The 8 Best Glean Alternatives for Enterprise AI Search in 2026

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Microsoft Copilot, Onyx, and Guru lead the strongest Glean alternatives in 2026, each solving a different reason you might be looking: M365-native embedding, open-source self-hosting, or curated-answer trust. Glean publishes its plan structure but not a per-seat rate, so budgeting starts with a sales call; the per-user figures that circulate online come from vendors that compete with Glean, and Glean has never confirmed them. All 8 real alternatives are compared below on pricing, G2 rating, and setup time, alongside the governed-context question none of the 8 answers on its own.

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*“N/A” means no G2 rating could be independently confirmed at research time, not that the product lacks reviews; verify directly on G2 before citing a figure. **Elastic and Perplexity’s ratings are their general-product G2 profiles (Elasticsearch and Perplexity AI respectively), the closest confirmed figures available; neither vendor splits out a separate “AI Search” or “Enterprise” tier rating on G2. ***Guru publishes no rate card at all: its pricing page states that “your investment is tailored to your organization’s scale, knowledge complexity, and AI maturity” and routes every buyer to sales. †Setup-time and relevance-depth ratings on this page are this page’s own estimates from public documentation and deployment reports, not figures any vendor publishes.

Glean is intentionally left out of the pricing column above: it publishes plan structure and per-user licensing but no per-seat rate. See “What does Glean actually publish about pricing?” below.

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Why consider Glean alternatives?

You typically start evaluating Glean alternatives for one of three reasons: the per-seat price is opaque until a sales call, your team has hit a specific answer-quality or connector gap, or the deployment model is wrong for your stack. None of these reasons means Glean is a weak product. Glean announced it had surpassed $300 million in annual recurring revenue on 2026-05-28, 15 months after reaching $100 million. CEO and co-founder Arvind Jain frames the company’s ambition plainly: “The layer we built initially, a good search product, required us to deeply understand people and how they work and what their preferences are. All of that is now becoming foundational in terms of building high-quality agents,” he told TechCrunch (2026-02-15). What’s missing from most “Glean alternatives” roundups is a comparison written by someone who isn’t also trying to win your Glean budget; every top-ranking page for this query today is authored by a direct Glean competitor, the same pattern already documented for Braintrust’s own alternatives search. And whichever tool wins your search budget, the underlying conversational search over enterprise data pattern behind all nine tools compared below stays the same.

What does Glean actually publish about pricing?

More than the “no public pricing” shorthand suggests, and less than a buyer needs. Glean documents two named plans, Glean Core Suite and Glean Enterprise Flex, both licensed per user per month, with Enterprise Flex adding org-pooled FlexCredits for pay-per-use capabilities. It publishes what the seat fee includes. It publishes real dollar rates for one thing, Glean Model Hub token usage, which runs from $0.05 to $60.00 per million tokens depending on the model. What it does not publish anywhere is the per-seat rate itself, so the number you will actually pay arrives in a quote. Per-user dollar figures and total-cost estimates for Glean do circulate online; the ones we could trace all originate with vendors that sell against Glean, and Glean has never confirmed them, so this page does not repeat them.

What does an unpublished per-seat rate mean for mid-market and smaller teams?

It moves the first real budget conversation from a web page to a sales call, which is a heavier lift for a 40-person team than for a 4,000-person one. Glean’s Enterprise Flex documentation describes the plan as designed to be deployed to every employee in an organization, which tells you the shape of the deal Glean is optimizing for. Several alternatives here go the other way and post a number: Microsoft Copilot at roughly $30 per user per month as an M365 add-on, Onyx at $20 per user per month for managed cloud with a free self-hosted community edition, Perplexity Enterprise at $40 per seat. For a team that needs to model cost before it can justify a pilot, that difference decides the shortlist.

What limits answer accuracy across every tool on this list?

Retrieval itself, and it is the same ceiling for all nine tools here. Research on metadata-enriched retrieval (Yousuf et al., arXiv, 2026) found that even well-tuned embeddings only lift retrieval Context@5 from 33% to 55%, meaning close to half of retrieved results are still wrong after tuning. Any LLM-backed answer built on that foundation can still hallucinate. That ceiling is architectural rather than a flaw in any one product, and it applies equally to every semantic-search-driven tool compared here.

