Glean Alternatives 2026: Gemini Enterprise, Microsoft 365 Copilot, ChatGPT Business, Claude Enterprise, Dust, Onyx and Guru (Compared)

The best Glean alternatives are the ones that fit your existing software and preserve who can see each document. Start with Gemini Enterprise for a Google-centered organization, Microsoft 365 Copilot for a Microsoft-centered one, and Onyx when self-hosting is mandatory; the 7 options below also cover existing ChatGPT or Claude seats, custom agents and a managed knowledge base. Glean publishes no price, so compare its written quote with each alternative's documented billing model.

Verified against each maker's public pricing, product pages and permission documentation on 27 October 2026. These are documentation-based comparisons, not hands-on product tests. Prices below are in USD and describe the stated entry offer, not the total cost of a deployment.

Glean is an enterprise AI platform combining search, company context and agents. Its public buying route leads to a demo request, with no published list price. A replacement needs to solve your actual job: finding authoritative information, using it to complete work, or keeping a company knowledge base current.

Glean Alternatives at a Glance

Start with the row that matches your reason for reconsidering Glean. The order follows buying situations, rather than a universal ranking of answer quality.

Microsoft's offer requires an eligible existing Business subscription, and its enterprise add-on also requires a qualifying Microsoft 365 license. Onyx's free software still needs infrastructure and a configured model. Those are different purchasing commitments from a ready-to-use hosted seat.

Choose by What You Already Run

Reuse an existing platform first when its approved connectors cover the work. For an operations lead who needs to find the latest procedure and draft a response, another company-wide search contract may be unnecessary. Start with the assistant your employees already open, then check whether it can retrieve the authoritative sources with the correct access.

A Google-centered organization should first distinguish the Gemini already available through Workspace from the separate Gemini Enterprise offering. A Microsoft-centered organization should make the equivalent distinction between included Copilot Chat and a paid Copilot add-on. Owning the suite gives you a useful starting point, not proof that the broader search requirement is included.

Choose Onyx when running the system yourself is a requirement. That decision transfers operational work to your infrastructure owner. Choose Dust when an operator wants to assemble and maintain agents for specific jobs. Choose Guru when the recurring problem is that employees find conflicting, outdated answers and somebody needs to own the knowledge.

The rule that flips the choice: your preferred product must find the required sources for an authorized employee while withholding them from an unauthorized one. If it cannot do both under its documented setup, familiar branding and a lower seat price do not rescue the purchase.

The Seven Alternatives, Compared

1. Gemini Enterprise: Start Here for a Google-Centered Organization

Gemini Enterprise is Google's company-data assistant and agent offering, and it is the first candidate to pilot when your working knowledge already lives in Google Workspace. Its Business edition connects to Workspace and other business applications, so a sales operations lead could ask for an account summary using the approved documents and connected systems behind that account. The useful question is whether it covers the sources missing from your existing Workspace experience. Choose it for a Google-centered starting point; select the edition from your governance requirements.

Google distinguishes the Gemini app included for Workspace commercial customers from the Gemini Enterprise app, which addresses a broader set of company sources and agents. Before adding a subscription, give your Workspace administrator an example question and identify the data it requires. A request grounded entirely in existing Workspace content deserves a different evaluation from one spanning several external systems. Google's product FAQ explains that distinction.

What document permissions need: Business administrators control which connectors members may use, and members connect their own data. For the managed editions covered by Google's Cloud documentation, administrators must configure an identity provider, the service that maps a signed-in employee to their account and groups. Google requires Google Identity for Workspace sources. Source permissions still determine which content the user can see. Identity-provider setup is part of deployment, not an optional sign-in polish step.

Custom content needs extra care. If your IT team imports files through Cloud Storage or builds a BigQuery-backed source, Google's access-control documentation requires the appropriate access-control setup and document permission metadata. Uploading the files does not automatically recreate who could read them elsewhere.

For a mid-market company, make the initial pilot a narrow workflow such as finding the current customer escalation policy. Include a policy visible to everyone and a restricted supporting document. If your deployment needs enterprise-grade compliance and broader administration, Google directs buyers toward Standard or Plus; the Business entry offer does not establish that those requirements are covered. Our Gemini Enterprise guide develops the pilot decision further.

Best for: Google-centered organizations whose missing knowledge spans approved business systems.
Standout: A Google route from company-data questions to agent workflows.
Pricing: Business starts at $21/seat/month; confirm the required edition and subscription terms on Google's page.
Free trial: Business offers 30 days.

