Tool Introduction

Arvind Jain, previously a co-founder of Rubrik and an early Google engineer, started Glean Technologies in January 2019 with co-founders Vishwanath T R, Tony Gentilcore, and Piyush Prahladka. The original enterprise search technology ran inside more than 40 companies before the broader market launch in 2021.

Headquarters sit at 260 Sheridan Ave, Suite 300, Palo Alto, California. By Glean's own account the company passed a $1B valuation within a year of that 2021 launch, reached $7.2B in 2024, and reports $300M in annual recurring revenue in 2026. Investors include General Catalyst, Sequoia, and Kleiner Perkins.

Demo Available?

Yes. A sales-led demo is the primary path, requested through the Get a demo call to action. No self-serve product trial is offered.

Tool's Accuracy

Glean published a head-to-head evaluation with a disclosed methodology, last updated February 12, 2026, scoring two dimensions: Correctness, meaning factual accuracy and logical validity relative to the query, and Completeness, meaning coverage of every part of the question.

Dataset: roughly 280 complex, multi-hop queries taken from Glean's own internal deployment, spanning comparable connectors including Google Drive, GitHub, Slack, Confluence, Jira, and Salesforce.
Grading protocol: four graders performed blind, randomized relative preference scoring on a five-point scale, cross-checked by Glean's AI quality team to reduce positional bias.
Result: where graders expressed a preference, Glean running on GPT-5.1 was selected over ChatGPT Business with company knowledge 1.9x more often, and Glean using Claude Sonnet 4.5 was selected over Claude's own enterprise search 1.6x more often.
Standing: this is a first-party Glean evaluation with disclosed method, dataset size, and model pairings; no independent third-party benchmark of Glean's search and assistant accuracy was found.

Aggregate Rating

4.6/5 stars (based on 700+ verified reviews across the internet)

Detailed Overview

What Glean Does

Employees ask a work question in plain language and get an answer drawn from the company's own documents, tickets, chats, and records instead of the public web. Glean Search reaches distributed internal sources, Glean Assistant answers using company context, and Glean Agents carries out multi-step work from natural-language instructions. An Enterprise Graph maps how people, documents, and processes relate, so answers reflect how the organization actually works.

Who Glean Is For

Knowledge workers in mid-size to large organizations who lose hours hunting across dozens of separate applications are the intended audience. Engineering, sales, support, and HR functions share a single deployment. Named customers such as Booking.com, Zillow, Ericsson, Samsung, Databricks, and Reddit span technology, travel, telecom, media, and fintech, so the fit is horizontal rather than tied to one vertical.

Top Differentiators

Breadth of connection comes first: 275+ out-of-the-box connectors reach workplace applications without custom engineering. Model choice stays open, with 40+ open and frontier language models routed by task to balance cost against performance rather than locking a buyer to one vendor. Glean Protect enforces source-system permissions on both reads and writes, and detects prompt-injection attacks at a stated 96.9% accuracy.

Founding Year

2019

Target Industry

B2B, Enterprise, SMB, Technology, Travel, Real Estate, Media and Entertainment, Telecommunications, Fintech, Consumer

Available Integrations

Slack: indexes public channels plus private channels and direct messages subject to Slack permissions, and sends, schedules, and reacts to messages from Glean.
Salesforce: pulls Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, and Leads and writes records, notes, and logged calls while Salesforce remains the system of record.
Jira: indexes projects, dashboards, issues, comments, and custom fields, and creates or edits tickets, projects, comments, and watchers.
GitHub: indexes repositories, pull request conversations, commit messages, and issue threads, and can create branches, open pull requests, and update files.
Confluence: indexes spaces, pages, blogs, and comments and creates or updates pages, spaces, blog posts, and labels for help-desk deflection.
Microsoft SharePoint: limited to SharePoint Server 2013, 2016, and 2019, indexing docx, pptx, xlsx, pdf, and OneNote files inside a document library.
Google Drive: indexes folders and native Docs, Sheets, and Slides, and creates or updates Docs and Sheets including tabs, ranges, and formatting.
Microsoft Teams: indexes only public conversations and shared files, though posting to channels, sending direct messages, and creating channels still run from Glean.
Zendesk: indexes knowledge-base articles and support tickets with comments, enforcing permissions down to the record level at the time of the query.
Atlassian Rovo: available as an MCP (Model Context Protocol) connector within the wider connector catalog.
MCP servers: connect external AI clients to Glean, with MCP Insights analytics for tracking server usage.
Google Docs Action Pack: lets agents create, update, copy, and edit documents directly.

