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Sana (Workday) vs Glean
A plain-English comparison to help you choose between them.
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.
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.
- 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
- Less suited to
Sana is now evaluated as part of Workday: non-Workday organisations must weigh roadmap and packaging risk that follows the acquirer's strategy rather than the standalone product's.
It is enterprise learning infrastructure, not a course marketplace: teams wanting off-the-shelf content libraries are shopping in a different aisle.
- Cost
- Enterprise
- Ease
- Intermediate
- 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.
- 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.
By area
Where each one pulls ahead, area by area.
| Area | Pick Sana (Workday) when | Pick Glean when |
|---|---|---|
| Search & knowledge retrieval | Sana grounds agents that both answer and act in company knowledge, with the learning platform growing from the same foundation | pure permission-aware search across the enterprise estate is the whole job and a learning layer would oversize the purchase |
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 July 2026