Grok

What does Grok have that the others don't? X.

Ask "what's everyone saying about the match last night?" and it can search X and the web, so the answer is about now. xAI says it can run advanced searches on X to show you what people are posting.

It reaches into your own stuff as well. Connect Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Outlook, OneDrive, Teams or Salesforce and you can ask about your email and files from inside a chat. Every Grok user gets connectors, not only the paying ones.

It's a busy app. Grok Imagine makes images and short videos with sound, there's a voice mode, and you can point your camera at something and ask about it.

Uploads are roomy. Documents, spreadsheets, code, audio and video, up to 150 MB a file.

And people do rate it. One App Store reviewer pays for all the big AI models and runs them side by side. They say Grok has become one of the best, a little to their own annoyance.

Working out what it costs. When we loaded the plans page on grok.com it showed no prices at all, so ours come from the US App Store listing. That listing doesn't say how often you're billed.

The free limits are a mystery too. xAI's docs say Grok is free to start and that the free limits reset on a schedule. They don't say what the limits are.

Paying doesn't make limits go away. A paid plan gives you one weekly allowance for chat, images, video and voice together. Use it up and paid features pause until the reset, unless you buy Extra Usage Credits from $5.

There's no app for your computer. The docs list the web, iOS and Android, and that's all.

It can be flaky! In November 2025 a long-time paying user wrote that it kept freezing mid-chat on their iPad. Another reported crashes after updates and a voice mode that stopped hearing them.

And Companions, the talking characters some people download it for, are in the iOS app only. xAI's FAQ says there are no plans for the web or Android.

Start free. Chat and voice are there, and that's enough to tell whether Grok suits you.

The cheapest paid tier is SuperGrok Lite, listed at $10 in the US App Store. One problem: xAI describes SuperGrok as everything in Lite plus more, and we couldn't find a list of what Lite itself includes.

SuperGrok is the main one, at $30 a month. You get chats five times longer, Expert mode, 30-second videos at 720p, longer voice chats and Grok Bot.

SuperGrok Plus is listed at $100 and adds 1080p video and priority at busy times. Heavy is $300, with the most usage and X Premium+ thrown in. We'd skip both unless Grok is how you earn a living.

Run out before the week resets? Extra Usage Credits start at $5, on the web only. xAI's FAQ says they cost more per action than the allowance in your plan.

If the price is what's putting you off, ChatGPT Plus is $20 and Google AI Pro is $19.99.

Grok has 4.9 on the App Store from about 1.5 million ratings. That's above ChatGPT's 4.8 and Gemini's 4.7.

Why so keen? For several reviewers it's the Companions. One says the animated character can look things up and play chess with them without dropping the act.

A widowed dad writes that it gave him someone to talk to every day. He also says his chats were cut back without warning in May 2026, and he was on a paid plan.

Others just think it's good. One asked for a love poem in the style of Poe's "The Raven" and was floored by what came back.

The complaints are about it breaking. Freezes on the iPad, crashes when Companions open, and one Companion that got stuck speaking Mandarin.

Hacker News talks about Grok more as a model than an app. One developer pairs it with Cursor and likes that it's priced lower than OpenAI's and Anthropic's models. Another, who pays for Gemini Pro, says free Grok sometimes gives better answers.