1. 1

   Pilot the Google route with one defined job

   Choose a recurring question whose answer already has an owner, such as the approved escalation procedure. List the source documents before choosing connectors.

2. 2

   Match the edition and identity setup

   Have the administrator check Business connector availability or the managed edition's identity requirements. For custom imports, include document access metadata from the start.

3. 3

   Compare an authorized and a restricted user

   Ask the same question from both accounts. Open the cited documents, check the current version, and record both missing results and content that should have been withheld.

2. Microsoft 365 Copilot: Glean vs Copilot for Microsoft 365 Users

Microsoft 365 Copilot is the natural first comparison when people work in Microsoft 365 and want answers inside that environment. The paid enterprise add-on provides business-data-grounded chat and assistance in applications including Word, Excel, Outlook and Teams. For an operations director preparing a project update, retrieving the relevant material and turning it into an editable work product can matter more than adopting a separate search destination. Choose it when Microsoft 365 is where the work happens and your required external connectors pass the access test.

The purchase turns on coverage and workflow. If most authoritative information already sits in your Microsoft environment, evaluate the add-on before commissioning a separate search layer. If critical answers depend on external systems, check those connectors individually. A familiar interface is useful only if it reaches the information that makes the answer correct.

What document permissions need: Microsoft's connector setup offers a consequential choice. Only people with access to this data source follows the source system's access control lists, or ACLs: the record of who may read each item. Visible to everyone gives the organization wider visibility. Microsoft explicitly warns that the wrong setting can expose sensitive content. Its connector-permission guide places the review under Copilot > Connectors > Your Connections in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center.

That guide also says an existing connector's access mode cannot currently be changed in place; administrators must recreate the connection using Custom setup. Review this before a broad rollout. Discovering the wrong mode after adoption creates avoidable migration work, even if the underlying source folders were configured correctly.

A useful pilot is a project-status question that needs an approved team document and a restricted management note. The ordinary project member should get a useful answer from the approved source. The assistant should not need the management note to appear helpful. Treat an appropriately incomplete answer as preferable to an unauthorized complete one.

Best for: Organizations already working heavily in Microsoft 365.
Standout: Business-data assistance inside the applications where employees produce work.
Pricing: Eligible Copilot Business offer $18/user/month paid yearly for the first year; enterprise add-on $30/user/month paid yearly, both requiring a qualifying base subscription. Business offer, enterprise terms.
Free trial: The checked page advertises included Copilot Chat, not a trial of the full paid enterprise add-on.

3. ChatGPT Business: Use the Seats You Already Have

ChatGPT Business is a strong first pilot when employees already use ChatGPT and need company context for a bounded job. Its Company Knowledge plugin can use supported connected sources, so an account manager could gather approved customer context before drafting a handoff. The value is keeping retrieval and follow-on work in a familiar assistant. Try existing Business seats before buying another platform for a workflow they can already cover.

OpenAI's current documentation calls Company Knowledge a plugin, replacing the previous company-knowledge option in chat. The plugin must be available and installed, and at least one supported source must be authorized. Members can invoke @Company Knowledge or select it from the tools menu. Installing it is not equivalent to connecting every company application. Company Knowledge setup defines those prerequisites.

What document permissions need: the connected account must have the underlying source access. Workspace permission to use an app and provider permission to read a file are separate checks. For Google Drive, a ChatGPT administrator controls available actions, while the Google Workspace administrator controls the required authorization scopes, the categories of access the integration requests.

The Google Drive setup guide says ChatGPT cannot use files the connected Google account cannot open. If an action is enabled in ChatGPT but the corresponding Google authorization scope is blocked, the connection or action can fail. Assign responsibility on both sides: the person managing ChatGPT availability and the person managing the source application.

For an IT lead, that makes the pilot question specific: can the intended employees access this source in this workspace, under this connection mode? Do not accept “ChatGPT supports connectors” as the whole answer. Confirm the source, authorization method, regional availability and required actions in the workspace you will use. Start with read access when the job is retrieval, and evaluate any write actions separately.

The main limitation is buying scope. A successful account-handoff workflow does not establish complete discovery across the company's entire document estate. Keep the initial job bounded, collect questions it cannot answer, and use those misses to decide whether a dedicated search purchase earns its additional administration. Our ChatGPT for Business guide covers the broader workspace decision.

