OpenManus is an open-source framework for building general AI agents, created by contributors from the MetaGPT community as an open alternative to Manus. You run the agent from a terminal, type an idea, and it plans and executes the work using tools such as browser automation, code execution, and web crawling.
Three entry points are provided: main.py for the general agent, runmcp.py for the MCP tool version, and runflow.py for a multi-agent flow that is marked unstable. The flow can include a DataAnalysis agent for analysis and visualisation tasks. LLM access is configured in a config.toml file with a global model and an optional separate vision model, and works with any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Python 3.12 is required.
Browser automation runs Browser Use CLI 3.0 as a default MCP server through uvx, which keeps Browser Use and its dependencies isolated from the OpenManus environment. Local mode attaches to Chrome or Chromium without an API key; a Browser Use Cloud key enables an isolated remote browser, and existing browsers can be selected via BUCDPURL, BUCDPWS, or BU_NAME. BrowserGym tasks still need a Playwright browser.
Features
- General agent: a single agent that plans and executes tasks from a natural-language prompt
- Browser tools: the Browser Use skill plus native browserexec and browserscreenshot tools
- MCP mode: run the agent with tools served over the Model Context Protocol
- Multi-agent flow: an experimental orchestration of several agents, including a DataAnalysis agent
- Model configuration: global and vision-specific LLM settings in config.toml
- OpenManus-RL: a companion project on reinforcement-learning-based tuning (such as GRPO) for LLM agents, developed with researchers from UIUC
Integrates with
Browser Use
Python library that lets an LLM agent operate a web browser — opening pages, clicking, typing, and filling forms from a task description
Crawl4AI
Reliable, large-scale web extraction, now built to be drastically more cost-effective. than any of the existing solutions.
Playwright
Drives Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit through one API for e2e tests, scripts, and AI-agent automation via MCP or CLI
