Grok

One thing to consider: do you need the X feed in the answer?

Who it is for. For people who live by the news and want to know what is being discussed right now: while answering, Grok searches the web and recent X posts and puts a source post card in the answer. None of the major chat assistants reads the X feed the same way.

Who else. For anyone who wants images and video in the same window as the chat: Imagine draws and edits right inside the reply, and in the API a second of video starts at $0.08 (docs.x.ai pricing, Sep 26, 2026).

Who it is not for. For anyone who needs predictability: the vendor does not publish limits, and since June 2026 the paid plans live on a shared weekly allowance.

Choosing between it and ChatGPT: see section 7.

What vibecoding isStarting from scratch: how to set tasks for agents with no coding experience

Four things in one window: chat with X search, images and video, voice, and a phone camera.

Chat with search. An ordinary question it closes like any chatbot, and for a question about today it turns on search across the web and X and answers with a link to the post. Expert mode on the paid plans makes the model reason longer, and Heavy assembles a team of such experts for a task. Without search turned on, the model knows only what was in its training, and the vendor's docs say so plainly.

Images and video. The Imagine tab draws from a description, edits an uploaded photo and makes short clips. The Imagine Image 2.0 image model shipped Aug 7, 2026 and in the Artificial Analysis text-to-image arena it trails only OpenAI's GPT Image models (Sep 26, 2026); video is handled by Imagine Video 1.5 with native 1080p. Spicy mode generates nude content, and the App Store app is rated 17+.

Voice and camera. You can talk to it aloud: speech recognition supports 25 languages, and a voice can be cloned from a short clip. A phone camera becomes a question: in official screenshots, it reads a road sign and explains why the road is closed, identifies a hummingbird from a photo, and analyzes a derivative graph from a textbook scan.

What else the vendor offers. The coding agent Grok Build builds apps right in the chat, and it has its own card. Grok Bot, an agent with its own computer, shipped Aug 11, 2026 and has been part of SuperGrok since August 26. The 3D companions Ani, Mika, Valentine and Rudi were removed from the app on Sep 1, 2026; the vendor published no official announcement, and the App Store description still advertises them. We have not run Grok on a task ourselves: the capabilities come from the vendor's docs and official footage.

Step 1. Click Sign Up and register by email with a code, through Google, or through Apple. An X account is not required. Sources from early 2026 still said you could not get in without X, but by July practitioners had confirmed email sign-in.

Step 2. Ask your first question. Ask about today with search enabled, otherwise the model will answer from its training memory. Images and videos live in the Imagine tab next to the chat.

Apps. The vendor has no desktop apps for macOS or Windows.

Impostors. There are only four official addresses: grok.com, x.ai, docs.x.ai and x.com. Sites with "official" in the title and Telegram bots resell someone else's key, and there is no official Grok bot on Telegram: the May 2025 deal fell through. Do not enter Google, Apple, or X passwords there; APK files from third-party sites are not official.

Steps verified Sep 26, 2026 against the app listings in the App Store and Google Play, the vendor's docs and practitioners' guides

Two signals: the models sit in the first thirty of an independent index, and the audience is mass-scale.

Artificial Analysis index. Grok 4.6, which powers the chat, scores 44 points and stands 28th out of 211 models. The new Grok 4.7 gives 46 points and 21st place, but the index notes that it is noticeably slower and more verbose than its peers (AA, Sep 26, 2026). Ranked in the twenties, not first place.

Storefronts. 4.87 in the App Store on 1.45 million ratings, 4.9 in Google Play on 3.9 million reviews and more than 100 million installs (machine capture Sep 26, 2026). There are no other public numbers on scale: Similarweb estimates grok.com at 326 million visits in March 2026 and 245 million in May, and aggregators count about 117 million monthly active users.

Grok's place among the assistants in our catalog is shown under the card title, and the full tool ranking is on the shared page.

You do not have to pay for chat, but the vendor does not say exactly how much you get for free.

Free entry. The grok.com markup states a price of 0 dollars (Sep 26, 2026), and the free tier's limits are not published. Guides cite about ten requests per two hours, but that is their observation, not a vendor rule.

Paid tiers. SuperGrok costs $30 a month and SuperGrok Plus $100; these two prices the vendor shows on its own pricing page (Sep 26, 2026). Lite at about $10 and Heavy at about $300 come from guides, the vendor's page carries no prices for them. Since June 2026 the paid plans draw on a shared weekly allowance: chat, Imagine, voice and Grok Build take from one pocket.

For developers. The API charges $2 per million input tokens and $6 on output for grok-4.7, the same as grok-4.6, with a cache hit at $0.50; past 200 thousand tokens of context the request price doubles. The smaller grok-4.3 costs $1.25 and $2.50 with a million-token context. An Imagine image starts at $0.04, a second of video from $0.08 at 480p to $0.25 at 1080p. You can top up from $5.

Three questions: where your data is stored, what to expect from the tone, and how much to trust the answers.

Data in the US. SpaceXAI operates from California, its privacy policy is not served to automated clients, and since Apr 11, 2025 the Irish regulator has been examining whether it was lawful to train the model on posts by users in the EU. The rule of thumb is simple: do not upload contracts, personal data, or trade secrets to the chat, as with any foreign service.

Tone and boundaries. The vendor itself calls “edginess” and the absence of censorship a product stance, and the Spicy mode in Imagine is part of it. For some that is a plus, for others a risk, and the risk has a history: in July 2025 the bot on X produced offensive replies, the company apologized and rewrote the system prompt, and since December 2025 a scandal over sexualized generated images of real people has dragged on. Indonesia and Malaysia temporarily banned the service in January 2026, and investigations in the EU and the UK are under way.

Answers need fact-checking. Without search enabled, the model does not know about events after training, as the vendor docs state directly, while an "answer from the live feed" inherits errors from the posts themselves. Verify figures and names against the source in the post card.

What is open. The vendor has published the assistant's system instructions in an open repository since May 2025, after a prompt-injection incident: a rare move for the industry that shows how the bot is instructed to behave. Only the weights for the old Grok-1 and Grok-2 are open; the current lineup is closed.

The choice is not "who is smarter," but "do you need the X feed inside the answer?"

Different workflows. ChatGPT wins through its ecosystem of add-ons and audience: 53.9% of assistant web traffic (Momentic, 05.2026). Grok wins on freshness: searching X while answering and video in the same window. The difference is not intelligence, but where each one looks.

Same barrier. For free, ChatGPT gives text chats with no limit, while Grok does not state its own limits. A ChatGPT Plus subscription costs $20 a month against $30 for SuperGrok.

Who else is nearby. If the main question is “free”, the answer is neither Grok nor ChatGPT but DeepSeek: the chat is free and works without registration.

In three years, a bot inside a single social network became a standalone app with images and video, while the company that created it changed owners and name.