Grok
xAI's chat assistant, with live search across X posts and the web, plus image and video generation, available on the web and in the X app.
What you'd use it for
Checking what people are saying about your industry, a launch, or an outage on X right now, without digging through the feed yourself.
- Search X posts and the web in real time for what's being said about a topic right now
- Generate images and short video clips from a text prompt (SuperGrok and above)
- Hold a spoken conversation with Grok using voice mode
- Pull in data from other apps through connectors during a chat
- Get an answer with citations back to the actual posts it was drawn from
The verdict
Grok's edge is currency — it reads X and the web in real time, so it is genuinely useful for tracking what is being said about your business or industry right now. That strength is also its weakness — a post is not a citation, and answers drawn from social media need the same scepticism you would give a colleague relaying a rumour. There is no desktop app and no connection to your own business systems, so it stays a chat window you copy answers out of. Worth having open during a launch or an incident; not a substitute for a research or knowledge-work assistant the rest of the time.
What it costs
| Tier | Price | For | Includes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0/month | Trying it, and for occasional questions that benefit from live search. | Real-time web and X search, voice mode, connectors, SOC 2 Type I and II compliance. |
| SuperGrok | $30/month | Regular daily use where the free rate limits get in the way. | The Grok 4.6 model, Grok Bot access, higher rate limits across all features, image and video generation. |
| SuperGrok Plus | $100/month | Heavy use, particularly video generation. | Everything in SuperGrok plus 1080p video, much higher usage across Chat, Imagine, Voice and Build, priority at peak times. |
| Business | Quoted per organisation | Teams needing seat management and consolidated billing. | Team seat management, role-based access control, domain verification, user analytics. |
| Enterprise | Custom pricing, arranged with sales | Organisations with compliance and residency requirements. | Custom rate limits, SSO and SCIM, data residency, dedicated data plane, volume pricing. |
Read from Grok's own pricing page on 25 Sep 2026. Vendors change prices without notice.
What you need to start
- An xAI account (sign up with email, X, Apple, Google or GitHub)
- A SuperGrok subscription ($30/month) to generate images or video
- An X account specifically if you want Grok inside the X app rather than grok.com
Under two minutes to a free account, no credit card required; real-time search answers work in that same session.
Your first run Sign up with an email or X account at grok.com — no credit card needed — then ask about something current, and the first answer arrives with citations to the posts it read, inside a couple of minutes of creating the account.
Where it breaks
The distinguishing feature — live access to X — is also the main caveat: answers can be sourced from posts, and a post is not a source in the sense a business decision needs. Tier names have changed repeatedly (SuperGrok Lite, SuperGrok Heavy and others appear in the comparison table without headline prices), so a price quoted in an article six months old is unlikely to still be right. Separate API pricing applies if you build on it rather than chat with it.
Browser at grok.com, iOS and Android apps, and inside X itself. There is no desktop application with access to your own files, which is the main practical difference from the other assistants at this level.
First entry in this reference. There is no previous check to compare it against.
When not to use it
Not for anyone who needs a cited, checkable source — Perplexity does that job properly. Not for teams wanting a desktop assistant that reads their own files or systems, since Grok has neither. And not worth paying for above the free tier unless image or video generation is specifically what you are after.
Where this one earns its place is currency. Ask most assistants what is happening right now in your industry and you get a careful paragraph assembled from training data; ask Grok and it reads X in real time and tells you what people posted this morning.
For a business, that is a narrow but real use: monitoring reaction to a launch, checking whether an outage is yours or everyone’s, catching a complaint before it becomes a thread. It is a listening tool that happens to be shaped like a chatbot.
The corresponding weakness
Posts are not sources. An assistant that reads social media in real time will confidently relay what social media says, and social media is frequently wrong in a way that a cited article at least gives you a chance to check. Treat Grok output the way you would treat a colleague saying “I saw something on X about this” — as a lead, not a finding.
What it does not do
There is no desktop app reading your own files, and no connection to your business systems in the way Microsoft Copilot or Google Gemini offer. You prompt it and copy the answer out.
For research where the citation matters more than the timeliness, Perplexity is the better instrument: it shows you the source and lets you click through to check it. For everything else you would open a chat window for, ChatGPT and Claude do more for less money.
Alternatives
Assistants & chatAppsPerplexity
A research assistant that answers questions from live web sources and shows the citation for every claim, so you can click through and check it yourself.
Assistants & chatAppsChatGPT
OpenAI's assistant in a browser tab, a desktop app and a phone app, where you ask questions, draft text, and hand it files or spreadsheets to work through.
Assistants & chatModelClaude
Anthropic's AI assistant, available in a browser tab and — the part that matters here — as a desktop app that can read the files on your own machine and reach the systems you connect to it.
Assistants & chatAppsGoogle Gemini
Google's assistant, usable on its own and also inside Gmail, Docs, Sheets and Drive, so it can draft and summarise against files you already keep in Google.
Get Grok
Buying the tool is not the hard part.
The ebook is about what to hand over, in what order, and how you find out when it goes wrong. One payment, no subscription.