Glean Alternatives: The AI Knowledge & Enterprise Search Tools to Compare (2026)
Glean is the best-known name in AI-powered enterprise search, but it is built and priced for large enterprises, which sends a lot of mid-sized teams looking for something that fits their size, budget or way of working. This guide compares the main alternatives, says who each one is best for, and clears up a mix-up that trips up most buyers: several of these tools are not doing the same job at all.
- Glean is the enterprise-search benchmark: broad, permissions-aware, and priced for large orgs with a reported seat minimum around 100 users.
- Already on Confluence or Jira? Atlassian Rovo is bundled into what you already pay for.
- Live in Notion? Notion AI answers over your own workspace, no new tool to adopt.
- Need verified, expert-approved answers? Guru is built for that, from $25 a user a month.
- Is your problem a recurring job that keeps losing its context, rather than company-wide search? An AI colleague such as Frntir is a different kind of answer.
Why teams look for a Glean alternative
Glean is built for large enterprises: knowledge sprawled across many systems, and the budget and seat count for an enterprise-search programme. A mid-sized team whose knowledge sits mostly in one suite rarely fits that shape, so it goes looking for something lighter, cheaper, or built around a job rather than a search box.
Glean is a well-funded, enterprise-grade AI work assistant and enterprise-search platform. It raised a $150 million Series F in June 2025 at a $7.2 billion valuation, and reports around $765 million in total funding. It does not publish pricing; third-party pricing trackers report an enterprise-search licence of roughly $50 per user per month, a Work AI add-on of about $15 per user per month on top, and a minimum commitment commonly around 100 users, which places the entry point near $60,000 a year. Enterprise search is also an enterprise deployment: connecting every system and getting document-level permissions right takes time, and third-party comparisons report typical Glean rollouts of several weeks.
None of that is a criticism. It is a fit. If you are a 120-person firm whose knowledge is scattered across a dozen systems and search is a daily tax on everyone, Glean may be exactly right and you should shortlist it. If you are a 40-person team whose knowledge mostly lives in one suite, or your real pain is one job that keeps losing its context, a hundred-seat enterprise-search contract is more than you need. The rest of this guide is for the many teams in between.
First, which job are you buying for?
Before comparing tools, get clear on the job, because "knowledge tool" bundles several different jobs together and most of these products are strong at one of them. Buying enterprise search to fix a single recurring bottleneck, or a wiki to fix a search problem, is the most common and most expensive mistake here.
Our guide to AI knowledge management breaks the field into four approaches (wikis and knowledge bases, enterprise search, dedicated AI knowledge layers, and AI colleagues) and argues which fits which situation. This page assumes that groundwork and does the next step: it ranks the named products you will be comparing, and says who each is for. In short, the four jobs are:
- Search everything you already have. Find answers across all your tools, wherever they were written. This is enterprise search: Glean, and to a large extent Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini inside their own suites.
- Curate a source of truth. A place where answers are written, verified and kept current on purpose. This is a knowledge base or wiki: Guru, Bloomfire, Notion, Confluence.
- Put AI on top of that content. Ask in natural language, get an answer grounded in your material with citations. Most tools here now do a version of this.
- Own a recurring job and remember it. Not a place you search, but a colleague that does the work and keeps its own context. This is the AI-colleague approach.
The tools below sit in different places on that list. Comparing them purely on price or on a feature checklist hides the fact that they are not all trying to do the same thing.
Glean alternatives at a glance
| Tool | Best for | Org size | Pricing | Core strength |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Glean | Large orgs with content spread across many systems and budget for enterprise search | Enterprise (reported ~100-seat minimum) | Not published; reported ~$50/user/mo + ~$15 AI add-on | Broad, permissions-aware search plus a Work AI assistant across all your connected tools |
| Guru | Support and ops teams that need verified, expert-approved answers | 10+ (10-seat minimum) | From $25/user/mo (annual); Enterprise usage-based | Verified knowledge cards plus AI search, grounded in approved content |
| Notion AI | Teams that already run on Notion and want AI over their own workspace | Any | Business $20/member/mo (AI included); Enterprise custom | AI Q&A and writing across your Notion pages and connected apps, no new tool to adopt |
| Atlassian Rovo | Teams already on Confluence and Jira | Any (bundled into paid plans) | Bundled into paid Confluence/Jira; Standard from ~$5.42/user/mo, credit-metered | Search, chat and agents across the Atlassian suite you already pay for |
| Bloomfire | Larger teams that want a managed, searchable knowledge library | Mid-size to enterprise | By quote; third-party trackers report ~$25 to $49/user/mo | Centralised knowledge library with generative answers and strong analytics |
| Frntir | Teams whose real problem is a recurring job losing its context every cycle, not company-wide search | Any | £6,000/yr per colleague (£500/mo) | A named AI colleague with persistent memory that owns a recurring job and remembers the work |
Pricing is indicative and shown in the currency each vendor publishes (USD for the US-based tools; Frntir in GBP). Guru, Notion and Atlassian publish their figures; Glean and Bloomfire do not, so those are third-party-reported and flagged as such. UK buyers should factor in FX and VAT, and verify current pricing directly before shortlisting.
