Best Glean Alternatives in 2026: 13 AI Search and Knowledge Tools Compared

Updated August 2026

Glean is an enterprise AI search and assistant layer sitting on top of the apps your company already runs: Slack, Google Drive, Jira, Confluence, Salesforce, GitHub, and dozens more. It doesn't store your knowledge anywhere new; it indexes what's already scattered across your stack and answers questions with permission-aware retrieval, so a rep only sees what they're allowed to see. That's a good pitch for a specific buyer: a mid-size to large company with real app sprawl and no single place to search. But a "Glean alternatives" search usually means one of two jobs. Either you want another cross-app AI search layer, this time with a price tag Glean won't show you, or your actual problem is that knowledge was never written down, which no search tool, including Glean, can fix. For the first job, Dashworks, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Atlassian Rovo, Coveo, Onyx, Moveworks, and Elastic are the closest matches. For the second, Guru, Notion, Confluence, Slab, Slite, and Bloomfire solve the root cause instead of searching around it.

We evaluated all 13 on published or vendor-confirmed pricing, connector coverage, AI search quality, and fit; every price below was verified against the vendor's own pricing page in August 2026. The headline fact: Glean publishes no pricing at all, and its site offers only a demo request, so a quoted number came from a sales call, not a price list. Some tools below show a price before you talk to anyone, and some won't; knowing which is which saves a procurement cycle. For a wider category view first, the best knowledge management software roundup covers the full field.

Key Facts

• Glean, Guru, Document360, Stack Internal (formerly Stack Overflow for Teams), and Bloomfire all now route pricing questions straight to a sales call instead of publishing a price list, a shift confirmed on each vendor's own pricing page as of August 2026.
• Gartner predicts 40% of enterprise applications will feature task-specific AI agents, including search and assistant features, by 2026, up from less than 5% in 2025 (Gartner).
• The average large organization already runs 367 separate software applications, and knowledge workers lose 30% of their workweek just searching for data scattered across them, per a Forrester Consulting study commissioned by Airtable (Crisis of the Fractured Organization).
• 72% of organizations now report using generative AI regularly, up from 33% in 2024 (McKinsey, The State of AI).
• The global enterprise search market is on pace to reach $5.83 billion in 2026, growing at a 9.05% CAGR through 2035 as AI-powered search adoption accelerates (Precedence Research).

Two Kinds of Glean Alternative

Before you shortlist anything, be honest about which problem you're solving. Glean is a retrieval layer, not a knowledge store: it doesn't create documentation, it finds documentation (and Slack threads, tickets, code) that already exists somewhere.

Cross-app AI search and assistant layer (content is scattered across many apps, you need one search bar over it): Dashworks, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Atlassian Rovo, Coveo, Onyx, Moveworks, Elastic.

Write-it-down-first knowledge tools (nothing consistent got documented, so there's nothing good for search to find): Guru, Notion, Confluence, Slab, Slite, Bloomfire.

If you're unsure which camp you're in, ask a blunt question: when someone can't find an answer, did search fail, or did nobody ever write it down? The how to choose knowledge base software guide walks through that diagnosis.

Why Buyers Look Past Glean

Search quality isn't the complaint. The complaint is that you can't budget for it, and the same is now true of tools that used to be the easy, transparent alternatives: Guru, Document360, and Bloomfire all pulled their price lists this year too. If process documentation is also a mess, that gap compounds any search tool you buy; the process documentation library covers fixing the root problem.

Quick Comparison Table

1. Dashworks - The Direct, Price-Transparent Competitor

Dashworks is the closest thing to a straight swap for Glean: an AI search and assistant layer across Slack, Notion, Google Drive, Jira, Confluence, Salesforce, and GitHub, with a Slackbot and browser extension so answers show up where people work. The difference that matters most: Dashworks tells you the price.

Team runs $12/seat/month monthly or $10/seat/month annually, no seat minimum, covering unlimited usage, core integrations, and the Slackbot. Business steps up to $15/seat/month monthly or $12/seat/month annually, requires a 10-seat minimum, and adds custom bots, choice of LLM, and org-wide integrations. Enterprise is a custom quote for SSO, SCIM, an API, and an uptime SLA. A 14-day free trial needs no credit card.

Best for: Teams that want Glean's core search-everything experience without an enterprise sales cycle standing between them and a price.

2. Microsoft 365 Copilot - AI Search for Teams Already Living in Microsoft

If your company's knowledge lives mostly in Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive, Copilot gives you a Glean-like search and assistant layer without a new vendor, answering questions and summarizing threads using content it already sees through your existing permissions.

