These three agents answer different trust and cost questions. Devin is the most mature and reliable when your task fits the box: a scoped bug fix or small feature from a ticket. It runs in a cloud sandbox so no local risk, and the Slack integration makes handing off work frictionless. The tradeoff is cost per task and lack of control. OpenHands is the answer for teams who want the same general shape as Devin but cannot accept vendor lock-in or per-task costs. Self-hosting is real work, but you own the whole stack: the model, the prompt, the infrastructure, the audit log. Manus is the wildcard: it aims for general-purpose autonomy across research, coding, design, and deployment in a single run. It succeeds sometimes, which makes it useful as a benchmark, and fails sometimes, which keeps it from being a default.
Pick Devin if you want to set it and forget it on a backlog of well-scoped work, your team is willing to pay per task, and you value the reliability curve. Pick OpenHands if self-hosting is acceptable or even desirable for your org, and you want to keep the agent loop under your control. Pick Manus if the question is not 'solve this for me' but 'how good can a general-purpose autonomous agent get.' The Manus demos are impressive enough that running it once on a complex task (write a market analysis, build and deploy a site, generate a slide deck from a brief) answers whether it replaces weeks of work for your specific motion.
In practice, many teams run more than one. Devin for the production backlog of narrow tasks where you want fire-and-forget, OpenHands in CI for nightly triage runs where you control the whole sandbox, Manus as a design exploration tool where you want to see what end-to-end autonomy can do. None of them compete directly with interactive agents like Cursor or Claude Code; that is a different question. These three compete on whether you hand the agent a ticket and come back in four hours, or you pair-program interactively. If hands-off is your goal, all three are worth a trial. Devin is the safest default.