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What should you look for in a Glean alternative?

Five dimensions separate these tools in practice, and none of them is the headline feature list.

• Pricing transparency: whether the vendor publishes a rate card or gates its per-seat rate behind a sales call, the way Glean, Coveo, and Moveworks all do today.
• Self-hosting or open-source deployment: removes per-user pricing entirely for teams willing to run their own infrastructure, and answers data-residency requirements that a multi-tenant SaaS cannot.
• Connector breadth, meaning how many source systems an AI tool can actually reach (Slack, Drive, Jira, Confluence, GitHub, ServiceNow) the tool indexes out of the box.
• Whether a revoked user’s agent identity and access is enforced at answer time or only at the next reindex cycle, the exact context freshness gap covered in enterprise search with AI.
• And whether the tool stops at finding an answer or can also resolve a ticket or trigger a step in an AI agent’s plan, which is Moveworks’s core differentiator.

One evaluation framework worth borrowing, cited here by framing rather than endorsement: Domo’s Glean alternatives comparison (2026), also a direct Glean competitor, proposes a “permission inheritance test”, checking whether a tool correctly inherits a source system’s existing access controls rather than flattening them. It’s a genuinely useful question to ask any vendor on this list, Domo included.

Feature	Why it matters	Alternatives offering this
Public, self-serve pricing	Removes the sales-call gate on basic budgeting	Microsoft Copilot, Onyx, Perplexity Enterprise
Self-hosting / open source	Removes per-user cost entirely and keeps the index in your own infrastructure	Onyx, Elastic AI Search
Broad connector breadth (Glean publishes 275+)	Covers a genuinely fragmented enterprise tool stack	Glean, Coveo
Action-taking, not just retrieval	Resolves the task, not just the document	Moveworks, Glean (Glean Actions)
Cited, live-web-blended answers	Useful when internal knowledge alone is incomplete	Perplexity Enterprise, Glean (Universal Knowledge)
Native productivity-suite embedding	Fastest path to production for existing users	Microsoft Copilot

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Which Glean alternatives are worth evaluating?

Eight alternatives have enough sourced pricing, ratings, or deployment data to profile in full, each leading on a different dimension: Microsoft Copilot on native M365 embedding, Onyx on open-source control, Guru on curated trust and review volume, Coveo on relevance-engineering depth, Moveworks on service-desk resolution, Amazon Quick Suite on AWS-native deployment, Elastic AI Search on developer flexibility, and Perplexity Enterprise on cited web-blended answers. Where each one sits in a broader AI agent tech stack varies by architecture, standalone search layer versus embedded productivity-suite assistant, which shapes the trade-offs below as much as feature lists do. Each is profiled below.

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Alternative 1: Microsoft Copilot

Microsoft embeds 365 Copilot directly inside Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, pricing it at roughly $30 per user per month as an add-on to an existing M365 subscription, a figure also confirmed on Microsoft’s own pricing pages, per a head-to-head comparison from Nexus (2026). It carries an active G2 review profile, though a single confirmed aggregate rating and review count were not independently verifiable at research time; check that page directly for the current figure. For a team whose knowledge already lives almost entirely inside SharePoint, Teams, and Outlook, Copilot answers questions from a corpus it already has deep, native access to, at a rate you can read off a web page.

The honest trade-off is scope: Copilot’s visibility narrows sharply outside Microsoft’s own ecosystem. Slack, Jira, Confluence, and other non-Microsoft tools are not natively indexed the way Glean’s published 275+ out-of-the-box connectors cover them, so a team with knowledge spread across a heterogeneous stack gets a materially thinner picture from Copilot than from Glean.

Feature	Glean	Microsoft Copilot	Winner
Native M365 embedding	Connector-based, not native	Deeply native	Copilot
Connector breadth outside Microsoft	275+ connectors	Narrow outside M365	Glean
Published pricing	No published per-seat rate	~$30/user/mo add-on	Copilot
Setup time for existing M365 tenants†	Days to weeks	Hours to days	Copilot
G2 review volume	Active profile, figure unconfirmed	Active profile, figure unconfirmed	N/A

Best for: teams whose knowledge already lives almost entirely inside Microsoft 365 and want the fastest path to production at a published cost.

