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The fiendish/celestial grizzly bear is one of the options in the summon monster IV list. While most moneters in the list are CR 3, the bear is a whopping CR 5... for a level 4 spell you get a monster with good DR, and an ability to smite good one, which should deal something like 1d6 + 10 damage... plus high HP and good stats overall, including grab.
I'm designing a CR 9 cleric to fight my PCs, and want her to have a summoned monster or two... she's gonna fly over the battlefield and summon creatures, while aiding them with all sorts of sweet spell like bestow curse and flame strike.
The party is going to be level 6 when facing this mighty final boss... is thig going to be too much? how come there's such a huge desperity in power among the options of a single spell? (party is very strong with 20 point build and an unstoppable barbarian leading the charge...)
The CR for a grizzly seems too high, compared to the CR 3 lion it has +10 hp and +1 AC, but the lion has more offensive and all round ability.
The lion can pounce, grab, rake and has a decent acrobatics skill.
The bear has grab and can even make two attacks with grab but no ability to make grab truly dangerous unlike the lion which has rake.
The two are about even really, both have 5HD and get the same abilities from the fiendish template, the lion could potentially benefit more with rake offensively and the bear benefits more from the defensive abilities DR and resistances (and SR since it is higher CR). CR 3 is probably too low for the lion and CR 5 too high for the bear, I'd make them an even CR 4 before the template and CR 5 with the template.
EDIT : after checking the list there seem to be several creatures that are either close to or better than the bear despite the bear's higher CR, bison in particular seems deadly.
Yeah, I think the lion is better. The bison could also be pretty effective by simply trampling. If you really want to do some summoning have the Cleric take the Augment Summoning and Sacred Summons feats. The she can cast Summon Monster V as a standard action to put an augmented babau into flank.
All of a sudden the bear looks pretty tame. Clearly the bear doesn't fit with the babau or dire lion at level 5, so I think level 4 seems like a good place for it.