Read It Before You See It: Crunchyroll Manga Review and Recommendations

Manga is the perfect compliment to anime

Tired of waiting weekly for new releases of your new favorite anime? Chances are, it was based on a manga, and there’s already a whole story that you can read right now. That’s where Crunchyroll‘s manga add-on comes in.

For a few extra dollars a month, Crunchyroll will give you access to digital versions of the manga that inspired some of its most popular anime.

Wondering if it’s worth the cost? Trying to figure out what to read first? Keep reading for my comprehensive Crunchyroll Manga guide.

Jump to:

• Crunchyroll Manga plans
• Crunchyroll Manga features
• Crunchyroll Manga drawbacks
• What to read on Crunchyroll

Crunchyroll Manga plans

Crunchyroll offers three base plans, but only the most expensive (Ultimate Fan) tier allows access to both anime and manga right out of the box. For the lower two tiers, you’ll have to purchase the Crunchyroll Manga add-on.

For more about each tier, check out our Crunchyroll review.

Crunchyroll Manga features

Crunchyroll Manga comes with a lot of cool perks. Here are some that I noticed in my testing:

Offline downloads

With Crunchyroll Manga, you can save titles for offline download, just like you’d be able to do with a regular streaming service.

Unfortunately, “offline download” doesn’t mean DRM-free. So you can’t download any EPUBs or PDFs like you might be able to from an online storefront. Instead, you have to read your manga within Crunchyroll’s app. So if you’re looking to buy an e-reader for manga, make sure you get one that runs Android and allows you to download apps from the Google Play store.

Anime integration

By far the coolest Crunchyroll Manga feature is its integration with the regular Crunchyroll app. If you have both apps installed on your device, you’ll want to try out this feature.

When on a manga’s information page, you might see a “play” icon (a rounded rectangle with a triangle in the center) in the top right. Click that, and you’ll be whisked away to the Crunchyroll app so you can start watching the anime that goes with the manga. On the web, this button looks like an orange triangle above the manga’s description.

This is an especially useful feature for when you suddenly run out of manga volumes. While Crunchyroll Manga carries a wide variety of titles, I’ve found that it doesn’t carry every volume of each one. For example, Crunchyroll only carries chapters from the first two volumes of “Villainess Level 99.” (As of writing, there are six volumes in print, although only four have an English release.)

If I wanted the whole story, I’d have to click on the watch button and go to the main Crunchyroll app, since the anime covers twice as much plot.

Vertical scrolling

Are you used to reading Webtoons on your phone rather than physical comics? Crunchyroll Manga can accommodate that. While you can read comics in a traditional two-page spread, scrolling right to left to follow the Japanese manga flow, you can also toggle on vertical scrolling.

That means that you don’t have to remember whether a book scrolls left-to-right or right-to-left. You’ll still have to read each page right-to-left, but you can scroll down through the comic like a Webtoon or webpage. You can also easily zoom in on any page to get a better view of the text.

Crunchyroll Manga drawbacks

As you might be able to tell from my comments in the last section, Crunchyroll Manga isn’t a perfect app. The company did away with its manga catalog a few years ago, and only brought it back at the end of 2025. So even though Crunchyroll’s been at this for a while, this version of the app is still very new, and it shows.

Most of my problems occurred when using the app on an iPad. The edges of pages were cut off, so I’d have to pinch and zoom every page to make sure I wasn’t missing any content. And whenever I closed out of a book, it’d lose my place, and skip several pages ahead when I reopened it.

I didn’t have any technical problems on my Android phone, so your own experience may vary depending on your device. But there is one major problem persistent with the entire service, and it’s not a UI problem or a bug: It’s the fact that many titles are out of date. I first tested Crunchyroll Manga by reading two titles: “The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn’t A Guy At All” and “Villainess Level 99.”

Crunchyroll carries only the first two volumes of “The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn’t A Guy At All,” even though there are currently four English volumes in print. It also carries only the first two volumes of “Villainess Level 99,” even though there are also four English volumes in print, with a fifth one coming later this year. This app is more suited for readers looking to start a new series than actually finish one.