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Alternative 2: Onyx

Onyx, formerly Danswer, is the clearest open-source alternative on this list: MIT Expat at the core, self-hostable, with 40-plus connectors and a genuinely free community edition, according to Onyx’s own comparison page (2026). Read the repository LICENSE before you plan around that, though: every ee directory carries the Onyx Enterprise License instead, so the open-source core stops where the enterprise features start. A paid cloud tier starts at $20 per user per month on an annual plan for teams that want managed hosting without giving up the open-source core.

Choosing Onyx means accepting an engineering trade-off in exchange for cost and control: you operate the infrastructure yourself, where Glean manages the software in both its hosted and customer-hosted models. For teams with the engineering capacity to run it, that trade replaces a sales-negotiated price with infrastructure you already pay for.

Feature	Glean	Onyx	Winner
License	Proprietary platform (open-source Indexing SDK)	MIT core; ee dirs commercial	Onyx
Self-hosting	Customer Hosted (GCP/AWS)	Yes	Depends
Who operates the deployment	Glean, in either model	You	Depends
Managed cloud option	Yes	Yes ($20/user/mo)	Tie
Engineering effort to run	Low (Glean manages the software in both models)	Higher if self-hosted	Glean

Best for: teams with engineering capacity who want open-source control and the option to self-host for free.

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Alternative 3: Guru

Guru holds the largest review base on this list, a 4.7-out-of-5 rating across 2,317 reviews on G2. Guru publishes no rate card at all: its pricing page states that “your investment is tailored to your organization’s scale, knowledge complexity, and AI maturity” and routes every buyer to sales. Third-party aggregators widely cite roughly $25 per user per month; that figure appears nowhere on Guru’s own site, so treat it as a buyer-reported estimate. Guru leads with governance rather than raw retrieval: answers are permission-aware and citation-enforced, and Guru says its Knowledge Agents verify or unverify roughly 80 to 90% of content automatically from usage signals, content age and policy rules, escalating to named experts only when those signals disagree.

Verification is Guru’s primary model, where Glean treats it as one signal alongside retrieval. Glean documents verification badges, authoritative Answers and curated Collections; in Guru, the verification state is what the product is organized around.

Feature	Glean	Guru	Winner
Review volume (G2)	Figure unconfirmed	2,317	N/A
Verified answers	Verification badges, Answers, Collections alongside retrieval	The primary model	Guru
Verification mechanism	Owner and moderator verification with re-verification reminders	Guru says ~80 to 90% automated, with expert escalation	Depends
Pricing	No published per-seat rate	Not published; quoted per organization	Tie (neither publishes a rate)
Connector breadth	275+	100+ source connectors	Glean

Best for: teams that have been burned by confident, wrong AI answers and want verification state to be the organizing principle, not one ranking signal.

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Alternative 4: Coveo

Coveo built its reputation in support and e-commerce search relevance, and holds a 4.3-out-of-5 rating across 142 G2 reviews. Its differentiator is ranking quality: Coveo’s machine-learning relevance models are purpose-built for the kind of high-volume, customer-facing search where a slightly better result order measurably changes conversion or resolution rates.

That relevance depth comes at real implementation cost. Coveo’s pricing is fully custom and enterprise-gated, and tuning its ranking models properly is a multi-week effort, longer than most of the tools on this list.

Feature	Glean	Coveo	Winner
Primary use case	General workplace search	Support/e-commerce relevance	Depends on use case
Relevance-tuning depth†	General-purpose ranking	Deep, purpose-built ranking models	Coveo
Setup time†	Days to weeks	Weeks	Glean
Pricing	No published per-seat rate	Custom, enterprise	Tie (neither publishes a rate)
G2 rating	Figure unconfirmed	4.3/5 (142)	N/A

Best for: teams whose primary need is customer-facing or support-search relevance, not general internal workplace search.

