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Google Gemini vs Glean
A plain-English comparison to help you choose between them.
Both promise answers grounded in your work, and they mean different things by your work. Gemini means the Google surround: inside Gmail, Docs, Drive and Meet, holding very long documents in one session and grounding answers in live Search, with a genuinely capable free tier underneath. Glean means the whole estate regardless of vendor, indexing the organisation's applications and returning permission-aware cited answers across drives, wikis, tickets and chats. Pick Gemini when work really does live in Google and the integration advantage is free money; pick Glean when it is scattered across a dozen systems and finding things is the actual bottleneck.
Side by side
- Summary
Gemini is Google's AI assistant, with a genuinely capable free tier and paid plans that add deeper models, research and generation.
- Best for
- A genuinely capable free assistant with paid depth when needed
- Work inside Gmail, Docs, Sheets and Meet
- Very long documents held and reasoned over in one session
- Cost
- Freemium (Free tier + paid plans)
- Ease
- Openness
- Hosted service
- Data
- The consumer Gemini app treats data as consumer data; Workspace/Business Gemini keeps org data private and untrained. For a first-timer, avoid pasting confidential or personal financial data into the free consumer app.
- Summary
Glean is enterprise search that respects who you are: it indexes the organisation's applications and answers questions with citations, showing each person only what their permissions allow.
- Best for
- Search across the organisation's applications at once
- Permission-aware answers that respect access rights
- Cited answers grounded in company content
- Cost
- Enterprise
- Ease
- Openness
- Hosted service
- Data
- Glean indexes your company systems with permissions preserved; its security model is the product, review it accordingly.
Pricing
- Google Gemini
Free·$4.99·$19.99·from $99.99
Prices as of August 2026.
- Free
- Free
- Google AI Plus
- $4.99per month
- Google AI Pro
- $19.99per month
- Google AI Ultra
- from $99.99per month
- Glean
Custom·Custom
Prices as of August 2026.
- Glean Core Suite
- Price on applicationno list price published
- Glean Model Hub Usage
- Price on applicationusage billed at API rates
Common questions
If we are a Google shop, is Glean redundant?
Only if Google genuinely holds everything, which is rarer than it feels. Tickets, wikis, code hosts and chat tools usually sit outside Workspace, and that scatter is precisely what Glean indexes. The honest test is to list where last month's answers actually lived. If the list is one vendor, Gemini covers it; if it is six, that is the case Glean is priced for.
How do the two purchases differ in shape?
Almost completely. Gemini follows Workspace licensing, so capability and admin controls arrive with the plan rather than a project, and a capable free tier means anyone can start today. Glean assumes hundreds of seats, a real IT function and enterprise procurement, which makes it a programme with an owner rather than a subscription someone expenses.
Which is more useful outside the office?
Gemini, and it is not the point of Glean to compete there. Gemini generates imagery and video, runs Deep Research on the open web and is conversational on the phone, so it doubles as a general assistant. Glean is a search and grounding layer over company knowledge; asking it general questions is using an expensive index for something a free assistant does better.
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Tool facts last checked August 2026