OpenBot vs Grok Bot: Which Always-On Agent App Fits You?

Should you use Grok Bot or OpenBot for persistent AI agents?

Use Grok Bot if you want a fully managed setup where each agent lives on a cloud computer and keeps working with nothing running on your end. Use OpenBot if you already pay for Codex, Claude, Gemini or Grok plans and want agents, files and chats on your own hardware. OpenBot is free, but it is a development preview with full agent access, and its license restricts commercial use.

What is Grok Bot?

Grok Bot comes from SpaceX AI, the company behind Grok. It started as an internal tool its teams used for sales, marketing, operations and engineering work, then became a product.

It is not a chat window. You create a bot, give it a name and a job, and it lives on a cloud computer with its own browser, file system and terminal. You message it like a coworker. It signs in to the tools you use, runs multi-step work, keeps going after you close your laptop, runs routines on a schedule and hands work to other bots. It comes back to you when something needs approval.

The trade-offs come from the managed design. The computer is not yours. Your bots, their files and their logins sit on a cloud machine hosted for your account in the US. Model selection is managed for you instead of chosen by you.

What is OpenBot?

OpenBot (from openbot.run) applies the same idea to your own computer. Its source is public on GitHub under Nightly Labs/Openbot. Each agent is persistent: it has a name, its own instructions, its own workspace and its own conversation, and it remembers what it did yesterday.

OpenBot sells no model. You connect what you already have:

• Codex through a ChatGPT plan
• Claude Code through a Claude plan
• Gemini through a Google AI Pro or Ultra plan
• Grok through a Grok account or an xAI API key
• Cursor, Cline, Muse Code, OpenCode, Pi and Inception Mercury
• Any agent that speaks the Agent Client Protocol (Goose and Qwen Code are examples), any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, and local models through Ollama and LM Studio

So a research agent can run on one provider, a coding agent on another, and a cheap background checker on a free or local model.

How do OpenBot agents work as a team?

Agents message each other, hand off tasks and review each other's work in shared channels. One agent can fix a bug, pass it to a second for review, and let a third close it out without you relaying messages. Each channel task has one owner. You can stop, resume, reassign, archive and restore delegated work.

Other pieces that matter for daily use:

• A built-in browser that agents can open, read and control, useful for work behind a login with no clean API.
• A job queue. If an agent is busy, you send the next task anyway. It waits, and you can pause, resume or cancel it, or steer work already running.
• Routines that start work on a schedule. On Mac and Windows, a "keep this computer awake" option stops the machine sleeping on power so routines fire on time.
• Chat access through Slack, Discord and Telegram, plus a voice pane where local models handle speech so only text reaches the agent.
• A vault that keeps logins and payment cards on your computer, encrypted by the operating system with one password, with Bitwarden connections. Agents see only a card name and its last four digits, and you approve the first fill on each site.

How does provider switching and fallback work?

This is the clearest practical difference. In OpenBot, changing an agent's provider changes the engine, not the teammate. The role, workspace and conversation carry over.

Fallback handles the other common failure. If a weekly plan limit runs out mid-task, or a provider is overloaded or down, the agent can move to a backup model on another provider and keep going. A note in the chat shows the switch. In Grok Bot, model choice is made for you, so there is nothing comparable to configure.

Grok Bot vs OpenBot: how do they compare?

What does "always on" cost with OpenBot?

Running OpenBot locally means the computer hosting it has to stay on while agents work. There are three paths:

1. Leave a desktop or home server running while your laptop sleeps.
2. Use an OpenBot-hosted server in the EU, from €20 or $25 a month.
3. Use the Teams offer, where OpenBot runs managed servers and sets things up around your company and tools.

Local-first is not offline. Your chosen provider still receives the prompts your agents send, and pages your agents open still use the network. What stays home is the workspace, conversations, files and browser data.

Is OpenBot safe to run?

Not without care. OpenBot says plainly that it is a development preview. After the first launch consent, agents run with full access and no per-action approval. They can read and change files, run commands, use the network and control the built-in browser without asking each time.

Grok Bot's separate cloud computer partly exists to keep that blast radius off your laptop. With OpenBot, that protection is on you:

• Run only agents and tasks you trust.
• Keep real backups.
• Consider a spare machine or a server for agents that run all day.
• Start with work you can afford to lose.

Can you use OpenBot commercially?

Not under the public license alone. The source is readable and free to run for non-commercial use such as personal projects, study and research. It ships under PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0, which is source-available, not open source in the usual sense. Commercial use needs a separate license. Teams should settle that question before building a workflow around it.

Which one should you choose?

Choose Grok Bot if you want the managed version, already use Cursor or SuperGrok, and care more about keeping no computer on than about controlling the stack. To see how it stacks up against other always-on agents, compare Dot, Muse, Grok Bot and Claude Duet.

Choose OpenBot if you already pay for Codex, Claude, Gemini or Grok plans, want files and chats on your own hardware, and want a free app whose code you can read. Judge it the way you would judge a new hire: do the handoffs and follow-through save real time by the end of the week?