The catch is the word "existing": Copilot is an add-on to a qualifying Microsoft 365 license, not a standalone product. As an add-on, it runs $18/user/month on an annual commitment (promotional pricing through September 30, 2026, down from $21) or $25.20/user/month billed monthly. Microsoft also bundles it: Business Standard with Copilot runs $23.50/user/month annual, and Business Premium with Copilot runs $32/user/month annual. Outside Microsoft's own apps, coverage depends on Graph Connectors, which add setup work and cost.

Best for: Organizations already standardized on Microsoft 365 that want AI search and drafting across their existing stack without evaluating a new platform.

3. Atlassian Rovo - Bundled AI Search for Jira and Confluence Shops

Rovo is Atlassian's answer to Glean, and the pricing model is the headline: if you already pay for Standard, Premium, or Enterprise Cloud plans of Jira, Confluence, Jira Service Management, or a Teamwork Collection, Rovo is included at no separate cost, metered by a monthly credit allowance rather than a per-seat fee.

Rovo Search and Rovo Chat pull answers from your Atlassian content and connected apps; Rovo Agents automate multi-step workflows on top. Rovo Dev, a separate coding-agent product, is priced at $20 per developer/month for 2,000 credits, extra usage at $0.01/credit. A 30-day free trial is available.

Best for: Teams already running Jira or Confluence on a Premium or Enterprise Cloud plan who want AI search bundled in rather than buying a separate platform.

4. Coveo - Enterprise Search for Workplace and Customer-Facing Search Combined

Coveo has been in enterprise search longer than most names here, targeting a slightly different buyer than Glean: a large enterprise wanting one relevance engine powering internal workplace search and customer-facing search on its website, commerce site, or service portal.

Pricing is entitlement-based for Service and Website use cases, seat-based for Workplace search, with a base unit covering 100,000 queries per month. Generative AI features, like Relevance Generative Answering, are paid add-ons rather than bundled in. None of it is a flat published number; Coveo routes every deal through a quote.

Best for: Large enterprises that want a single search vendor covering both internal knowledge and customer-facing search rather than buying two separate platforms.

5. Onyx - Open Source, If You'd Rather Own the Stack

Onyx is the open-source answer to Glean: the full product, chat, search, 40+ connectors, and custom AI agents, is free to self-host from its GitHub repository (20,000+ stars, actively maintained). If you can run and secure it yourself, that's a real zero-license-cost path to the same category of tool.

For teams that don't want to manage that infrastructure, Onyx sells a Business cloud tier at $20/user/month billed annually, covering the same chat/search UI, connectors, code interpreter, and developer APIs. Enterprise adds SSO, on-premise deployment, white-labeling, and dedicated support, priced through a custom quote.

Best for: Engineering-led teams that want Glean's search-and-assistant concept without vendor lock-in, whether that means self-hosting for free or paying a transparent $20/user/month for the cloud version.

6. Moveworks - Now Part of ServiceNow

Moveworks earned its reputation as an AI assistant for IT, HR, and finance requests, deflecting tickets and answering employee questions in Slack or Teams before they reach a service desk. That's broader than pure search: it resolves requests, not just surfaces documents. Worth knowing first: ServiceNow completed its acquisition of Moveworks in December 2025 and, in February 2026, launched EmployeeWorks, combining Moveworks' conversational AI with its own workflow automation. Moveworks is still sold, now as part of ServiceNow's portfolio rather than an independent company.

Pricing remains quote-only, with no published tier or per-seat rate. Moveworks cites a Forrester study it commissioned showing composite customers saw 256% ROI and $11.5 million in savings over three years, a vendor-sponsored figure worth treating as directional.

Best for: Enterprises already running or open to ServiceNow that want AI-driven employee support and workflow resolution layered on top of search, not just a place to ask questions.

7. Elastic - Build Your Own, on Infrastructure You Control

Elastic isn't a packaged Glean competitor; it's the search infrastructure teams use to build one. Elasticsearch and the Elastic Stack already power a huge share of custom internal search tools, and Elastic's AI tooling (ELSER, connectors, a retrieval-augmented-generation Playground) gives you the pieces to assemble a Glean-like assistant on infrastructure you own.

Pricing follows the deployment model. Cloud Serverless bills on usage, pay-as-you-go or prepaid, scaling automatically with search and indexing load. Cloud Hosted bills on the compute your cluster consumes. Self-managed deployments are licensed by node count and RAM if you run it yourself. A free tier and open-source core exist, but there's no flat number; you configure a deployment and Elastic prices it from there.

Best for: Engineering teams that want to build a custom search-and-AI layer on infrastructure they already run or plan to control long-term, rather than buy a packaged assistant.

8. Guru - Verified Knowledge for Customer-Facing Teams

Guru takes a different approach than a pure search layer: knowledge lives in cards, each with an assigned owner and a verification schedule, so reps get answers that are current, not just findable. A browser extension and Slack integration surface those cards where reps actually work.