Best for: Existing ChatGPT teams needing approved company context during everyday work.
Standout: Company Knowledge inside an assistant employees already use.
Pricing: Standard seats start at $20/seat/month billed annually on OpenAI's pricing page.
Free trial: No general Business trial is advertised on the checked pricing page.

4. Claude Enterprise: Glean vs Claude for Existing Users

Claude Enterprise fits organizations that already work in Claude and need enterprise administration alongside company-data assistance. Its Ask Your Org search project gives employees a dedicated place to query connected knowledge, such as the documents and conversations behind an operational decision. An owner configures the project, and employees connect the sources they can use. Evaluate the search you already have before upgrading solely for the word “enterprise.”

Claude's enterprise-search feature is available on both Team and Enterprise. The Enterprise buying case therefore rests on the additional controls and commercial arrangement you need, rather than exclusive access to company search. Anthropic documents audit logs, automated user provisioning through SCIM, and custom retention among the Enterprise controls. Enterprise plan documentation is the appropriate checklist for that upgrade.

What document permissions need: standard user-authenticated connectors use each person's source permissions. But Anthropic names an exception: a custom connector using a shared credential, such as one API key, reaches whatever that credential can access for everyone using it. An administrator's broad service credential is not a substitute for individual employee authorization.

The enterprise-search documentation describes query-time calls through MCP, a standard for connecting assistants to tools, rather than indexing connected source data for those searches. It also requires the owner to select Documents and Chat connectors during initial setup; Email is optional. That makes availability and authorization in the connected systems part of the experience employees receive.

For a senior operations lead, a good use case is reconstructing why a policy changed: find the current policy, search the relevant discussion, and produce a cited explanation. If the search misses a source, narrow the request to that system before assuming the model cannot answer. If a custom connector is involved, inspect its credential model before letting more departments use it.

The spending distinction is equally material. The Enterprise seat buys access, while usage is metered separately. Set organizational and individual spending limits before treating recurring searches and longer research tasks as routine. That is a different budget model from assuming the seat price covers all activity.

Best for: Claude-centered organizations needing company search plus Enterprise controls.
Standout: A dedicated search project, with a documented live-connector model.
Pricing: $20/seat/month billed annually, plus usage at API rates; 20-seat self-serve minimum. Claude pricing.
Free trial: No Enterprise trial is advertised on the checked pricing page.

5. Dust: Choose It to Build Shared Agents Around Defined Work

Dust is a platform for creating agents that work with selected company knowledge and connected tools. It belongs on the shortlist when an operations owner wants a reusable assistant for a defined task, such as assembling an escalation brief from approved support and product material. The owner chooses the knowledge and behavior, then manages who can use the resulting agent. Choose Dust when someone will own the agent and its data boundaries after launch.

The useful unit of evaluation is the workflow. Give the agent a clear input, an approved set of sources and an output a colleague can review. For example, an escalation brief should separate the published workaround from internal engineering speculation. Connecting both sources is easy to describe; deciding which audience may receive each is the operational design work.

What document permissions need: Dust administrators scope connections to selected folders or documents, then organize accessible data into Spaces, containers with open or restricted membership. Its access-control documentation makes administrators responsible for defining this policy and maintaining it.

The default Company Data Space cannot be restricted. Sensitive material belongs in appropriately restricted Spaces, with the intended members. Dust's Spaces guide ties agent availability to the Spaces its tools use. That is a concrete configuration requirement, not a promise that importing a source automatically reproduces every employee's original document rights.

Dust also explicitly separates what an agent may read from who may use it. Its permission-model explanation describes administrator-approved overrides that can let an agent serve users without direct access to its underlying documents. That can support an intentional workflow, but it needs a deliberate decision about what the agent may disclose. A prompt saying “keep this confidential” is not an access-control design.

The smaller-tool appeal has a boundary: the current Business offer allows up to 3 data connectors and 5 Spaces. Map your required sources and audiences before assuming the entry plan fits a fragmented organization. Dust also meters usage with credits, so an agent doing more tool calls or using a different model may consume a different amount. Current plan details describe those limits and the credit model.

Best for: Operators building and maintaining shared agents for specific recurring tasks.
Standout: Explicit selection of agent knowledge, tools and audience.
Pricing: Pro starts at $24/seat/month billed yearly, with a credit allowance; Enterprise is quoted. Dust pricing.
Free trial: Free seats include 500 lifetime credits rather than an unlimited ongoing allowance.