Glean Core Suite

Glean publishes one named offering, Glean Core Suite, licensed on a per-user, per-month seat-fee basis. The official pricing page does not list a seat price, and access runs through a Get a demo sales contact.

Included in seat fee: Enterprise Graph, Agent Harness, Memory, Connectors, Glean Protect, Glean Search, Personalization, Library, Agent Building, Agent Governance, Agent Sharing, surface integrations such as Slack, Teams, Zoom, GitHub, and Miro, plus the Platform, Admin, Data Indexing, and Tools APIs.
Model Hub Usage: billed separately through an upfront commit for Model Hub Usage, charged at the underlying model or hosting provider's API rates, per million tokens.
Example provider rates: Glean Waldo $0.50 input and $2.50 output per million tokens, OpenAI GPT-4o $2.50 input and $10.00 output, Google Gemini 2.5 Flash $0.30 input and $2.50 output.
Flexible Model Management: a separate service billed as a percentage of total large language model (LLM) usage, based on upfront commit or actual usage.
Charging terms: Glean will only charge for successful LLM calls, and API usage covering normal human-scale product and portal usage carries no additional fee, while machine-scale or abusive volumes are subject to additional charges.
Free access: no free tier and no free trial are offered in Glean's official pricing materials.

Pricing last verified: 09/09/2026
Disclaimer: Pricing is subject to change. Please confirm current pricing on the vendor site.

Features & Specs

Connectors: 275+ out-of-the-box connectors covering project management, communication, storage, engineering, sales, and HR tools, plus custom connectors built with the Indexing SDK.
Model support: 40+ open and frontier language models with routing that matches each task to cost and performance.
Platform APIs: Chat API, Search API, and Agents API, published as an Experimental Preview.
Client APIs: Chat, Search, Activity, Agents, Announcements, Answers, Authentication, Documents, Collections, Entities, Governance, Insights, Messages, Pins, Shortcuts, Summarize, Tools, and Verification.
Indexing surface: an Indexing API, a Web SDK, and an Indexing SDK for custom connector development.
Client libraries: Python (pip install glean-api-client), TypeScript (@gleanwork/api-client), Java (com.glean.api-client via Maven Central), and Go (github.com/gleanwork/api-client-go).
Agent frameworks: toolkit integration with LangChain, CrewAI, the OpenAI Agents SDK, Google ADK, and the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
Agent hosts: Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, GitHub Copilot, Goose, Windsurf, and any MCP host.
Governance: permission-aware access controls, full query observability and tracking, and enterprise data-governance capabilities.
Architecture pillars: Enterprise Context, Glean Protect, Glean Intelligence, and an Open Platform layer with multi-cloud support.

Security & Compliance

Glean states certifications and attestations covering SOC 2 Type II, ISO 42001 for AI management, ISO 27001 for information security, HIPAA for healthcare data protection, GDPR alignment for EU data privacy, and TX-RAMP Level 2 for Texas state government security.

Identity: single sign-on (SSO) provider verification is required before AI execution, and user identity stays distinct from agent identity during authentication.
Permissions: source-system permissions are enforced on all read and write operations, so an agent cannot automatically access every resource its user could reach.
Runtime detection: prompt-injection attack detection at a claimed 96.9% accuracy and unstructured-data risk scanning at a claimed 95% accuracy.
Auditing: always-on end-to-end audit logging with event streaming to security information and event management (SIEM) systems.
Agent governance: write-action verification before an agent executes a write, agentic browser-use controls marked beta, and policy-based restrictions scoped to specific agents or users marked coming soon.
Content controls: built-in and custom policy frameworks, topic-restriction enforcement before a model produces a response, sensitive-data redaction from search results, and sensitive-content detection across structured and unstructured data.

