Glean
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.
It is bought at organisational scale: the indexing, connectors and governance assume hundreds of seats and a real IT function.
- Cost
- Enterprise
- Ease
- Intermediate
- Model
- Hosted service
- Checked
- July 2026
Prices, plans and model versions change fast: this is a mid-2026 snapshot; check the tool's official site for the latest.
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.
Costs & data, in short
Enterprise per-seat pricing by agreement; procurement-grade rather than credit-card SaaS.
Glean indexes your company systems with permissions preserved; its security model is the product, review it accordingly.
In practice
How Glean is used, area by area.
Operations
Glean removes the where-is-that-document tax on operations. Policies, process docs and past decisions surface from wherever they live across the application estate, permissions intact, with citations attached, which cuts the interruptions that make ops teams the company's human search engine and gives every answer a source someone can check. The value tracks how messy the tool sprawl is, which is precisely the condition operations teams inherit. Scale draws the boundary: below enterprise size, workspace-native AI covers most of the need, since the connectors, indexing and governance assume hundreds of seats and a real IT function. Content hygiene also remains your job, because stale documents produce well-cited stale answers.
Example tasks
- Find the current version of any process across systems
- Answer operational questions with citations to the source
- Surface who owns what from the knowledge itself
- Cut duplicate-question load with self-serve answers
- Audit where knowledge actually lives across the estate
Limits
Operations teams below enterprise scale get most of the value from their workspace suite's own search and AI; Glean's machinery pays off when the app estate is genuinely sprawling. Content hygiene remains your job.
Compares
| vs | Pick Glean when | Pick the other when |
|---|---|---|
| Notion AI | Glean removes the where-is-that-document tax across the whole app estate, surfacing policies, process docs and past decisions from wherever they live with permissions intact | the team's knowledge concentrates in one workspace below enterprise scale |
Search & knowledge retrieval
Glean is enterprise search done as a product rather than a feature. It indexes the whole tool sprawl (Drive, Slack, Jira, wikis, tickets) and answers questions from all of it at once, with each person seeing only what their permissions allow, which is the feature that makes enterprise deployment survivable and the price justifiable. Assistants and agents build on the same governed foundation. It is bought by organisations drowning in their own knowledge, at a scale where the answer exists somewhere and nobody can find it. The shape excludes the rest: small teams get most of the value from workspace-native AI, citation-first web research and personal corpus tools solve different problems, and answer quality inherits the estate's hygiene.
Example tasks
- Search every connected system from one box
- Get cited answers that respect permissions
- Find the decision, the document and the person together
- Ground assistants in governed company knowledge
- Onboard new joiners onto the organisation's actual knowledge
Limits
Citation-first web research and personal knowledge tools solve different problems; Glean is specifically the enterprise's internal estate. Permission-awareness is the feature that justifies the price, and only enterprises need it.
Compares
| vs | Pick Glean when | Pick the other when |
|---|---|---|
| Microsoft CopilotFull comparison → | 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 |
Where to start
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Alternatives
Same category, different strengths.
Appears in these stacks
Curated combinations this tool is part of.
Common questions
What is Glean best at?
Glean is strongest 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.
What is Glean not good for?
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.
Is Glean free?
No: Glean is enterprise software, priced per organisation.
Where does Glean fit best?
Glean fits best in Operations and Search & knowledge retrieval; see its practice notes for how.
Before sharing confidential or personal data, check this tool's data-governance and training policies. They differ between providers and can change.
Last checked: July 2026