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Alternative 5: Moveworks

Moveworks takes the most structurally different approach on this list: rather than returning an answer, it is built to resolve the underlying IT or HR request directly. ServiceNow completed its acquisition of Moveworks on 15 December 2025 and launched ServiceNow EmployeeWorks in February 2026, which pairs Moveworks’ conversational AI and enterprise search with ServiceNow’s own workflows. ServiceNow states that Moveworks “continues to be offered as a standalone product within the ServiceNow portfolio”, buyable independently or as part of a ServiceNow deployment. Moveworks can reset a password, provision access, or close a ticket as part of the same interaction, and it is tuned end to end for that single workflow.

Moveworks is strongest on IT and HR service-desk resolution, where password resets, access provisioning and ticket closure are documented end to end, though it now positions across every department rather than the service desk alone.

Feature	Glean	Moveworks	Winner
Scope	General workplace search	IT/HR service-desk resolution first, now positioned across departments	Depends on use case
Action-taking (not just retrieval)	Yes (Glean Actions, read and write)	Core capability	Depends on use case
Service-desk workflow depth	General-purpose	Tuned end to end for ticket resolution	Moveworks
Pricing	No published per-seat rate	Custom, enterprise	Tie (neither publishes a rate)
Setup time†	Days to weeks	Weeks	Glean

Best for: IT and HR teams whose real goal is resolving a request, not just finding the document that explains it.

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Alternative 6: Amazon Quick Suite (formerly Amazon Q Business)

AWS closed Amazon Q Business to new customers and now points buyers to Amazon Quick Suite, which it calls “the next evolution of Amazon Q Business”. Existing Q Business customers keep bug fixes and security updates but no new features, and AWS publishes a migration path that carries the existing index across. The old Q Business rate card is still posted, $3 per user per month for Lite and $20 for Pro, but it is no longer a price a new buyer can transact at. AWS has published no end-of-support date.

The trade-off mirrors Copilot’s: the AWS option is strongest inside its own ecosystem. Teams whose knowledge lives outside AWS get a thinner experience than Glean’s broader, platform-agnostic connector set. Q Business documents 25 connectors; Glean publishes 275+.

Feature	Glean	Amazon Quick Suite / Q Business	Winner
Availability to new buyers	Generally available	Q Business closed to new customers; Quick Suite is the successor	Glean
Entry pricing	No published per-seat rate	Q Business posted $3-$20/user/mo, not transactable by new buyers	N/A
AWS-native integration	Connector-based	Native	AWS
Documented connectors	275+	25 (Q Business)	Glean
Platform-agnostic breadth	Broad	Narrower outside AWS	Glean

Best for: AWS-heavy stacks that want their search layer inside the same cloud account. New buyers start with Amazon Quick Suite, not Q Business.

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Alternative 7: Elastic AI Search

Elastic AI Search, built on the Elastic Stack, is the most developer-first option on this list, priced on usage rather than a flat per-seat rate. Elastic’s broader search product line, the closest confirmed figure available since Elastic does not break out a separate “AI Search” rating, holds 4.4 out of 5 across 525 reviews on G2. It gives engineering teams maximum control over indexing, ranking, and deployment, including a fully self-managed option outside of Elastic Cloud.

That flexibility is also the cost. Elastic AI Search requires meaningfully more in-house search expertise to configure well than a turnkey product like Glean, which trades some configurability for a faster out-of-the-box setup.

Feature	Glean	Elastic AI Search	Winner
Configurability	Turnkey, less flexible	Highly configurable	Elastic
Self-hosting	Customer Hosted (GCP/AWS)	Yes, fully self-managed	Depends
In-house expertise required	Low	High	Glean
Pricing model	No published per-seat rate	Usage-based	Elastic (more transparent structure)
Setup time†	Days to weeks	Days to weeks (expertise-dependent)	Tie

Best for: engineering-led teams that want maximum control over search infrastructure and are willing to configure it themselves.

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Alternative 8: Perplexity Enterprise

Perplexity Enterprise blends internal document search with live, cited web results in a single interface, at $40 per seat per month on the Enterprise Pro tier, a figure published on Perplexity’s own enterprise pricing page. Perplexity’s general G2 profile, the closest confirmed figure available since Perplexity does not break out a separate Enterprise-tier rating, holds 4.4 out of 5 across 326 reviews on G2. Its differentiator is citation format: every answer carries a visible source link, internal or external, which is a meaningfully different trust model than a tool that only searches inside your own systems.