Industry Use-Cases

Travel: onboarding and daily research at Booking.com

New hires spend their first weeks asking colleagues where information lives, and tenured staff repeat the same lookups. Booking.com routed those questions into Glean rather than into teammates' inboxes. Per the company's published case studies, teams reclaim up to 110 hours per year, and onboarding saves 36 hours per employee.

Consumer technology: building a learning loop at Nextdoor

Adoption of a work assistant stalls when nobody teaches people what to ask it. Shweta Puri, Marketing Technology and AI Operations Lead at Nextdoor, documented the response in a Glean blog post titled "The human side of Work AI: building a learning loop at Nextdoor." The account describes pairing Glean's Work AI with a continuous internal feedback loop.

Tool's Alternatives

Amazon Q Business indexes documents, images, audio, video, and application or database data and answers natural-language questions with citations across 50+ business platforms including Jira, Salesforce, and ServiceNow, while respecting existing organizational permissions. AWS states the product is no longer available to new customers and points them to a successor, Amazon Quick, which makes it a shrinking option for fresh evaluations. Its identity is AWS-native, bound to AWS infrastructure and IAM-style permissions rather than sitting as a cloud-agnostic layer.

Moveworks pairs enterprise search across Slack, OneDrive, Google Drive, SharePoint, Confluence, Outlook, and 50+ other sources with a Reasoning Engine that plans and executes multi-step tasks. Officially stated typical time to value is 8 weeks, supported by 1000+ pre-built agents in Agent Studio. Framing leans heavily on IT service desk and HR ticket deflection, a narrower center of gravity than a search-everything posture. Help-desk automation and employee self-service are the flagship use cases.

Guru structures, verifies, and routes organizational knowledge pulled from sources such as Slack and SharePoint, with Knowledge Agents that detect duplicate, stale, or conflicting content and flag non-compliant answers. Verification and governance sit at the center, catching inaccurate answers before people or AI systems consume them. Coverage stays within curated, human-verified knowledge bases, so live cross-app data and action-taking span a narrower slice of the workflow.

Atlassian Rovo builds a Teamwork Graph linking people, projects, and work across connected tools, then layers search, autonomous Rovo agents, and admin controls over what AI can access. First-party depth across Confluence, Jira, and code repositories is the strength, since Atlassian owns both the source systems and the AI layer. That same graph centers on the Atlassian suite, concentrating value in organizations already standardized on Jira and Confluence.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does Glean actually do for employees at work?

Glean indexes internal applications so staff can search company knowledge, ask Glean Assistant a question in plain language, and hand multi-step tasks to Glean Agents built from natural-language instructions.

How many applications can Glean connect to?

Glean states 275+ out-of-the-box connectors across five types: Native, MCP (Model Context Protocol), Push API, Web History, and Partner-Built. Custom connectors can also be built with the Indexing SDK.

How much does a Glean subscription cost?

Pricing is a custom quote. Glean Core Suite is licensed per user, per month with no published seat price, plus separate Model Hub Usage billed per million tokens at the model provider's rates.

Does Glean offer a free trial or demo?

A sales-led demo is the entry path, requested through the Get a demo call to action. No self-serve trial signup flow and no free tier appear in Glean's official pricing materials.

Which security certifications and attestations does Glean hold?

Glean states SOC 2 Type II, ISO 42001, ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR alignment, and TX-RAMP Level 2, alongside always-on audit logging and event streaming to security information and event management systems.

Can a Glean agent reach restricted internal documents?

No. Source-system permissions are enforced on both read and write operations, so an agent cannot automatically access every resource its signed-in user could reach, and SSO verification runs before AI execution.

Which language models does Glean run on?

Glean states support for 40+ open and frontier language models with routing that matches tasks to cost and performance. Its published evaluation cites runs on GPT-5.1 and Claude Sonnet 4.5.

Who founded Glean and when did it launch?

Arvind Jain, previously a Rubrik co-founder and early Google engineer, started Glean in January 2019 with Vishwanath T R, Tony Gentilcore, and Piyush Prahladka. The broader market launch came in 2021.

How do developers build on top of Glean?

Client libraries ship for Python, TypeScript, Java, and Go, alongside Chat, Search, and Agents Platform APIs in Experimental Preview, an Indexing API, a Web SDK, and LangChain, CrewAI, and MCP toolkit support.

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Glean

Enterprise AI that understands your company.