The 2026 wrinkle: Guru's pricing page no longer shows a dollar figure. It now calls itself "a platform and expertise solution, not just a per-seat tool" and routes visitors to sales. Trackers report a self-serve tier around $25/seat/month with a 10-seat minimum (reported, not vendor-confirmed), the last figure Guru published. See Glean vs. Guru for a head-to-head, or the best Guru alternatives roundup.

Best for: Support and sales enablement teams that need verified, current knowledge surfaced where reps work, not a raw search index over everything.

9. Notion - When the Real Fix Is Writing It Down

If your team's real problem is that nothing got documented consistently, no search tool fixes that, including Glean. Notion fixes the root cause instead: a flexible workspace for wikis, project docs, and databases, with AI that answers questions across your own content once it's there.

Notion is free to start, with Plus at $10/seat/month on monthly billing (annual billing saves money, but Notion doesn't publish the exact annual rate, so budget the monthly figure until you get a quote). Business runs $20/seat/month with fuller AI; Custom Agents bill separately at $10 per 1,000 monthly credits. Search outside Notion itself stays limited. The AI documentation tools library covers how AI fits a docs workflow, and Confluence vs. Notion compares it against a traditional wiki.

Best for: Teams whose real gap is a knowledge base that was never written down consistently, not a search layer over apps that already have good content.

10. Confluence - The Mature, Governed Wiki (With AI Search Built In)

Confluence solves the documentation problem the way Notion does, with more governance and a tighter Jira relationship, and since Atlassian's Rovo rollout, ships AI search over that content at no extra cost on paid Cloud plans (see Atlassian Rovo above).

Pricing is bracketed by user count rather than a single flat number. Standard runs roughly $6.05/user/month and Premium roughly $11.55/user/month at a mid-size team's headcount on monthly billing, dropping per seat as you add users; annual billing saves around 17%. Free covers up to 10 users. For Confluence's wiki competitors specifically, see the best Confluence alternatives roundup and the how to choose internal wiki software guide.

Best for: Teams that already write and maintain documentation and want a mature, governed wiki with AI search built in, rather than a separate cross-app search platform.

11. Slab - A Dedicated Wiki With Strong Search

Slab does one thing: internal knowledge management, with search indexing across Slack, Google Drive, GitHub, and Jira alongside its own content, plus a verification workflow that prompts authors to confirm articles are still accurate.

Free covers up to 10 users and guests, forever. Startup runs $6.67/user/month annually, Business $12.50/user/month annually, and Enterprise is custom, requiring at least 100 users, with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Best for: Teams that want a dedicated internal wiki with genuinely strong search and freshness verification, at a fraction of what an enterprise search platform costs.

12. Slite - AI Search Over a Comfortable Team Wiki

Slite sits closer to Glean's Q&A experience than most wikis here: Ask Slite answers questions in natural language, synthesizing content from your wiki and connected tools with source links, rather than returning a list of documents.

Slite repriced and renamed its tiers in 2026: Basic runs $10/user/month billed yearly, Pro runs $20/user/month billed yearly and adds the Slite Agent, cross-tool AI search, and 50 monthly AI credits per seat. There's no permanent free plan, just a 14-day trial, no card required. Enterprise is custom.

Best for: Ops and HR teams that want an AI-search layer over a company wiki without buying a full enterprise search platform to get it.

13. Bloomfire - A Searchable Insights Library for Enablement Teams

Bloomfire's pitch is a searchable knowledge library built for engagement, not just storage: mixed content formats (video, PDF, docs, slides), discussion threads on individual pieces, and search tuned for what sales and customer success teams actually produce.

Like several names in this cluster, Bloomfire went quote-only. Its pricing page names three plans, Team, Department, and Enterprise, with no published figures. Budget for an annual fixed cost plus a separate implementation fee rather than a per-seat rate, and get a real quote before comparing it against per-seat tools.

Best for: Enablement teams that want a searchable insights library with engagement features, evaluated against a real quote since nothing is published upfront.

Stage Fit Matrix

Sizing and Persona Table

How to Choose: Decision Framework

What to Do Next

Pick two options, one from each camp if you're not sure which problem you have, and run a two-week pilot around a question your team asks constantly. Don't judge on a demo; judge on whether the tool finds, or contains, the answer your team needed last week.

If pricing transparency is driving you from Glean, Dashworks and Onyx will show you a number before you talk to anyone. If knowledge never got written down, start with Notion or Confluence instead of a search layer, since better search over empty documentation still returns nothing. If messaging is also breaking down, the best Slack alternatives and best Google Workspace alternatives guides cover the layers next to whichever knowledge tool you choose, and individual users can check the best Obsidian alternatives guide.

Camellia writes about productivity and knowledge management tools for B2B teams. Last updated August 2026.