To be honest, the first time I used Grok Bot, its design really impressed me. Unlike OpenClaw before it, it was not just Claude Code connected to a chat app. It truly cared about how it works with people. It felt like a living AI assistant, and working with it was painless. That is the idea I kept learning from the whole time I built Pots: it is not an agent hooked up to a chat channel. It should be a coworker that feels alive and is comfortable to work with.
But Grok Bot is only Grok's bot. Which model you get depends on your X subscription, your data and your machine are all in the cloud, and most of all, it is a standalone app, and most of its features serve that app.
Pots is a bit different. In Sydney I have talked with quite a few founders. Grok Bot is good, and it helps them a lot with their personal tasks. But when I asked who had actually put Grok Bot into their company's work to make their startup team faster, nobody had. So I think Pots is in a different place from Grok Bot, and from most open-source Grok Bot alternatives: it grew out of what real startup teams need. Before I open-sourced it, 6 small startups I met at startup events had been using it with me for over a month.
Pots is built first for the channels startup teams already work in, not for an app of its own, so most of what it does serves the places where you actually work. The teams use Pots as a middle layer: a CEO talks ideas through with the team in chat, Pots listens, and then it builds a prototype that both sides can check. They use Pots for competitor research: because Pots runs inside their channels, it knows their product well. Not only the GitHub repo, but the team's daily discussions and what the team cares about. Pots has been listening quietly the whole time, so it knows the product with no setup at all. It also works well with each channel: it talks to people with the channel's own controls, like Slack and Discord buttons and cards, and when it hands over something complex, it deploys a page with its built-in server so everyone sees it in a better form.
So Pots is different from Grok Bot and from most open-source alternatives. It came out of what real startup teams need. Its channel features start from what each company's work needs, and it can join your real work setup with no setup and still do well, instead of being one more app that nobody uses and that is hard to start with. And it ran in real business for a while before I cleaned it up and open-sourced it.
The difference from Grok Bot is also exactly why I made Pots an open-source Grok Bot alternative. I have OpenAI and Claude subscriptions with plenty of quota, and my own servers, so I don't want an X subscription to limit me. I want to use whatever model I want and do whatever I want. I can even switch to an open model, and none of my data goes into anyone's pocket.
Try it (Node 24+, macOS, Linux or Windows): the easiest way is to ask your coding agent (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor) to read docs/for-agents.md in the repo and set up Pots for you. Or by hand: npm install -g pi-durable-bot, then pots init.
I'd love feedback, especially on how it decides when to act.