6. Onyx: The Open-Source and Self-Hosted Route

Onyx is the strongest fit in this shortlist when running company search on your own infrastructure is a requirement. Its core search, chat, agents and connectors are free and open-source, while paid plans add capabilities including document-permission inheritance. A technical operations team can use that separation to evaluate deployment control before committing to a commercial plan. Choose Onyx for control you are prepared to operate, not because “open-source” implies a finished deployment costs nothing.

The recurring work includes maintaining the deployment, keeping connectors healthy, configuring model access and checking what happens when a source changes. Those responsibilities need a named owner. A solo technical builder may be comfortable taking them on for a bounded internal corpus; an IT lead without that capacity should include hosted operation in the comparison.

What document permissions need: select Auto Sync Permissions for a supported connector when source permission inheritance is required. Onyx also offers Private and Public modes. Its connector documentation warns that Public can make private source content visible to every Onyx user.

Credential requirements vary by source. Google Drive and Gmail permission syncing require a service account or Google Workspace Admin OAuth credentials. SharePoint requires certificate-based authentication. A connector existing in the catalog therefore does not prove that the credentials available to your administrator support the permission mode you need.

There is an easy packaging mistake here. The connector documentation calls permission sync an Enterprise Edition feature, while the current billing documentation explicitly includes document-permission inheritance in the paid Business plan. Treat it as a paid capability and confirm the license for your deployment. Do not assume it comes with the free core, and do not assume the wording automatically requires a custom Enterprise commercial contract.

For a practical evaluation, start with a source whose access rules are straightforward. Confirm an authorized user receives a cited answer and another user cannot retrieve the same material. Then remove access and observe how the connector handles the change. The result should be a deployment decision based on the required connector, credentials and operating work.

For the search behavior itself, include both natural-language questions and exact policy or project names. Our guides to semantic search and hybrid search explain why an enterprise-search evaluation needs more than a few fluent answers.

Best for: Technical teams requiring open-source control or self-hosting.
Standout: A free core with a documented path to paid permission inheritance and deployment options.
Pricing: Free core; Business $20/user/month with annual billing; infrastructure and model costs depend on your deployment. Onyx pricing.
Free trial: Onyx Cloud offers 2 weeks without a credit card, according to its billing docs.

7. Guru: Choose It When Knowledge Needs an Owner

Guru is a knowledge platform for maintaining trusted information and delivering answers from it. It fits an operations lead whose problem is conflicting procedures, unclear ownership and stale guidance, rather than merely finding another document. A support organization could use it to establish which refund policy is current and make that approved answer accessible to the right staff. Choose Guru for knowledge maintenance; do not presume its current offering is a cheap small-team subscription.

Guru's current offer combines the platform with expertise in knowledge architecture, rollout and optimization. Verification workflows and cited Knowledge Agent answers are part of the proposition. That is useful when nobody can confidently identify the authoritative procedure today. It is less compelling for a small company with a clean shared handbook that simply wants occasional questions answered. The current pricing page describes a scoped package, not a published entry seat price.

What document permissions need: distinguish the account connecting a source from the people who may use its content in Guru. The connecting account determines what Guru can ingest. After that, administrators choose between two access models.

With Guru Groups, administrators grant groups access inside Guru independently of each member's rights in the source application. With inherited permissions, supported sources preserve the source system's own access model; Guru says that setup requires an administrator from the source system. The source setup guide explains both. Choosing the first mode does not mean the second is silently happening in the background.

For a small operations team, this creates a useful decision. If the goal is a carefully maintained handbook with an explicit audience, a knowledge-management workflow can be valuable. If the requirement is to reproduce existing per-document rights across several systems, confirm inherited-permission support for each source before purchasing. Do not rely on a general “permission-aware” description to settle that configuration question.

Assign an owner to the answer as well as the connector. When a policy changes, that owner should know where to correct the authoritative content and how to verify the new answer. Otherwise the organization has installed a better-looking way to distribute the same unresolved disagreement.

Best for: Teams that need maintained, verified knowledge with clear ownership.
Standout: Knowledge-quality work alongside search and answers.
Pricing: Custom platform-and-expertise package; Guru publishes no starting amount on its current pricing page.
Free trial: A demo or working session is offered; no self-serve trial is advertised there.

