Grok Bot is your own AI teammate. Runbear is your team's.
Grok Bot gives you a roster of Bots that sign in once as you and work from your desktop or iOS app. Runbear puts named agents in the channel your team already works in, acting through each person's own connected accounts — including guests who have no Runbear account at all.
Runbear is a Slack-native AI teammate. You create named agents, connect 2,000+ tools, and deploy them into the channels your team already works in. Every action runs through the asking person's own accounts, and people outside your company can use those agents in a shared channel without signing up for anything.
Grok Bot is xAI's early beta agent product. You create named Bots and, in xAI's words, "give tasks to Bots like you would a teammate on desktop or iOS." Bots sign in to your tools and drive them the way you would — including the ones with no clean integration to call. Everything on this page was observed on x.ai/bot on 23 August 2026; it is a fast-moving beta, so confirm the current details with xAI.
Yours vs your team's
Grok Bot answers to one person.
Runbear answers to the channel.
Both products call themselves AI teammates, and both mean it. The question that sorts them is not which model is better — it is who is allowed to give the agent work, and whose permissions it uses when it does.
- In the channel. Agents live in Slack, Teams, and Discord. Anyone in the thread mentions them by name.
- Open to outsiders. Customers and vendors in shared channels use your agents with no account and nothing installed.
- Acts as each person. Per-user OAuth, so an action only reaches what that individual is already allowed to reach.
- Answers the front door. Support, onboarding, and billing agents that reply to real requests, then hand off to a human.
- On your desktop. You give Bots work from the desktop or iOS app. Colleagues have no handle to mention.
- One account's roster. Bots coordinate with each other in a thread — inside your account, not across your team.
- Signs in once as you. "It uses your apps and websites just like you would," so the roster shares your identity.
- Built for your own queue. The shipped roles are outbound and back-office. None of the eight is customer-facing.
Side by side
The full feature matrix.
| Feature | Runbear | Grok Bot |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Named AI agents deployed into your team's chat channels | A personal roster of Bots you direct from your own app |
| Where you talk to it | Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, and the web app | Grok Bot's desktop or iOS app on your own machine |
| Who can give it work | Anyone in the channel, including customers and vendors as guests | The account holder; each person needs their own plan |
| Whose permissions it uses | Per-user OAuth — it acts as the person who asked | Your logins, signed in once and reused across your Bots |
| Multi-agent work | Named agents different people mention: @Support, @Onboarding, @Billing | Bots that pass work between themselves inside one account |
| How it reaches tools | 2,000+ maintained connectors via Pipedream, MCP, native OAuth | Plugins where they exist, plus browser control for tools that lack them |
| Customer-facing work | Support, onboarding, and billing agents that answer in the thread | None of the eight published roles is a support or service role |
| Triggers | Cron, event, channel, file, webhook, and connected-app completions | Routines you schedule, taught by demonstrating the task |
| Approvals & audit | Human-in-the-loop approvals, audit logs, per-agent usage | Approve-before-send in the product; confirm audit tooling with xAI |
| Compliance | SOC 2 Type II, SSO, RBAC — shipped today | No certification listed on x.ai/bot; enterprise goes through sales |
| What access costs | Usage credits, no per-seat fee, guests free | An eligible paid plan per person, plus the app on their device |
Where the agent lives
A private console, or a shared channel.
This is the difference everything else follows from. Grok Bot is addressed from the app on your device; Runbear is addressed from the thread your team is already in. Neither is wrong — they answer different questions.
Your agents have handles. A teammate types @Support in #customer-escalations and gets an answer where the question was asked, with the thread as context. Nobody installs anything, and nobody switches windows.
xAI's own framing is that you "give tasks to Bots like you would a teammate on desktop or iOS." For a solo operator that is genuinely better: no channel noise, and you can watch the Bot work on its own screen. It just means your colleagues have no handle to reach.
Whose account it acts on
One login for everything, or each person's own.
How an agent authenticates decides what it can reach when someone else asks it for something. That is a security question long before it is a convenience one.
Each person connects their own HubSpot, Salesforce, Jira, or Notion. When an agent acts, it runs as the person who asked, so it can never surface a record that person could not already open. Secrets stay vaulted and rotation is handled for you.
The product line is "Log Grok Bot in once. It uses your apps and websites just like you would." That single identity is what makes browser-driving work at all — persistent sessions are the feature. It also means the roster carries your access, which is fine for your own queue and a different conversation once other people are asking.
Reaching the tools
Driving the browser, and calling the API.
The honest answer here is that both approaches win somewhere, and the two are complementary more than competitive.
2,000+ tools wired in through Pipedream, MCP, and native OAuth, kept current by us. When a vendor ships a breaking API change, you find out by not noticing. Anything we do not cover, you add as a custom MCP server.
Bots use your apps "including the tools that are harder to navigate" — the legacy portal and the internal dashboard with no API at all. That is real reach no connector catalogue has, bought with the tradeoffs of driving a UI: it is slower than an API call, and logins, 2FA, and CAPTCHAs hand the screen back to you.
Choose the right tool
When to reach for each.
Choose Runbear if…
- Your team lives in Slack or Teams and will not adopt another app
- Customers, candidates, or vendors need to reach an agent without an account
- You want named agents that different people mention by handle
- An agent must act with each asker's permissions, not one shared identity
- You need audit logs, RBAC, and SOC 2 Type II before AI touches real systems
- Work should start when something happens in a connected tool, not when you open an app
Choose Grok Bot if…
- You are a solo operator and the queue you want cleared is your own
- The tools that matter have no API, and a Bot driving the browser is the only way in
- You already pay for an eligible Cursor or SuperGrok plan
- You want to watch the agent work on its own screen while it does
- Your work is draft-first, where you review every outbound before it sends
- You would rather demonstrate a workflow once than configure one
Questions you're probably asking
Runbear and Grok Bot, side by side.
Keep your own Bot. Give your team one too.
10-minute setup. Bring a real workflow and we'll wire it live on a demo call.