Grok Bot is a better product than OpenClaw and Hermes Agent

Grok Bot is an example of how much the product design matters.

Its marketing pitch starts with "AI teammates you can give real work to". I believe most of my none-IT friends and family will roughly understand what it means. If I would tell them "open-source autonomous agent", I would lose them in a moment.

To be completely fair, OpenClaw marketing pitch starts with "The AI that really does things", which is also a nice, approachable way to explain it. Unfortunately, it then tells you about "Your memories. Your skills. Your models. Your machines. Your data." and suggests you to "Run it for yourself". I don't know anyone outside of IT circle who would want to run things themselves, or who would care about any of these low level details. With designing and running things well and at scale being one of my main jobs, I also don't have a particular passion to run and maintain one more thing.

There is nothing Grok Bot can do that Claude Cowork/Code or ChatGPT Codex/Work can't (except one thing that we will get to in a moment).

Claude and GPT are also able to use computers way better than Grok Bot, simply because they are powered by way better models - nothing beats Astra in Computer Use. And yet, it feels so much nicer to automate certain tasks with Grok Bot than it ever did with other tools. The reason for this is not a better model, but just simply a better product.

Things that Grok Bot gets better than others

I've been thinking about why exactly Grok Bot feels different and nicer to use for some use-cases that competitors. It is a better product, but what makes Grok Bot a better product? So far, I've identified 4 things.

Bots Concept

OpenAI and Antrophic both give you APIs and SDKs to build your own agents. Whole agentic platforms are being promoted on every corner. But when it comes down to you running things on your laptop, none of those products give you a simple way to define what an Agent is.

For sure, you can build Automations/Routines and Loops, write any number of scripts to wrap an inner harness with an outer harness, or even use Agent SDK. But this always feels like a lot of effort, especially for none-techies.

In Grok Bot, you create Bots and each Bot has a job. You do it by clicking "Create a new Bot" button. Once you click it, you can tell the Bot what it's job is. It can access any tools you configure and it can handle scheduled tasks. Most importantly, it has got A Computer.

Computer

There is no need to think about permission boundaries between your agents and your hardware, because Grok Bot has it's own computer. It seems to be some Linux Desktop VM, with a browser and a couple of other tools pre-installed. All of your Bots share this computer, and by default Grok Bot can't access your personal computer - unless you allow it to.

Conveniently, Grok Bot lets you use your own computer as an egress proxy for the traffic coming from it's own computer, reducing the risk of bans based on some data center IP. It's very thoughtful to bundle poor mans residential proxy implementation so early in the product development phase!

Multiple Tools

As anything else, Grok Bot let's you configure plugins, but unlike competitors, it also let's you configure multiple instance of each plugin out of the box. All plugins support connecting more than 1 account - multiple GMail and GitHub Accounts, Slack Workspaces etc.

This is especially useful, as you might create independent accounts in each of those tools per each Grok Bot. I am just happy that such an obviously basic feature is working out of the box, while big competitors like ChatGPT limit this to only a couple of connector types.

Browser Use

While having a computer in the cloud from Day 1 is a nice capability, I have to also highlight how easy and intuitive browser use in Grok Bot is. Whenever it detects a captcha, or it needs an OTP code, it just shows you a nice input field where you can insert the data and click "continue", or you click on "Take over", fill in the captcha, and then click "I am done" - and the bot takes it back over. It doesn't just get stuck on some locked page, instead it proactively decides whether it needs your help - and wraps asking for help with neat in-chat UI widgets.

Things that Grok Bot could handle better

I am mostly confused about the weekly limits and how they map to different subscription tiers. Should I get Grok Heavy, should I get Cursor Ultra? They say that Grok Bot limits are separate from primary token limits on each subscription, but what are these limits?

I did a number of SEO research tasks, as well as some automated posting of one product to different online directories and after couple of days of light to medium use I got to 63% on a $20 subscription - I think, if I will continue using it heavily, I will end up getting one of the top tier subscriptions, but I just don't know which one. Currently, Cursor Ultra seems like the best deal, at least if I was to expand my agentic engineering setup even further.

And that's it?

I am surprised how many things Grok Bot gets right while being still in it's early days. I can see how it will grow to support multiple computers per bot, how it can orchestrate coding agents, and maybe eventually extend communication channels beyond its own native apps.

Already today Grok Bot is just a way better product than it's direct "AI can do the work for you" competitors. I still need to put more load and tasks on it, and I will report about it again, as well as share my actual use cases and setup - make sure to subscribe to our newsletter or our social media channels to get the news first.