Glean

Glean is the right answer for mid-market and enterprise teams whose senior staff have become human search engines — but it's the wrong first buy for a 50-person agency, even one that "feels" like it has a knowledge problem. The real signal for Glean is that your VP has opened the same Slack channel, Drive folder, and Notion page three times this week to answer the same question. Below 150 seats, most teams get 80% of the benefit from tightening Notion/Drive hygiene and native search — and save $60K/year doing it.

Where Glean wins hard is permission-aware retrieval. Most competitors in the category either ignore source permissions or require a fragile manual sync; Glean inherits cleanly from Google Workspace, Okta, and SharePoint groups. That's the feature buyers are actually paying for. If your source systems have messy permissions — stale guest access, legacy Drive shares, inconsistent Slack channel privacy — fix that first, or Glean will cheerfully expose every mistake across the org.

On pricing, list is roughly $40–$100/user/mo but the real lever is annual commit and connector scope. Public buyer reports suggest 25–40% off is a reasonable target on 24-month commits with a tight connector scope — limiting to the 5 systems you actually use beats the "everything connected" default, which ends up paying for Jira indexing nobody searches. Start narrow, expand once adoption proves itself. Revisit the decision if you drop below 100 active users or if your source permissions can't be cleaned up — in both cases, a lighter-weight alternative like Dust usually wins on ROI.