Perplexity Enterprise’s deep-indexing of nuanced internal app permissions is lighter than Glean’s, though, which matters more for organizations with intricate access-control requirements than for teams that mostly need a fast, well-cited answer.

Feature	Glean	Perplexity Enterprise	Winner
Live web blending	Yes (Universal Knowledge)	Yes	Tie
Internal permission depth	Deep	Lighter	Glean
Citation transparency	Every answer cited	Every answer cited	Tie
Pricing	No published per-seat rate	~$40/user/mo	Perplexity
G2 review volume	Figure unconfirmed	326 reviews, 4.4/5 (general profile)	N/A

Best for: teams that want internal knowledge blended with live, cited web results in the same query.

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How does Glean compare to these alternatives overall?

Laid side by side, the eight alternatives split into three groups: native cloud and productivity-suite extensions (Microsoft Copilot, Amazon Quick Suite), open or developer-controlled platforms (Onyx, Elastic AI Search), and purpose-differentiated products (Guru’s curation, Moveworks’s action-taking, Perplexity Enterprise’s cited web blending, Coveo’s relevance depth).

Alternative	Strengths vs. Glean	Considerations	Best for
Microsoft Copilot	Native M365 embedding, published per-seat cost	Narrow outside Microsoft’s ecosystem	M365-heavy stacks
Onyx	Open source, free self-hosted tier, you operate it	Requires engineering effort to self-host	Cost- or control-sensitive teams
Guru	Largest review base, verification as the organizing model	Governs the knowledge layer, not the systems beneath it	Teams burned by wrong AI answers
Coveo	Deep relevance-tuning for support/e-commerce	Long setup, no published rate	Customer-facing search
Moveworks	Service-desk resolution tuned end to end	Deepest in IT and HR workflows	IT/HR ticket resolution
Amazon Quick Suite	AWS-native, inside one cloud account	Q Business is closed to new customers	AWS-native stacks
Elastic AI Search	Maximum configurability, self-hosting	Requires in-house search expertise	Engineering-led teams
Perplexity Enterprise	Cited, live-web-blended answers	Lighter internal permission depth	Blended internal/external search

Whichever of the eight you land on, the retrieval ceiling stays the same: metadata-enriched embeddings still only reach 55% Context@5 accuracy, so nearly half of what any of these tools surfaces is still an imperfect match without something underneath deciding what’s actually authoritative, the same data catalog-adjacent question every one of these vendors eventually runs into.

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How do you choose between Glean and its alternatives?

Your decision should be driven by which specific gap is blocking you, price, connector breadth, self-hosting, or action-taking, rather than dissatisfaction with Glean alone.

Stay with Glean if:

• Your knowledge is genuinely spread across five or more disconnected systems, your LLM knowledge base is already fragmented across them, and you need the breadth Glean publishes at 275+ out-of-the-box connectors.
• You can absorb a sales-negotiated price that Glean does not publish per seat.
• You value Glean’s established track record over a lower published cost.
• Broad, cross-department knowledge discovery matters more to you than a service-desk workflow tuned end to end.

Consider alternatives if:

• You’re already deep in Microsoft 365 and want native embedding at a lower published cost: Microsoft Copilot.
• You need open-source control and want to operate the deployment yourself: Onyx.
• Verification state should be the organizing model, not one ranking signal: Guru.
• You need a service-desk workflow tuned end to end: Moveworks.
• You’re AWS-native and want everything inside one cloud account: Amazon Quick Suite.

By company profile

Startups and small teams (1-50 employees): Onyx’s free community edition removes the pricing-opacity problem entirely, at the cost of running the infrastructure. AWS-native teams start with Amazon Quick Suite, since Amazon Q Business is closed to new customers.

Mid-market (50-500 employees): Microsoft Copilot or Guru, depending on whether native M365 embedding or verified-answer trust matters more; Copilot publishes entry pricing a mid-market team can evaluate without a sales call.

