Best Grok Bots (2026): What Actually Exists, Official and Third-Party

Updated November 2026 · 10 min read · By the CreatorSprout team

Based on published sources read on 3 November 2026 — official xAI documentation and GitHub repos where available, named secondary guides elsewhere. This is not hands-on testing: we did not run these bots. Several Grok Bot access and pricing claims conflict across sources; where they do, this article flags the conflict instead of picking a winner. No affiliate links in this article.

One name, at least three different things

Start here, because most of the confusion — and most of the wrong pricing claims — around "Grok bots" comes from a name collision. The free conversational @grok you can tag on X is not Grok Bot. Neither is the Grok API. At least three different things share one brand:

• Grok Bot — xAI's always-on agent product, launched in beta on 11 August 2026. Persistent agents in their own apps, sold by subscription, with no public API.
• @grok — the reply bot inside X. Tag it in a thread and it answers publicly, in context.
• Third-party bots on the Grok API — Discord bots, Telegram bots and terminal agents built by independent developers using xAI's paid API. These are not xAI products, however official their names sound.

Everything below is separated into those buckets — official xAI offerings first, third-party projects clearly labelled after — because what each one costs, and who is responsible for it, is completely different.

Comparison table

Access column deliberately says "unsettled" where sources disagree. Any roundup that gives you one clean price for Grok Bot itself is presenting contested reporting as fact.

Grok Bot: xAI's always-on agents (official)

Grok Bot launched in beta on 11 August 2026 as a set of persistent, always-on AI agents that xAI markets as "AI teammates." Each agent works on a cloud computer, signs into tools and websites on your behalf, retains memory across sessions, and runs 24/7 without supervision. It lives in its own apps — at launch, desktop and iOS, with Android described as planned in the launch coverage.

One detail even the product descriptions disagree on: one source says each Bot gets its own dedicated cloud computer, while another, summarising the product FAQ, says the computer is assigned per user, not per Bot. We could not resolve that from an official page, so treat the exact setup as unconfirmed.

Access is the part to read carefully. Grok Bot has no public API, no free tier and no startup credit program — it is subscription-only. Beyond that, sources conflict: one guide summarising xAI's own page lists Grok Bot across several SuperGrok and Cursor plan tiers, while other coverage narrows it to top tiers only, and later reporting ties it to a newer X subscription bundle. Because those accounts disagree, we do not publish a price for Grok Bot. If you are considering it, check the plan and billing page inside your own account — that is the only figure that applies to you.

One November 2026 development is still worth knowing before you build a workflow on it: Musk posted on X that the cost of serving Grok Bot was "unsustainably high relative to revenue," after users reported hitting weekly usage caps early. No figures or new limits were given in that reporting — but a vendor publicly questioning the economics of its own always-on agent product is a reason to keep any critical workflow portable.

@grok on X: the mention-reply bot (official)

This is the Grok most people have actually used. Tag "@grok" in a reply with your question, and it responds in the thread, using the tagged post and the thread above it for context. One source dates this reply behaviour to March 2025.

Access conflicts here too, and we present both accounts. One guide says free accounts get limited @grok usage that resets weekly, and that paid X subscription plans share one usage pool. Another guide says that as of early 2026, in-thread @grok use was restricted to Premium and Premium+ subscribers — a change it says X did not formally announce. Neither account is stated as settled in this article; what your own account can do today is the practical test.

Grok tab and "Explain this post" (official)

Separate from @grok replies, Grok also sits inside X as a chatbot surface: open it from the Grok icon in the navigation bar for private chats, or tap "Explain this post" on a post you are reading. Per X's help centre as summarised in the coverage we read, the Grok tab is available on iOS, Android and web, and chats in the tab are private.

One privacy caveat from the same source: once @Grok is added to an X Chat, X and xAI can read messages sent after Grok joins, until it is removed. Worth knowing before you add it to a group conversation.

@bot tagging: hand a post to your Grok Bot

Tagging @bot in a reply to a post on X hands that post to your own Grok Bot as a task, according to xAI's official documentation as summarised by secondary sources. The @bot account itself only posts a short confirmation in the thread; the actual work and its results appear inside your Grok Bot app, not in public replies. You need the X plugin installed and connected in your Grok Bot account before tagging works, and one source dates Grok Bot's X connector to 29 August 2026.

Flag: this entry rests on thinner, secondary sourcing — summaries of xAI docs rather than an xAI page we read directly. The same coverage says @bot tagging is not available in the EU, UK, Australia, Iceland, Liechtenstein or Norway. If you are in one of those regions, that would explain @bot doing nothing.

