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Glean vs Microsoft Copilot
A plain-English comparison to help you choose between them.
Both answer questions from your organisation's knowledge; the split is estate shape. Copilot searches the Microsoft tenant superbly: mail, chats, meetings and files under existing permissions, for licensed Microsoft-centred organisations. Glean is built for the sprawl beyond one vendor: permission-aware search and cited answers across the whole application estate, wherever knowledge actually lives. Pick Copilot when work genuinely lives in Microsoft's world; pick Glean when the truth is scattered across dozens of systems.
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.
- 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
- Less suited to
Small teams are outside the shape: the connectors, indexing and governance assume enterprise scale, and the procurement matches. Below that, workspace-native AI covers most of the need.
Answer quality also inherits the estate's hygiene: stale documents produce well-cited stale answers.
- Cost
- Enterprise
- Ease
- Intermediate
- 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.
- 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
- Less suited to
Most of Copilot's value sits behind a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence on top of a qualifying plan; the free assistant is a general chat companion, not the in-app, tenant-grounded product. Outside Microsoft-centric organisations the integration advantage largely disappears.
It is also not the pick for design-led decks, heavy statistics or the strongest prose voice: it is the governed workhorse inside Office rather than the specialist in any single craft.
- Cost
- Free tier + paid plans
- Ease
- Beginner-friendly
- 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.
By area
Where each one pulls ahead, area by area.
| Area | Pick Glean when | Pick Microsoft Copilot when |
|---|---|---|
| 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 | the knowledge already lives in the Microsoft estate, in email, chats, meetings and files |
Common questions
If we are all-in on Microsoft, is Glean redundant?
Largely, yes: Copilot's tenant grounding covers the Microsoft estate well, and adding a search vendor duplicates it. Glean's case begins where significant knowledge lives outside the tenant, in wikis, tickets, drives and apps Copilot cannot see.
How do they handle permissions?
Both are permission-aware by design: each shows a person only what their access allows. The practical differences are connector breadth for Glean and tenant-native depth for Copilot, plus the same warning for both: retrieval surfaces whatever permissions allow, so oversharing becomes discoverable.
Which is the bigger commitment?
Glean: enterprise procurement, connector rollout and indexing across the estate assume organisational scale and a real IT function. Copilot arrives as a licence on the suite you already run, which is much of its appeal.
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Tool facts last checked July 2026