The alternatives, one by one
Each tool is described by what it is best at, and where it is the wrong fit. A comparison where one option wins every row is not worth reading.
Glean
The enterprise benchmark for AI-powered search and a Work AI assistant that answers across all your connected tools. Its strengths are breadth and permissions-awareness: it indexes across a large set of systems and respects who is allowed to see what, so answers come back with the right sources and without leaking. If your knowledge lives everywhere and search is a company-wide problem, this is what enterprise search is for.
Best for: large organisations with content spread across many systems and the budget for a real enterprise-search programme. Less ideal for: mid-sized teams below the reported seat minimum, or teams whose knowledge already sits mostly in one suite.
Guru
Guru pairs enterprise search with a verified knowledge base and now positions itself as an "AI Agent Center". Its differentiator is trust: answers are grounded in content a human has marked as verified, with reminders to re-verify before it goes stale, which matters when a wrong answer is costly. It publishes pricing from $25 per user per month on an annual plan, with a ten-seat minimum, and a usage-based Enterprise tier above that.
Best for: support, ops and sales teams that need answers they can trust and keep current. Less ideal for: teams wanting the widest possible cross-system search, where a dedicated enterprise-search tool reaches further.
Notion AI
If your team already runs on Notion, Notion AI is the lowest-friction option here: it answers questions and drafts across your own pages and connected apps with nothing new to adopt. As of 2026 the separate AI add-on is gone, folded into the Business plan at $20 per member per month, with Enterprise quote-only. Note that heavier agent use runs on a metered credit system on top of seats, so budget for that if you lean on it.
Best for: teams whose knowledge already lives in Notion and who want AI over it without a separate platform. Less ideal for: organisations whose content is spread across many non-Notion systems.
Atlassian Rovo (Confluence and Jira)
Rovo brings search, chat and agents across the Atlassian suite, and the useful part is that it is bundled into paid Confluence and Jira plans rather than sold as a separate contract. Confluence Standard starts at around $5.42 per user per month, and Rovo features draw on a monthly credit pool that scales with your plan tier. If your knowledge already sits in Confluence, this is close to free additional capability rather than a new purchase.
Best for: teams already committed to Confluence and Jira. Watch: Rovo Chat, agents and deep research draw on credits, so a heavy-usage team should check the credit maths against its plan. Less ideal for: teams not on the Atlassian stack.
Bloomfire
Bloomfire is a centralised, searchable knowledge library with generative answers and strong analytics, aimed at teams that want a managed source of truth rather than search stitched across every tool. It does not publish list pricing; third-party trackers report roughly $25 to $49 per user per month depending on tier, with larger deployments quoted per organisation, so treat any figure as indicative and get a quote.
Best for: larger teams that want one curated, well-analysed knowledge library. Less ideal for: small teams put off by per-seat library pricing, or teams that need cross-system search rather than a destination.
Frntir (the AI-colleague approach)
Frntir is not a like-for-like Glean competitor. The tools above are places you go to find an answer. Frntir builds AI Synths: named AI colleagues with persistent memory that are given a recurring job rather than a search box. Because a Synth remembers the work it does as a by-product of doing it (the jobs it runs, the decisions and the context around them), the knowledge builds up where the job happens instead of in a library someone has to keep alive. The trade-off: enterprise search is far broader, it can answer across everything your company has ever written; a Synth is scoped to the jobs it owns and is not a whole-company search index.
Best for: teams whose problem is a recurring job (bids, procurement, CRM upkeep) that keeps losing its context every cycle. Less ideal for: teams that need to search every document across the whole company, which is what enterprise search is built for.
Pricing: £500/mo per full-time colleague (£6,000/yr), no setup fee, whole team included.
Before you buy: the search you may already own
One check saves a lot of money here. If you are on Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, part of the cross-tool search Glean sells is already in your stack, so test what you own before buying a separate platform.
