://kortix.com/install | bashkortix initkortix ship

What Manus is built for

Manus is built for long, unsupervised web work. A browser operator drives the tabs you are already logged into, and Wide Research splits one request across many sub-agents. For one person who wants a finished report, a deck or a website without running a server, that is a reasonable trade. The limits show up when the work belongs to a team: prompts and tasks stay in Manus's product, and nothing proposes a change for a second person to approve before it counts.

The other open-source agents

Two more open-source agents sit in the comparison table on this page. OpenClaw runs a personal assistant on your own machine and meets you in the chat apps you already use (OpenClaw). Hermes is a self-hosted agent with persistent memory and a built-in scheduler (Hermes Agent). Both are free and self-hosted. Kortix is the one built for a company: one repo for the agents, skills, memory and connectors, a sandbox per session, and a review gate before work lands.

A visual workflow builder such as n8n fits a different job: steps a team designs on a canvas. The Kortix blog draws that line. To go deeper on choosing a platform your team can own, Kortix has a companion guide. You can also read the code yourself on Kortix on GitHub.