Enterprise (500+ employees): Glean, Coveo, and Moveworks are all realistic here; the deciding factor becomes which specific capability, connector breadth, relevance depth, or action-taking, matters most, not company size itself.

By use case

• General workplace knowledge discovery, heavy Microsoft footprint: Microsoft Copilot
• Cost- or control-sensitive, engineering capacity available: Onyx
• IT/HR service-desk resolution, not just search: Moveworks
• Customer-facing or e-commerce search relevance: Coveo
• Internal search blended with cited live web answers: Perplexity Enterprise

Every one of these choices still leaves the same open question: once the tool finds an answer, what decision trace shows whether that answer is current, permitted, and authoritative. That question is the subject of the next section.

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Beyond search: when do you need governed context underneath Glean or any alternative?

None of the eight tools above competes with Atlan, which is why it doesn’t appear as a ninth alternative in the table. Glean’s own documentation lists Atlan among its supported remote MCP servers, the clearest available evidence that the two occupy different layers of the same stack rather than the same buying decision. Atlan’s Enterprise Data Graph adds certification, ownership, and sensitivity to the same assets any of these eight tools index, and mcp delivers that business context to Glean, and to any other MCP-compatible search or agent tool, at query time. That same governed layer is also what keeps a compromised or prompt-injected query from silently exposing data through a search interface that was never designed to check policy at answer time, and it’s the reason a genuine AI context platform sits a layer below any of the nine tools compared here, Atlan included. Why MCP matters for AI agents generally is worth a read before assuming any two MCP-connected tools do the same job.

The distinction that matters here is a layer distinction, not a capability scorecard. These tools are built to retrieve and act on enterprise content, and several of them do both well. Glean documents verification badges, authoritative Answers, agent identity and query-time permission enforcement; Guru’s Knowledge Agents check content age and usage signals; Moveworks resolves the ticket outright. What none of them carries is the asset-level layer a data catalog provides: certification with a named business owner, lineage back to the system of record, and sensitivity classification attached to the data asset rather than the document. What a search tool reads from, it does not itself certify at the data-asset level, which is the gap covered in enterprise search with AI and tested directly in context quality testing for AI agents. A 2026 arXiv study found metadata-enriched retrieval still only reaches 55% accuracy at best, which is the ceiling every search tool compared here shares no matter how good its interface is.

That ceiling is worth taking seriously precisely because the category itself is moving. Glean now describes itself as “an AI platform for work that unifies enterprise search, assistants, and agents on company context”, which is a bigger claim than search, and the language across this market is converging faster than the architectures underneath it. Whichever of the eight alternatives you choose, the same question stays open: what decides whether the tool’s answer is trustworthy, not just findable, is a separate layer from the interface you pick to ask the question, the same layer enterprise-ready AI agents depend on and the reason context engineering starts from governed retrieval rather than a clever prompt. Search that stops at retrieval alone returns noise instead of a certified answer at enterprise scale, and no amount of AI agent harness engineering on top of the interface fixes a context problem underneath it. For teams ready to build that layer rather than just pick a search tool, how to implement an enterprise context layer for AI is the practical next step, and what a context layer actually is is worth reading first if the term itself is still fuzzy.

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Real stories from real customers: governed context reaching search tools

Neither quote is about Glean specifically; both are about the same shared-language, governed-context mechanism the MCP section above just described, applied here to the search use case.

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Why the search tool you pick matters less than what feeds it accurate answers

Glean remains a genuinely strong choice: $300 million in ARR, 275+ published connectors, and a leadership team that is itself arguing publicly that the real fight has moved to “the layer beneath the interface.” Nothing here argues otherwise, and none of the eight alternatives above is weak either; each wins clearly on the specific dimension it was built for. The decision to switch should be driven by pricing transparency, deployment model, workflow depth, or ecosystem fit, not dissatisfaction alone.

What every one of these nine tools has in common is where they operate: on top of the documents, tickets and messages your systems already produce. None of them certifies the data asset underneath, with a named owner, lineage to the system of record, and a sensitivity classification that travels with the asset. That is the layer Atlan sits in, rather than competing inside the search interface. The search tool you pick decides how fast you get an answer. What feeds it governed context decides whether that answer is worth trusting.

