What Is Glean? Enterprise AI Search Explained

What is Glean? It’s an enterprise AI platform that searches your company’s apps, answers questions and runs agents. Pricing is per user and quote-only.

Quick answer: Glean is a work assistant for companies. It connects to tools like Slack, Google Drive, Jira, Confluence, SharePoint, GitHub and Salesforce, indexes what’s inside them, and lets employees search or chat with all of it in one place. It respects each app’s existing permissions, so people only see what they already have access to. Glean doesn’t publish prices. Its pricing docs describe a per-user, per-month license with pooled credits for heavier AI use. We checked Glean’s site and docs on November 2, 2026.

One naming note: Glean.ai is a different company that makes accounts payable software. This guide is about Glean Technologies at glean.com.

What Glean does

Glean started in 2019 as enterprise search and grew into what it now calls an enterprise AI platform. Its main products are:

• Glean Search: one search box across all your connected work apps.
• Glean Assistant: a chat assistant that answers with your company’s documents, data and people directory, and can analyze files and build slides.
• Glean Agents: agents you describe in plain language to automate multi-step work. Glean’s October 2026 update lets teams build, test and publish governed agents from where they already code.
• Glean Protect: controls that flag sensitive content and unusual activity.
• Glean Intelligence: routes each task to one of 40+ open and frontier models to balance price and quality.

Under all of this sits what Glean calls Enterprise Context: connectors, a search index, an Enterprise Graph that maps how people, documents and processes relate, and a memory that keeps learning. Developers can reach the same index through Glean’s Search, Chat and Agents APIs, a web SDK and MCP support. If those terms are new, our explainers on RAG and MCP cover the basics.

Why companies buy Glean

The pitch is simple: an AI assistant is only as useful as the company knowledge it can reach. Glean’s own numbers show it’s working. The company says it passed $300M in annual recurring revenue, tripling from $100M in 15 months, and that more than 85% of customers use it across five or more departments.

Our take: Glean’s real advantage isn’t the chat window, which every vendor now has. It’s the permission-aware index that took years to build. That’s also why it’s hard to replace once rolled out.

How much does Glean cost?

Glean doesn’t list prices. Its pricing page redirects to the homepage and asks you to book a demo. What Glean does publish is how the billing works:

Glean model	How you pay	What’s included
Enterprise Flex	Per user, per month, plus pooled FlexCredits	Unlimited fast-mode searches and chats; thinking-mode queries on standard models up to 100 per user a week
Extra usage	FlexCredits at Glean’s rate card	Premium models, agent runs, code writing, slides and meeting notes
Core Suite	Per user, per month, plus Model Hub usage	Model calls billed at per-million-token rates

Building, testing and sharing agents is unlimited on Enterprise Flex. Running them uses credits. Because Glean sells through sales-led contracts, the only reliable number is a quote, and it’s worth asking early about seat minimums and how fast a typical team burns credits.

Glean alternatives

• Microsoft 365 Copilot: the default pick if your company lives in Outlook, Teams and SharePoint.
• ChatGPT Enterprise and Claude Enterprise: strong general assistants that add company connectors.
• Notion Enterprise Search: included in Notion’s Business plan at $20 per seat a month billed yearly, and still marked beta. It searches Notion plus connected apps like Slack and Google Drive. See what’s free in Notion AI for the plan details.
• Guru and GoSearch: other knowledge-base and workplace search tools worth a demo.

For public-web research rather than company files, AI search engines are a better fit. Our roundup of AI search engines covers them.

Is Glean worth it?

Glean makes sense for large companies with knowledge spread across many apps, where people waste time hunting for documents and answers. For a small team that already works in one or two tools, a Notion or Microsoft plan with built-in AI search is cheaper and simpler. Ask for a pilot on your own data before you sign.

Frequently asked questions