Microsoft 365 includes Copilot search across SharePoint, Teams and Outlook, and Google Workspace has Gemini search across Drive and Gmail. Neither reaches as widely as Glean across non-native systems, and neither is as strong at unifying a fragmented estate, which is where Glean earns its price. But if most of your knowledge already sits inside one of those suites, the first move is to turn on and try the search you are paying for, then buy a dedicated tool only for the gap that leaves.
AI knowledge and enterprise-search glossary (2026)
A few terms come up on every vendor page in this category. Here is what they mean.
- Enterprise search
- Search that indexes across all your tools at once and answers in natural language with links to the source. It can only find knowledge that was written down somewhere.
- RAG (retrieval-augmented generation)
- The method behind most "AI answers grounded in your content": the tool retrieves relevant passages from your material, then has a language model write an answer from them, with citations. It reduces made-up answers but depends on the quality of what it retrieves.
- Permissions-aware / document-level permissions
- The system only surfaces content a given user is already allowed to see, so search does not leak restricted documents. This is a large part of what makes enterprise search hard, and expensive, to do properly.
- Knowledge base vs wiki
- A wiki is open pages anyone can edit (Confluence, Notion). A knowledge base adds structure and, often, verification, so answers are curated and trusted rather than just written down (Guru, Bloomfire).
- Tacit vs explicit knowledge
- Explicit knowledge is written down and can be searched. Tacit knowledge is the unwritten reasoning in someone's head. No search tool can find tacit knowledge that was never captured, which is the limit of every tool on this page.
- Connectors
- The integrations that let a tool read your other systems (email, chat, drives, ticketing). More connectors means wider reach, and usually a longer, more involved rollout.
Which should you choose?
Match the tool to your situation, not to a leaderboard. There is no single winner here, because these tools are built for different sizes of organisation and different jobs.
- Large org, knowledge scattered across many systems: shortlist Glean and test it on your hardest real search, then compare a specialist enterprise-search rival on the same query.
- Already on Confluence or Jira: turn on Rovo before buying anything, since it is included in your paid plan.
- Already on Notion: Notion AI on the Business plan is the least-friction option.
- Answers must be trusted and current (support, ops, compliance): Guru's verified model is built for that.
- You want one managed, well-analysed library: Bloomfire.
- On Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace: try the Copilot or Gemini search you already pay for before adding a platform.
- The real gap is a recurring job losing its context, not company-wide search: look at an AI colleague such as Frntir that owns the job and keeps its own memory.
Every tool here helps you find what was written down. The deeper question is whether your problem is retrieval or continuity. If people cannot find things, search is the answer. If the same recurring job loses its context every cycle, because the person who held it left, or because it never got written down in the first place, a better search box will not fix that. That is the gap an AI colleague is built for, and it is a different decision from picking the best knowledge tool.
Related guide: AI knowledge management for mid-sized businesses: stop losing know-how when people leave →
Sources and method
Vendor capabilities and positioning are drawn from each company's own site and from 2026 third-party comparison write-ups. Glean funding figures ($150m Series F at a $7.2bn valuation, June 2025; around $765m total) are from Glean's own announcement and Tracxn. Glean pricing is third-party-reported, as Glean does not publish prices: the roughly $50/user/mo search licence, ~$15/user/mo AI add-on, ~100-user minimum and ~$60k/yr entry point are reported by pricing trackers including Workativ, Coworker AI and GoSearch, and the several-week rollout is from third-party comparisons; treat all of these as indicative, not official. Guru pricing (from $25/user/mo annual, ten-seat minimum) is Guru's published figure. Notion AI ($20/member/mo on Business, AI included; metered agent credits) follows Notion's published 2026 pricing. Atlassian Rovo pricing (bundled into paid Confluence/Jira, Standard from ~$5.42/user/mo, credit-metered) follows Atlassian's published plans. Bloomfire does not publish list pricing; the ~$25 to $49/user/mo range is third-party-reported and indicative. Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini search capabilities are from those vendors' own product pages. Frntir pricing (£500/mo, or £6,000/yr, per full-time colleague) is our own list price. Last reviewed August 2026. If you spot anything out of date, tell us and we will correct it.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best alternative to Glean?
How much does Glean cost?
Is there a cheaper Glean alternative for a mid-sized business?
What is the difference between enterprise search and an AI knowledge base?
Do I still need Glean if I already use Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace?
What is the difference between a knowledge tool and an AI colleague?
The problem is continuity, not search?
Tell us which recurring job keeps losing its context, and we'll show you what an AI colleague could own and remember, inside the tools you already use.
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