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FAQs about Glean alternatives

1. What is the best alternative to Glean for enterprise AI search?

The best alternative depends on why you are leaving Glean. Microsoft Copilot fits teams already standardized on Microsoft 365. Onyx fits teams that want open-source, self-hosted control. Guru fits teams that want curated, verified answers instead of raw retrieval. Moveworks fits teams that want the tool to resolve a ticket, not just find a document.

2. Is Glean open source?

No. Glean’s platform is proprietary and commercially licensed. It is not, however, SaaS-only: Glean documents a Customer Hosted deployment (formerly Cloud-Prem) that runs single-tenant inside your own GCP or AWS account, with Glean managing upgrades and patching. Onyx is the closest open-source equivalent: MIT Expat at the core (its ee directories are commercially licensed), self-hostable, with a free community edition.

3. Does Microsoft Copilot replace Glean?

For teams whose knowledge lives almost entirely inside Microsoft 365, Copilot can replace most of what Glean does at a published $30 per user per month on top of an existing M365 subscription. For teams with knowledge spread across Slack, Jira, Confluence, and other non-Microsoft systems, Copilot’s visibility narrows sharply outside the Microsoft stack.

4. What is the most cost-effective alternative to Glean?

Onyx is the most cost-effective option: a genuinely free, self-hosted community edition, with managed cloud hosting at $20 per user per month. AWS still posts lower per-user rates for Amazon Q Business, $3 to $20, but that product is closed to new customers and AWS points new buyers to Amazon Quick Suite.

5. Is enterprise AI search the same as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)?

No. RAG is the underlying architecture, retrieving relevant chunks and feeding them to a language model to generate an answer. Enterprise AI search is the product experience built on top of RAG, plus connectors, permissions, and a chat or search interface. Every tool compared here uses some form of RAG under the hood.

6. How hard is it to switch from Glean to another enterprise search tool?

Connector re-setup is usually the fast part; every alternative here connects to the same core systems (Slack, Google Drive, Confluence, Jira). The slow part is rebuilding permission mappings and any curated Answers or verified-content workflows Glean users have accumulated, which typically takes several weeks for a mid-market team.

7. Can you self-host a Glean alternative?

Onyx’s core is MIT Expat and self-hostable with no paid tier required. Its ee directories carry the Onyx Enterprise License, so it isn’t open source end to end. Elastic AI Search can also run self-managed on Elastic’s own infrastructure stack for teams that want direct control over deployment.

8. Does Atlan compete with Glean?

No. Glean’s own documentation lists Atlan as a supported MCP server. Glean is the search and chat interface employees use; Atlan is the governed context layer that certifies whether what Glean retrieves is current, permitted, and authoritative.

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Sources

1. Glean’s top line crosses $300M as AI budget cutting becomes its major selling point, TechCrunch, 2026
2. The enterprise AI land grab is on. Glean is building the layer beneath the interface, TechCrunch, 2026
3. Glean revenue, valuation & funding, Sacra, 2026
4. Glean Pricing 2026: Plans, Costs, and What You Actually Pay, Workativ, 2026
5. Glean vs Microsoft Copilot: Enterprise Search vs AI Assistant, Nexus, 2026
6. Open-Source Glean Alternatives for Enterprise Search, Onyx, 2026
7. Top Glean Alternatives for AI-Powered Analytics, Domo, 2026
8. Best Enterprise AI Assistant in 2026: 8 Platforms Compared, Coworker AI, 2026
9. Supported remote MCP servers, Glean Documentation, 2026
10. Glean Technologies Products, G2, 2026
11. Guru Products, G2, 2026
12. Coveo Solutions Inc Products, G2, 2026
13. Moveworks G2 Reviews: What Users Really Say, Rezolve.ai, 2026
14. Utilizing Metadata for Better Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Yousuf et al., arXiv, 2026
15. Microsoft 365 Copilot Reviews, G2, 2026
16. Amazon Q Business Reviews, G2, 2026
17. Elastic Products, G2, 2026
18. Perplexity AI Products, G2, 2026
19. Amazon Q Business Pricing, AWS, 2026
20. onyx-dot-app/onyx LICENSE, GitHub