Glean

What is Glean?

Glean is an enterprise search and AI assistant that spans every app a company connects to it. A worker asks a question in plain language, and Glean searches across documents, chat, email, tickets, code, and wikis at once, then returns ranked results and a written answer that cites the sources behind it. The aim is one search box for the whole company, so people stop switching between tools to find what they need.

Glean makes the product. The company was founded in 2019 by Arvind Jain, a former Google search engineer, along with a team that set out to bring that quality of search inside the workplace. Glean focuses on enterprise knowledge: connecting a company's apps, indexing their content, and keeping every result inside the permissions each person already has.

The audience is mid-size and larger organizations where information lives across many systems and staff lose time looking for it. Engineering, support, sales, and operations teams all fit, because each one deals with knowledge spread across separate tools that a single search can pull together.

Key features

Glean centers on a set of capabilities that turn scattered company content into one searchable, answer-ready surface:

• ▸Cross-app search: one query searches across documents, chat, email, tickets, code, and wikis at once, so staff find content without knowing which tool holds it.
• ▸Permission-aware access: Glean mirrors the access rights in each source system, so a person sees only the content they have permission to open.
• ▸Cited answers: the assistant writes an answer to a question and links the sources behind it, so staff can verify where a claim came from.
• ▸Agents: configurable helpers carry out multi-step tasks and workflows on top of company knowledge, moving Glean from search into doing work.
• ▸Company knowledge: Glean builds a model of a company's people, projects, and terms, so results reflect who works on what and what internal names mean.
• ▸Connectors: prebuilt links to common workplace apps let admins index a new source without custom engineering for each one.

The permission-aware design is central. Because Glean respects the access rights held in each connected system, search never exposes a document to someone who could not open it in the source app. That control is what lets a company index sensitive content and still hand every employee one search box.

How well does it work?

Glean performs well when a company connects many of its apps. The more sources it indexes, the more one query can replace a hunt across separate tools, and the cited answers give staff a fast way to trust and check what they find. The permission model means an organization can index sensitive systems without leaking access, which is a common blocker for company-wide search.

The limits track the setup. Glean is worth most when its connectors reach the apps a company relies on, so a source left unconnected stays invisible to search. Standing up those connectors, mapping permissions, and tuning results takes admin and IT effort up front. Answer quality also rides on the content itself: stale or duplicated documents produce stale or conflicting answers, so the underlying knowledge base still matters.

A practical way to raise Glean's value is to connect the apps that hold your highest-traffic knowledge first, then add sources in order of how much staff search them. Coverage of the busiest tools drives adoption faster than breadth for its own sake.

Glean pricing

Glean uses custom, per-seat pricing. There is no public rate card. Cost is quoted based on how many seats you need and which connectors and capabilities you turn on, and the figure is set during a conversation with the Glean team.

Because pricing is custom, the tiers below describe how a deployment is scoped rather than fixed prices:

The per-seat model favors organizations rolling Glean out to a wide set of staff, since value grows as more people search a shared, well-connected index. Because there is no list price, budget for a sales conversation and ask how seats are counted, which connectors carry extra cost, and what onboarding covers, so you can weigh the total against the time your teams lose to searching today.

Who should use Glean?

Glean fits organizations where knowledge sits across many apps and staff lose time finding it. It suits these groups in particular:

• ▸Mid-size and larger companies with dozens of connected tools, where no single app holds the answer to a given question.
• ▸Engineering and product teams that search across code, tickets, design docs, and chat to understand a system or a decision.
• ▸Support and operations teams that need cited answers from internal policy, runbooks, and past cases.
• ▸Enterprises with strict access rules that require search to respect each person's permissions in every source.

Glean is a weaker match for small teams that run on one or two apps, where a built-in search covers the job, and for organizations that cannot commit the admin and IT effort to connect their sources and maintain the index.

Alternatives and how it compares

Glean competes with a field of enterprise search and workplace assistant tools. The right comparison depends on your app stack and how much you value permission-aware search across everything.

• ▸Microsoft Copilot: a work assistant tied to Microsoft 365 that searches and drafts across Office apps, a strong fit for organizations centered on Microsoft's stack.
• ▸Guru: a knowledge platform that surfaces verified answers inside the tools staff use, focused on curated company knowledge more than broad search.
• ▸Coveo: an enterprise search and relevance platform aimed at large deployments across support, commerce, and internal use cases.

Glean's edge is permission-aware search across a wide range of connected apps, paired with cited answers, company knowledge, and agents. If your knowledge is spread across many tools from different vendors, Glean is built to unify them. If your work sits inside one vendor's suite, a native assistant from that vendor may cover more of the job, so weigh the breadth of your stack against the price.

Limitations and getting started

Be honest about the trade-offs before you commit. Glean's value rides on connected sources, so an app left unconnected stays outside search, and answer quality reflects the content you index, so stale or duplicated documents produce weak answers. The custom, per-seat pricing means no public rate to compare, and the product aims at mid-size and larger organizations, so small teams may find it heavy for their needs.

Getting started follows a clear path:

1. 1List the apps that hold your most-searched knowledge and rank them by how much staff look for content there.
2. 2Scope the deployment with Glean, including seat count, which connectors you need, and how onboarding is handled.
3. 3Connect your top sources, confirm that Glean mirrors the access rights in each one, and check that results respect permissions.
4. 4Pilot with one or two teams, gather feedback on result quality, and clean up stale or duplicate content that muddies answers.
5. 5Widen the rollout to more teams and connectors as adoption and answer quality hold up.

A staged rollout keeps risk low: start with the busiest apps and one or two teams, confirm that search returns trusted, permission-safe results, then add sources and users as the numbers hold. Because Glean's value grows with coverage, early wins on high-traffic knowledge build the case for a wider deployment.