Grok Bot vs OpenMausBot: is the free open-source copy good enough?
The short answer
Mostly yes: I run 17 bots and 25 routines on OpenMausBot, the free open-source copy, 24/7 on one Linux PC for $0 extra on top of the AI plans I already pay for, while Grok Bot costs $30, $100 or $200 a month.
The one thing Grok Bot still wins is X search: in my Oct 15 test it brought back 15 posts, all real, and my own agent had scrolled 185 posts and missed 13 of them. The catch with the free one is setup time: on Oct 16 only 27% of what my YouTube bot found was useful, until I told it exactly what to look for.
Chapters
Receipts (Oct 15–17, 2026)
| What | Number | Source |
|---|---|---|
| OpenMausBot | Free, open source (Apache-2.0); 5,006 GitHub stars on Oct 17 | github.com |
| My OpenMausBot setup | 17 bots (13 on Gemini, 4 on Claude), 25 routines on timers, 24/7 on one Linux PC | in the video |
| Extra cost on top of the AI plans I already pay for | $0 | in the video |
| Grok Bot plans | $30, $100 or $200 a month | cursor.com |
| My Grok Bot weekly limit on the $30 plan | 22% gone 37 hours into the week | in the video |
| Someone on the $200 plan (Cursor forum, Sep 10) | 99% of a week in 3 days | forum.cursor.com |
| X search test (Oct 15) | Grok Bot: 15 posts, all real. My agent: scrolled 185 posts, missed 13 of them | in the video |
| Useful finds from my YouTube bot (Oct 16), before I told it exactly what to look for | 27% | in the video |
Try it on your own computer
- Before you pay for a hosted bot, run the free open-source one next to it on one real research job and compare what each brings back.
- Let your coding agent do the setup: ask it to configure the timers, routines and triggers you want, then ask it about anything you don't understand.
- Make each bot narrow: specific categories and a specific kind of person. I look for power users (people on more than three $200 subscriptions) and read one report every morning at 9:00.
- Pay only where the paid tool clearly wins. For me that is X search: Grok Bot brought back 15 posts, all real, and 13 of them were not in the 185 posts my own agent scrolled.
Transcript
0:00 I was kind of surprised that the open-source project is actually better than the consumer product. They spend a lot of money, talented engineers, to develop Grok Bot, but seems like the open-source one is doing better.
0:14 So, here's my take on Grok Bot and OpenMausBot. OpenMausBot is an open-source copy of Grok Bot, and I have used this doing auto research overnight, 24/7.
0:28 But the thing is, Grok Bot usage limit is so low, although I'm only using a $30 plan, because I just wanted to test it out to see if it's better than an open-source one or not.
0:39 OpenMausBot has lots of configuration, which is not a problem these days, because if you just use Astra to configure whatever things you want, it will just do it for you. OpenMausBot is quite advanced, configurable. At first, there's a lot of things going on. Eventually, you can just prompt it to configure it for you and then ask whatever things that you don't know.
1:01 So I don't think UI is a problem. It's actually better than Grok Bot because it has a lot of configuration that you can do: timers, routines, triggers, those stuff. I'm sure Grok Bot has it, but since they made it more like a consumer product, it's a lot more like simple UI and intuitive to use. I get it.
1:22 But other than searching X, I honestly think it's not worth...
1:32 The thing about the 24/7 research bot is that you have to be very manual at first. Right now, I have X, Reddit, Instagram, YouTube, Threads, Hacker News, some other websites running right now. I get a daily report every morning at 9:00 and skim over what happened overnight. Is there a new trend? What's going on?
1:54 Even if you do that, at first, the results are going to be really bad compared to the tokens that you spend. And then once you get it, you have to manually adjust the bots, focus on specific categories, specific things that you want to search. You want to search what the power users are doing.
2:11 Now, what is a power user? Power user, in my terms, would be using at least more than three $200 subscription. You have to be very specific to get the good results. And it's just the same thing as LLMs. If you want to get good results, you have to be specific. You have to articulate. You have to practice. And you have to fail. Try again. Try again with different things.
2:30 Yeah, that's my opinion about Grok Bot and OpenMausBot.
