The five personal agents in our 2026 class differ on one axis above all: what the free tier actually gets you, and whether the agent runs consumer, dev, or research workflows. Meta Muse is the consumer pick with the richest free run — up to 100M tokens a week — then Power at $20/month (500M tokens/week) and Maximum at $100/month (3B tokens/week), where paid tiers buy more of the same weekly budget rather than new features; it is US/Canada only, 18+, card required even on the free tier, and there is no published annual discount. Manus is the autonomous goal-driven pick: free gets 300 daily-refresh credits plus a 1,000-credit one-time starter pool, then Starter $20/month (4,000 credits), Pro $40 (8,000) and Pro Max $200 (40,000), with annual saving about 15% — and credits are the single billing unit, so they do not roll over and complex or re-run tasks cost more. Perplexity Computer turns research into action with multi-model orchestration and has no free tier: Pro is $20/month with 4,000 bonus credits but no recurring Computer allocation, while real recurring agent work starts at Max $200/month (10,000 monthly plus 35,000 bonus credits), metered at 100 credits per $1 with a default $200 spend cap adjustable to $5,000. Claude Code is the terminal-first developer pick, reachable three ways: bundled into Pro ($20/month, $17 billed annually at $200 up front) or Max (from $100/month), as a Team seat ($25/month, $20 annual), or API-only at per-token rates (Sonnet 5.5 at $2 input / $10 output per million tokens; Opus 5.5 at $4 / $20) — cheaper than any flat seat once usage is high. Codex bundles OpenAI's broadest cloud-coding surface into ChatGPT with no separate bill: free is only a time-boxed promo trial, and the tool ships inside Plus $20 / Pro 5x $100 / Pro 20x $200, with Go at $8 excluded and Business at $20/user/month annual ($25 monthly). Pricing verified against official pages (2026-09-08 through 2026-10-02).
Broadest consumer personal-agent surface with the richest free tier in the class — 100M Muse tokens a week on Free, Power $20 and Maximum $100 to scale. You are not paying for capability you cannot use; the free run is a real agent, not a chatbot.
Free tier: Yes
Paid from: $20/mo (Power) (Paid tiers are US/Canada only, 18+, and a payment card is required even on the free tier; checkout for agent purchases runs through Link by Stripe with one-time card numbers and purchase protections)
Meta Muse is the consumer personal agent: it plans and executes real work (email, travel, forms, purchases) on Meta's own Muse Spark model, free up to 100M tokens a week, Power $20 and Maximum $100 for more weekly budget.
Free 300 credits a day plus 1,000 one-time credits, then Starter $20 to Pro Max $200 — the pick when you want the agent to pursue a multi-step goal (research, build a site, make a deck) and hands you the result.
Free tier: Yes · 7 days
Paid from: $20/mo (Starter) (Credits are the single billing unit and do not roll over; complex or re-run tasks consume more, so the real bill depends on task difficulty rather than a fixed per-task price)
Manus is a hosted autonomous agent that plans and runs multi-step work (research, slides, spreadsheets, web apps) in its own sandboxed virtual computer, free with 300 daily-refresh credits and paid plans from $20 a month.
Pro $20 (one-time 4,000 bonus credits) to Max $200 (10,000 monthly credits), 19-model orchestration and a real browser — the cleanest path from a question to a multi-step executed answer.
Free tier: No — trial only
Paid from: $200/mo (Max, for recurring Computer credits) (Credits meter agent work at 100 credits per $1, and unused monthly credits do not roll over; Max carries a default $200 monthly spend cap (adjustable up to $5,000))
Perplexity Computer is an always-on digital worker that executes multi-step workflows (research, coding, documents, app actions) across 19 frontier models in an isolated cloud sandbox, billed through Perplexity Max at $200 a month.
Pro $17/mo annual undercuts the class at the same capability tier, and the API-only path at $2/$10 per MTok means heavy use never hits a per-seat ceiling.
Free tier: Yes
Paid from: $17/mo annual (Pro) (Claude Code is reachable three ways: bundled into a Pro or Max subscription, as a team seat, or API-only at per-token rates (Sonnet 5.5: $2 input / $10 output per million tokens; Opus 5.5: $4 / $20), which is cheaper than any flat seat once usage is high.)
Claude Code is the model-native terminal agent: it runs inside Claude Pro at $20 a month, Claude Max from $100, or straight off the API at per-token rates with no seat fee.
Bundled into ChatGPT with no separate subscription — $20 Plus floor, Pro 5x $100 / 20x $200 — the broadest cloud-coding surface (code review, Slack, larger VMs) and the cleanest enterprise path.
Free tier: Yes
Paid from: —
OpenAI's always-on coding agent, bundled into ChatGPT with no separate subscription — CLI, IDE, cloud tasks and automatic code review across GPT-5.x model tiers.
Bottom line: Picks by use-case: Muse for the broadest personal runs and the best free tier, Manus for autonomous multi-step goals, Perplexity Computer for research-to-action, Claude Code for terminal-first developers, and Codex for teams and cloud coding. All prices re-verified 2026-09-30.
Meta Muse — 100M Muse tokens a week on the free plan, the richest standing free agent tier in this class.
Most do, except Codex, which is bundled into the ChatGPT plan you already pay for. Manus, Muse and Perplexity Computer all sell their own plans.
Claude Code for a terminal-first workflow with a real API-only token path; Codex for the broadest cloud-coding surface with automatic code review and Slack integration.