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Sana (Workday) vs Glean
Glean is enterprise search across your app estate; Sana turns company knowledge into courses and learning paths. Finding or teaching decides it.
Both answer questions from company knowledge; the difference is what sits on top. Glean is enterprise search first: permission-aware, cited answers across the whole application estate, with assistants built on that governed foundation. Sana is learning first: courses generated from internal content, personalised paths and knowledge agents, now inside Workday's orbit. Pick Glean when finding and grounding is the organisational problem; pick Sana when the knowledge must become structured learning, especially in a Workday shop.
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Side by side
- Summary
Sana is AI-native learning and knowledge: a learning platform that generates structured courses from internal documents and personalises paths by role and progress, and knowledge agents that answer employee questions from company content. Learning and knowing share one foundation.
Its acquisition by Workday moves it into an enterprise HR estate: for Workday customers that promises deep integration; for everyone else it adds a strategic question to the evaluation, since roadmap and packaging now follow the acquirer's logic.
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It suits organisations treating learning as living content generated from their own knowledge, rather than a library of static courses.
- Best for
- Generating structured courses from internal content
- Personalised learning paths by role and progress
- Knowledge agents answering from company content
- Keeping compliance training current as policies change
- Workday-centred enterprises wanting integrated learning
- Cost
- Enterprise
- Ease
- Openness
- Hosted service
- Data
- Learning and knowledge content stays under enterprise terms. The Workday acquisition is the strategic fact to weigh: existing customers continue, but roadmap and packaging decisions now sit inside a larger suite.
- 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.
Pricing
- Sana (Workday)
Free$30/user·Custom
Prices as of August 2026.
- Free
- Free
- Team
- $30per user, per month
- Enterprise
- Price on applicationno list price published
- 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
By area
Where each one pulls ahead, area by area.
| Area | Sana (Workday) | Glean |
|---|---|---|
| By job | ||
| Operations | Sana stops process knowledge living in the heads of whoever has been there longest, keeping SOPs and the training built from them synchronised as the process changes | Glean stops operations being the company's human search engine, cutting the duplicate-question load and surfacing who owns what from the knowledge itself |
| By task | ||
| Search & knowledge retrieval | Sana grounds agents that both answer and act in company knowledge, with the learning platform growing from the same foundation | Glean returns the decision, the document and the person together, so a new joiner is onboarded onto what the organisation actually knows rather than what someone wrote down for them |
Common questions
Do they overlap enough to compare at all?
At the knowledge-agent layer, yes: both answer employee questions from internal content. Below that they diverge completely, with Glean indexing the app estate for retrieval and Sana turning content into courses and paths.
What does the Workday acquisition mean for choosing Sana?
Deeper integration ahead for Workday customers, and a strategic question for everyone else: roadmap and packaging now follow the acquirer's logic. Non-Workday organisations should weigh that explicitly in any long-term commitment.
Could an organisation need both?
Plausibly, at scale: Glean as the retrieval layer across everything, Sana as the learning layer on HR and enablement content. Smaller organisations should pick the one matching their sharper pain rather than buying the pair.
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Tool facts last checked August 2026