Grok Automations: scheduled Grok (official)

Grok Automations — renamed from Tasks on 16 July 2026 — is the most bot-like official feature for creators: it adds schedule and email triggers on grok.com and in the Grok apps, with no API involved. Schedule triggers can run once, daily, on weekdays, weekly, monthly or yearly; email triggers fire when a matching Gmail or Outlook message arrives, filtered on sender, recipient or subject. The old grok.com/tasks address redirects to grok.com/automations.

Access, as reported from xAI's announcement: scheduled automations are available to everyone, and email triggers are included with SuperGrok. For a recurring research or monitoring job — a daily watch on a topic, a digest when a specific sender emails you — this is the official route that needs no code and no third-party bot.

Grok Build: the official coding agent (official)

Grok Build is xAI's terminal-based AI coding agent. It runs as a full-screen terminal interface that understands your codebase, edits files, executes shell commands, searches the web and manages long-running tasks — interactively, headlessly for scripting and CI, or embedded in editors via the Agent Client Protocol (ACP). Its public repo (xai-org/grok-build) is open source under Apache-2.0 with 27,668 GitHub stars as read on 3 November 2026, and it installs via the x.ai CLI (curl -fsSL https://x.ai/cli/install.sh | bash). The repo notes that external contributions are not accepted and the code is synced periodically from an internal monorepo.

What we will not tell you: which paid plan Grok Build requires. Secondary sources conflict on that, and no official page verified it in our research — so if a roundup names a required plan as settled fact, treat it the same way as the Grok Bot prices above.

Grok API: what third-party bots are built on (official)

The Grok API is the developer platform underneath every third-party bot in this article. Per a secondary guide, it lives at api.x.ai/v1 and follows the OpenAI SDK format. Its pricing is also the only Grok pricing in this article verified from an official page — xAI's own developer documentation (titled SpaceXSI Docs, page last updated 21 September 2026):

• grok-4.7 (flagship): $2.00 per 1M input tokens, $6.00 per 1M output tokens, 500k-token context window
• Voice API: speech-to-speech $0.08 per minute; text-to-speech $15.00 per 1M characters; speech-to-text $0.10 per hour (batch) / $0.20 per hour (streaming)
• Imagine API: images from $0.02 per image; video from $0.02 per second

The bot-building pattern is ordinary: a Discord or Telegram "Grok bot" is a normal platform bot whose message handler forwards chats to this API. You register with the Discord Developer Portal or Telegram's BotFather, get an xAI API key from the xAI console, and build your own memory and rate limits. API billing is separate from any Grok Bot subscription — the two products do not share a wallet.

Third-party Grok bots (not xAI products)

Everything in this section is built by independent developers on the Grok API above. That distinction matters: xAI has not published a first-party Discord or Telegram integration for Grok Bot or the Grok API — there is no official xAI Discord bot and no official xAI Telegram bot. Two of the three projects below say so themselves, in explicit not-affiliated disclaimers.

discord-grok: self-hosted Discord bot (third-party)

jdmsharpe/discord-grok is a Discord bot built on Pycord 2.0 that integrates xAI's Grok APIs: stateful multi-turn conversations, image generation, video generation and text-to-speech, all through Discord slash commands (/grok chat, /grok-media image, /grok-media video, /grok-tools tts), defaulting to grok-4.7.

The code is free under MIT — but "free code" is the whole story: you must supply a Discord bot token and an xAI API key, host it yourself (Python 3.11+, or Docker), and pay xAI's API rates for whatever your server generates. Popularity is unproven: the GitHub snapshot we read showed 0 stars and 0 forks despite 174 commits and 28 releases. It is a workable self-host project, not a proven community favourite.

Grok AI Telegram Bot: @grok_ai_telegram_bot (third-party)

This independent project (repo: artastakenaka/grok-ai-telegram-bot) describes itself as a free AI bot for Telegram that answers questions in your chat, generates AI images and videos through Grok, offers free daily requests and needs no sign-up. Its README lists free allowances — for example, Express at 10 requests daily and Images at 3 generations weekly. Its own disclaimer is explicit: "This is an independent open-source Telegram client that integrates with the Grok API. It is not affiliated with xAI, Elon Musk, Telegram, or Pavel Durov."

