X (aka. Twitter), as one of the most popular social networks, provides a platform for communication and online discourse. Unfortunately, it has also become a target for bots and fake accounts, resulting in the spread of false information and manipulation. This paper introduces a semi-automatic machine learning pipeline (SAMLP) designed to address the challenges associated with machine learning model development. Through this pipeline, we develop a comprehensive bot detection model named BotArtist, based on user profile features. SAMLP leverages nine distinct publicly available datasets to train the BotArtist model. To assess BotArtist’s performance against current state-of-the-art solutions, we evaluate 35 existing X bot detection methods, each utilizing a diverse range of features. Our comparative evaluation of BotArtist and these existing methods, conducted across nine public datasets under standardized conditions, reveals that the proposed model outperforms existing solutions by almost 10% in terms of F1-score, achieving an average score of 83.19% and 68.5% over specific and general approaches, respectively.