Glean alternatives in 2026: 8 options compared

Most teams start looking for a Glean alternative at the same moment. The renewal quote arrives, somebody points out that Microsoft 365 Copilot is already licensed across the company, and the question becomes whether a separate enterprise search platform is still earning its place.

The right alternative depends on why you are looking. In 2026 the options fall into four groups: search built into a suite you already own (Microsoft 365 Copilot, Atlassian Rovo, Google Vertex AI Search), dedicated enterprise search platforms (Coveo, Sinequa), open source you run yourself (Onyx), and employee service products that search and then act on the answer (Moveworks, now also sold as ServiceNow EmployeeWorks, and Rezolve.ai). This guide compares all eight on what each is built for, how it is priced, and what you give up by choosing it.

What Glean is

Glean is a dedicated enterprise search and AI assistant platform. The product connects to a large number of workplace systems, mirrors each system's permissions into its own index, and lets employees search and ask questions across all of them from one place, and more recently it has added agents that carry out multi-step tasks. Glean is also one of the best-funded companies in the category: it raised $150 million in a Series F led by Wellington Management in June 2025, at a $7.2 billion valuation.

So the question is rarely whether Glean works. For organizations whose main problem is finding information scattered across many tools, it does that job well. The reasons people look elsewhere are narrower, and each one points to a different kind of replacement.

Why teams look for Glean alternatives

The pricing model does not match how the product gets used. Glean does not publish its prices, and every contract is negotiated. Vendr's procurement data shows per-user licensing on annual terms, with per-user rates falling as deployments grow and buyers of 500 or more seats negotiating meaningfully better terms. Across 174 purchases in that data, the median annual contract is about $99,000. Minimum commitments of around 100 seats are widely reported. The structural point matters more than the exact number: per-seat pricing across the whole headcount means spend grows with the organization whether or not most employees use the product weekly. Setting that cost against the work it actually removes is its own exercise, which we walked through in what an AI agent actually costs.

Something already licensed now covers part of the job. Microsoft 365 Copilot, Atlassian Rovo and Google's search offerings all search their own suites with permissions that are already correct. For an organization whose content mostly lives in one of those suites, a separate platform can look like paying twice for overlapping coverage.

Employees find the answer, then do the work themselves. Search answers "where is the information?" For a large share of employee questions, the real need is "get this done": request the access, reset the account, submit the expense. Glean's agents are moving in that direction, but its core remains knowledge discovery, and teams whose volume is mostly service requests find that the gap between answer and action is where their time goes.

The upkeep never ends. Mirroring permissions across dozens of sources is the right design for scattered content, and it is also a permanent operational job. Sources change, permissions change, and connectors need attention. Some teams decide that burden belongs closer to where the content lives.

The 8 Glean alternatives at a glance

How to choose between them

The quickest way to use that table is to start from the reason you are leaving. If it is price, look first at the suite you may already own and at open source. If it is overlap, the answer is probably the suite you are standardizing on. If it is the gap between answering and doing, the employee service rows are the relevant ones. If it is upkeep, it comes down to whether you want more control or less. The employee service side of this decision changed for many teams when ServiceNow bought Moveworks. The deal closed in December 2025, and in February 2026 ServiceNow launched EmployeeWorks, which combines Moveworks' assistant and enterprise search with ServiceNow's workflows, while continuing to sell Moveworks on its own. We covered that decision separately in Moveworks alternatives.

The governance question most comparisons skip

Nearly every Glean comparison asks what the product can see: connectors, coverage, permission mirroring, answer quality. Those questions made sense when the output was a search result.

The output is increasingly an action. The assistant files the ticket, grants the access, submits the request. Once that is true, a second question becomes the important one: what did the system do, on whose behalf, based on which source, and can you show an auditor afterwards?

That second question covers several things the lists rarely test. Whether every action is recorded with the reasoning behind it. Whether you can see which document an answer came from, and what the system did when two documents disagreed. Whether actions require approval where your policy requires approval. Whether the agent that grants access is held to the same controls as the person who used to. Those checks matter whichever product you choose, and they separate products more sharply than connector counts do. We set out what running agents under that kind of control involves in what it takes to run an agent estate, and the tests we would apply to the search side in our evaluation guide for AI search.

When staying with Glean is the right call

If your problem is genuinely information discovery across many systems, your employees use it heavily, and the cost is justified by that use, there may be no good reason to move. Switching enterprise search is disruptive, and a product that works is worth more than a theoretically better one halfway through a migration.

The same applies if you need both jobs done: Glean for research and discovery, and something else for employee service. Research and service are different jobs, and some organizations deliberately run one product for each.

Rezolve.ai as a Glean alternative

We appear in both tables above, so take this section as our case rather than a verdict.

Rezolve.ai covers both halves of the problem in one product. Rezolve SearchIQ is permission-aware enterprise search across SharePoint, Confluence, Google Drive, Workday and other sources, with semantic search, document summarization and conversational follow-ups. Where the answer is a task, Sidekick carries it out in the same conversation: the password reset, the access request, the expense claim. Every answer and action is recorded in the Explainable AI view, showing how the request was understood, which knowledge was used and what was done, which is the governance question above answered in practice. On the enterprise search side specifically, Rezolve.ai was recognized as a Major Contender in Everest Group's Enterprise Search Products PEAK Matrix® Assessment 2026.

If you are moving off Glean because employees can find the answer but the work itself is still waiting for them, we are built for exactly that. If you only need to find documents more cheaply, one of the suite-native or open source rows is probably the better fit.

Learn more about how Rezolve.ai compares.