This discrepancy isn’t always clear, since titles display the date that their chapters were uploaded to the platform, not the date that they were published overall. So if you run out of chapters in a series, it’s worth Googling to see if there are more volumes available elsewhere. (I recommend your local library.)

What to read on Crunchyroll Manga

So you’ve weighed the pros and cons, and decided to get a Crunchyroll Manga subscription. You’re faced with a ton of appealing covers, but have no idea where to start. Am I right?

For a full list of every title on Crunchyroll Manga, you can check out the Crunchyroll Manga info page. But if you want to whittle the list down a bit, I’m here with recommendations for all of the best tiles that Crunchyroll Manga has to offer — including ones that have anime adaptations over on Crunchyroll’s main app.

Manga with anime adaptations

“The Apothecary Diaries”

“The Apothecary Diaries” is one of the hottest anime right now. It follows Maomao, a physician’s daughter who gets kidnapped and forced into service in the palace. But she soon uses her unique skills and enthusiasm for poisons to become a high-ranking concubine’s personal food taster, solving medical mysteries along the way.

“Welcome to Demon School, Iruma-kun”

“Welcome to Demon School, Iruma-kun” is a lighthearted show, perfect for teens just getting into anime. It follows Iruma, an unlucky boy whose parents sell him to a demon. Luckily, the demon just wants to dote on his new grandson, and sends him to a prestigious demon school. Iruma’s life is great… As long as he can keep his humanity a secret from his bloodthirsty classmates.

“Hana-Kimi”

“Hana-Kimi” is a classic romance manga that only recently received an anime adaptation. (They all get one eventually!) Mizuki lives in America, and idolizes a Japanese student athlete she sees on TV. She travels across the world to go to school with him, but he attends an all-boys school — so she has to pretend to be a boy to get close to him. No one can know she’s a girl, even when some of her classmates start developing some confusing feelings about her.

More Crunchyroll Manga with anime adaptations

• “Black Clover”
• “Bleach”
• “Dr. STONE”
• “Jujutsu Kaisen”
• “Kaiju No. 8”
• “May I Ask for One Final Thing?”
• “My Dress-Up Darling”
• “My Hero Academia”
• “Naruto”
• “One Piece”
• “Princess Jellyfish”
• “Secrets of the Silent Witch”
• “Spy x Family”
• “The Summer Hikaru Died”
• “Villainess Level 99”

Manga without anime adaptations (yet)

“Stuck in a Time Loop: When All Else Fails, Be a Villainess”

Selene Vixent is stuck in a time loop. Her father and fiancé began plotting against her when they learned that she inherited a mysterious shadow power, but every time they kill her, she travels back in time to the first moment of their betrayal. This time around, she’s determined to survive and break the time loop. Even if it means everyone fears her.

“The Princess of Convenient Plot Devices”

An unlucky fujoshi gets reincarnated as Princess Octavia, a minor character in her favorite BL series. Thanks to a mysterious man’s interference, the worldbuilding is different than she remembers, and she finds herself painted as a scheming villainess. But Octavia is more concerned with finding a fake boyfriend to impress her brother than any of the political conspiracies boiling around her. And what’s the deal with her handsome, mysterious bodyguard?

“The Color of the End: Mission in the Apocalypse”

This quiet and melancholic story follows Saya, an uncanny human travelling a post-apocalyptic wasteland with her animal companion. Saya is immune to the body-altering disease that wiped out humanity, so it’s her job to clean the planet up, one cremation at a time. Along the way, she learns more about the people who lived on Earth and how they coped with their own ends.

More Crunchyroll Manga without anime adaptations

• “A Sinner of the Deep Sea”
• “Call the Name of the Night”
• “Cinderella Got Married, So the Evil Stepsister Can Chill Out… Right?”
• “Dusk Maiden of Amnesia”
• “Magical Girl Incident”
• “She Loves to Cook, and She Loves to Eat”
• “The Princess of Blue Roses”
• “Witch of Thistle Castle”

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