How These Were Picked

These seven products cover the buying routes an IT or operations lead is most likely to consider after a Glean quote: existing suite, existing assistant seats, task-specific agents, self-hosting and managed knowledge. Each was checked on its maker's own site on the verification date above.

The comparison uses five criteria: access to the sources the job needs, the documented permission model, deployment responsibility, fit with existing employee workflows, and published billing terms. No answer-quality benchmark was run. The recommendations describe where to start a pilot, rather than measured superiority on your documents.

The most consequential distinction is who maintains the access boundary. Some connections use each employee's source identity. Others require synchronized access lists, a mapped identity provider, or an explicitly managed audience inside the new product. That is why each card names the setup requirement instead of assigning a generic security score.

Standalone search infrastructure was left out of the shortlist because this reader is replacing an employee-facing service. Building the application around infrastructure is a different project, with different ownership and acceptance criteria.

The Ones to Avoid

Avoid Claude Enterprise if your existing Team plan's search already covers the job and you do not need the Enterprise controls. The dedicated search feature alone is not a reason to upgrade. The separate usage bill also deserves a deliberate budget decision.

Avoid free-core Onyx as a shortcut to automatic source-permission inheritance. Evaluate the paid entitlement and the connector's supported credentials. Self-hosting changes who operates the system; it does not eliminate the access-control requirements.

Avoid Guru if “small team” really means “a simple self-serve subscription with a visible price.” Its current package may be worthwhile, but it should earn that scope through knowledge-maintenance needs. Do not build a purchase recommendation around an old seat price absent from its current page.

Avoid Dust if nobody will maintain the Spaces and agents. A flexible tool with no owner becomes another place where access and content drift.

Avoid treating the included Gemini app or Copilot Chat as proof that a full Glean replacement is already licensed. Confirm the edition, connectors and workflow. Equally, keep Glean in the final evaluation if its proposed deployment covers important sources or operating requirements the alternatives cannot satisfy. An alternatives search should improve the decision, not force a switch.

Run a Permission Test Before Signing

A useful pilot measures whether people can get correct, authorized work done. It should include a question the assistant must refuse or leave incomplete, not just questions designed to produce attractive answers.

For next week, use this proposed five-working-day evaluation. The counts below are a manageable test design, not a vendor benchmark.

1. 1

   Choose ten questions and name the authoritative sources

   Ask employees for recurring questions they currently send to colleagues. Include an exact policy name, a question spanning sources, an outdated document and a question whose answer is intentionally unavailable. Record the correct sources before seeing the assistant's response.

2. 2

   Use two roles with different access

   Create or select approved test accounts for an ordinary employee and a manager. Confirm what each can open directly in the source application. Ask the same questions and compare the returned facts, snippets and citations.

3. 3

   Revoke access and observe the next retrieval

   Remove a test account's permission to a controlled document. Record when new searches stop returning it. Check the maker's sync behavior rather than assuming instant revocation. Separately record any existing chat history containing earlier results; withholding future retrieval does not by itself erase an answer already delivered.

4. 4

   Score usable answers and operating work

   Count answers supported by the correct current source, missing answers and any unauthorized disclosure separately. Record connector setup, permission maintenance and review time alongside the quoted subscription and applicable usage charges. Do not average an access failure into an otherwise good answer score.

5. 5

   Expand only after the boundary is understood

   Choose the option that completes the defined job with the least additional operating burden while meeting your access requirements. Assign an owner to source changes, user departures and failed connections before adding another department.

The concrete deliverable is a short acceptance record: what the product may read, who may ask, what evidence makes an answer usable, and who fixes it when a source or permission changes. That record is more useful at renewal than a long list of supported integrations.

Glean Alternatives FAQ

Glean vs ChatGPT

Start with ChatGPT Business if your organization already pays for it and Company Knowledge can cover the intended sources under the right permissions. A dedicated enterprise-search purchase needs to justify additional coverage or operational benefits. A successful pilot for one workflow does not prove complete discovery across your organization.

Glean pricing

Glean publishes no public list price. Use the written quote and ask which users, deployment work, support and usage it covers. Compare that scope with the alternatives' documented terms; third-party estimates are not a Glean price.

Glean alternatives github

Onyx is the open-source route in this shortlist. Its core is free, but the current paid Business plan includes document-permission inheritance. For self-hosting, verify the required license, connector authentication and operational ownership before importing restricted material.

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