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Glean vs Microsoft Copilot
A plain-English comparison to help you choose between them.
Both answer from your organisation's own knowledge under existing permissions, and the estate decides which one can actually do it. Microsoft 365 Copilot works inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams on the tenant's files, mail and meetings, so it changes the writing: drafting, explaining a spreadsheet, recapping a meeting, all where the work already sits. Glean changes the finding instead, on the premise that in a large company the document already exists and someone has already answered the question, and neither is where you would look, so its connectors reach across drives, wikis, tickets and chats. Pick Copilot when work genuinely lives in Microsoft's world and Glean when the truth is scattered across dozens of systems; on permissions the two are more alike than either pitch suggests, and that likeness is what evaluations most often miss.
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Side by side
- 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. The knowledge sprawl across drives, wikis, tickets and chats becomes one queryable surface.
Its Work AI direction builds on that foundation: assistants and agents grounded in company knowledge, with the permission-awareness that makes enterprise deployment survivable.
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It is bought at organisational scale: the indexing, connectors and governance assume hundreds of seats and a real IT function.
- Best for
- Search across the organisation's applications at once
- Permission-aware answers that respect access rights
- Cited answers grounded in company content
- Assistants and agents on the same governed foundation
- Organisations drowning in knowledge sprawl
- Cost
- Enterprise
- Ease
- Openness
- Hosted service
- Data
- Glean indexes your company systems with permissions preserved; its security model is the product, review it accordingly.
- Summary
Microsoft Copilot is AI threaded through the Microsoft stack: a free assistant in Windows, Edge and the Copilot app, and a licensed Microsoft 365 Copilot that works inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams on your organisation's own files, mail and meetings.
The licensed tier is the substance. Grounded in tenant content under existing permissions and enterprise data protection, it drafts documents, builds and explains spreadsheet analyses, recaps meetings and answers questions from the company's own knowledge. Copilot Studio extends it with custom agents for repeatable workflows.
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The trade is governance over flair. Output starts corporate and functional rather than beautiful, and the licence only pays back where Office is genuinely the centre of work.
- Best for
- AI assistance inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams
- Working over your own tenant's files, mail and meetings
- Enterprise data protection and permissions-aware answers
- Meeting recaps and follow-ups native to Teams
- A free assistant in Windows and Edge to start with
- Cost
- Freemium (Free tier + paid plans)
- Ease
- Openness
- Hosted service
- Data
- Copilot grounds in your own data and, at the enterprise/business tier, does not train foundation models on it; still, every Copilot-generated figure or narrative needs human review before it informs decisions.
Pricing
- 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
- Microsoft Copilot
from $21/user·$23.50/user·$30/user·$32/user
Prices as of August 2026.
- Microsoft 365 Copilot Business
- from $21per user, per monthbilled annually; $25.20 per user per month if billed monthly
- Microsoft 365 Business Standard with Copilot
- $23.50per user, per monthbilled annually; $28.20 per user per month if billed monthly
- Microsoft 365 Copilot
- $30per user, per monthbilled annually
- Microsoft 365 Business Premium with Copilot
- $32per user, per monthbilled annually; $38.40 per user per month if billed monthly
By area
Where each one pulls ahead, area by area.
| Area | Glean | Microsoft Copilot |
|---|---|---|
| By job | ||
| Legal & compliance | Glean confirms every result still respects the source application's own permissions and puts the permission model to any competing vendor as the first question | Microsoft Copilot summarises a long agreement into briefing form in Word and recaps a matter meeting with the decisions and actions that came out of it, all inside the tenant the documents already live in |
| Productivity & personal assistant | Glean finds the current version of a document without anyone knowing where it lives and surfaces the answer someone already gave to the same internal question before | Microsoft Copilot — when Word, Excel, Outlook and Teams are where the day already happens and tenant permissions should decide what the assistant can see |
| By task | ||
| Search & knowledge retrieval | Glean turns knowledge sprawled across applications beyond any single suite, drives, wikis, tickets and chats, into one governed, cited search surface with permissions respected | Copilot searches your own organisation natively, answering what was agreed and where the latest version lives from email, chats, meetings and files, permissions-aware by design |
Common questions
If we are all-in on Microsoft, is Glean redundant?
Largely, and the honest test is a list rather than an instinct: write down where last month's answers actually lived. If every entry is a Microsoft surface, Copilot's tenant grounding covers it and a second search vendor duplicates work you have already licensed. Glean's case begins where significant knowledge sits outside the tenant, in wikis, ticket systems, code hosts and drives that sit outside Copilot's native grounding and each need a connector deployed for them, which at scale is usually more than the list predicts.
Does either widen access to material people should not see?
Neither widens access, and both make an existing problem visible, which is the part worth planning for. Glean's connectors sync each source's access controls and filter results to what you could already open; Copilot grounds in the tenant under the same permissions. What changes is discoverability, because material technically shared but practically buried becomes findable at chat speed. Fixing permissions belongs in the rollout rather than after it.
Which is the bigger commitment?
Glean, in kind rather than degree. It assumes enterprise procurement, connector rollout and indexing across the estate, which means an owner, an IT function and a programme. Copilot arrives as a licence on a suite you already run, which is much of its appeal, though the licensed tenant-grounded tier is the substance and the free assistant is a different product wearing the same name.
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Tool facts last checked August 2026