Verification level: the repo exists (6 GitHub stars, 78 commits, created 30 January 2026; no licence was shown in the details we read). The bot's live behaviour, free allowances and model claims are the project's own claims — they were not independently tested in Telegram for this article. Treat the allowances as what the maker says, not as verified fact.

superagent-ai/grok-cli: community coding agent (third-party)

superagent-ai/grok-cli is an open-source terminal coding agent that connects to xAI's Grok API — real-time X search, web search, the full Grok model lineup, sub-agents on by default, and remote control via Telegram: pair once, then drive the agent from your phone while the CLI keeps running on your machine. Its README carries the disclaimer: "This project is community-built, open-source, and not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by xAI Corp."

The code is MIT-licensed with 3,504 GitHub stars as read on 3 November 2026, and it needs a Grok API key; the Telegram control additionally needs your own BotFather bot token and the CLI kept running.

Name trap: this community project's grok command is not the official Grok Build above — which installs a command of the same name. If you install both, check which one your terminal is actually running before you trust its output.

Grok Companions: discontinued or disputed — not a current pick

Grok Companions (Ani, Mika, Valentine, and Rudi / Bad Rudi) were 3D animated companion characters inside the Grok app, launched from July 2025. We include them only to close the question, not as a recommendation:

• Two sources report that on 24 July 2026 an official Grok statement called the 3D avatar Companions "an experiment" and said they would be retired; removal reportedly rolled out account by account, with 1 September 2026 as the in-app date, and the characters reportedly still exist as text personalities inside normal Grok chat.
• A conflicting source says the characters were instead "moving to Animates" after 7 September 2026 rather than simply ending, and a download page last updated 30 October 2026 still describes the companions in the present tense.

Verdict: treat Companions as a discontinued experiment with a disputed afterlife. Any guide still listing Ani or Mika as a current "best Grok bot" is working from pre-retirement material.

What we could not verify

• Grok Bot's exact price and included plans. Sources conflict on which plans include it and at what price, and no xAI consumer pricing page was read directly in our research — so no figure is published here as fact.
• Dedicated vs shared computer for Grok Bot. One source says each Bot gets its own cloud computer; another says the computer is assigned per user. Unresolved.
• Whether @grok is free or Premium-only. The two accounts in the @grok section above directly contradict each other.
• Grok Companions' current status. Retired in July 2026, "moved" in September, or still listed in October — the sources do not agree.
• An "official" Telegram bot at t.me/GrokAI. One secondary guide listed it, but no official xAI page confirming it was found. Do not treat it as official.
• Grok Bot user numbers. A widely repeated paid-user figure was flagged as unverified by the very source reporting it, so we do not repeat it as fact.
• Grok Build's required plan. Secondary sources conflict; not verified from an official page.

FAQ

What is the difference between Grok Bot and @grok?

They are different products that share a brand. Grok Bot is xAI's always-on agent product, launched in beta on 11 August 2026, which runs persistent agents in its own apps. @grok is the mention-reply bot on X: tag it in a reply and it answers in the thread. A third thing, the Grok API, is what independent developers build their own bots on. None of the three is interchangeable with the others.

How much does Grok Bot cost?

There is no settled answer we can publish. Grok Bot has no public API and no free tier, and sources conflict on which subscription plans include it and at what price, so we do not state a single price as fact. Check the plan and billing page of your own X or SuperGrok account before relying on any figure you see elsewhere.

Is @grok free to use on X?

Sources conflict, and we report both rather than picking one. One guide says free accounts get limited @grok usage that resets weekly; another says that as of early 2026, in-thread @grok use was restricted to Premium subscribers — a change it says X did not formally announce. Treat access as unsettled and check what your own account can do.

Is there an official Grok bot for Discord or Telegram?

No. xAI has not published a first-party Discord or Telegram bot for Grok Bot or the Grok API. The Discord and Telegram bots in this article are independent third-party projects built on the Grok API, and two of them carry explicit not-affiliated-with-xAI disclaimers. Check who makes a bot before giving it access to your chats or your API key.

What does the Grok API cost?

Per xAI's official developer documentation (SpaceXSI Docs, page last updated 21 September 2026): the flagship grok-4.7 model costs $2.00 per 1M input tokens and $6.00 per 1M output tokens, with a 500k-token context window. Voice speech-to-speech is $0.08 per minute, and Imagine API images start from $0.02 per image. API billing is separate from any Grok Bot or SuperGrok subscription.

Are Grok Companions like Ani and Mika still available?

Do not count on it. Two sources report that an official Grok statement on 24 July 2026 called the 3D avatar Companions an experiment and said they would be retired, while another source says the characters were moving to a different app instead — the reports conflict. We list Companions as a discontinued or disputed experiment, not as a current product you can choose.

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