Coveo vs Glean Pricing: Cost at 100 to 1,000 Users

Coveo and Glean end up on the same shortlist more often than their histories suggest. Coveo has sold search for about twenty years, mostly to power customer-facing sites, commerce catalogs and support portals, with an employee search product alongside. Glean was built for one job: finding things inside a company's own apps. Both will run a solid demo. Neither will put a number in writing until you are deep in a sales cycle, which leaves the IT or digital workplace lead with a budget line to fill and nothing to fill it with.

This piece collects every public price we could verify for both, with the source and date for each, and runs them at 100, 250 and 1,000 users. We sell InSearch, an enterprise search tool that competes with both, so read us as an interested party. Where Coveo or Glean is the better buy, we say so.

Is Coveo cheaper than Glean?

On the public record, yes. Coveo's last listed Pro plan was $15,840 a year, while SpendHound's average Glean spend for small and mid-sized businesses is $142,019 a year. The catch is that Coveo's old list prices covered query volume, not seats, and its current Workplace plans are seat-based and quote only.

So the comparison is less clean than the gap implies. A Coveo Pro subscription at $1,320 a month bought one pricing unit, which Coveo defines as 100,000 queries a month, with three cloud connectors. A query in Coveo's terms is any Search API request that retrieves results: a search, a filter, a facet click, a sort, a page turn. Query suggestions do not count. For a 1,000-person company, 100,000 queries a month works out to 100 retrieval requests per employee per month, and every facet click spends one.

The Glean figures are procurement averages across contracts of unknown size. They describe what a typical Glean deal costs, not what yours will. Treat both sets of numbers as a sense of scale, then get quotes.

What do Coveo and Glean cost for 100, 250 and 1,000 users?

Coveo's last list prices do not change with headcount, so Base stays $7,200 a year and Pro $15,840 a year until query volume forces a second unit. Glean has no list price to multiply, and at 100 users you sit at or below its reported minimum. The table sets the public figures side by side.

Two things stand out. At 1,000 seats our own per-user pricing is above the SpendHound averages for Glean, and we would rather you see that here than in a spreadsheet later. And Coveo's old flat prices look cheap only because they were never meant to cover a full employee deployment with the connectors most companies need, which is the next question.

You will also find a Coveo figure of $34,700 a year in circulation. It is a number GoSearch attributes to Vendr, and Vendr's Coveo page now returns a 404, so we cannot check it. The same GoSearch article estimates Coveo's three-year total cost of ownership at $750,000 to $2,000,000. Three years at $34,700 is $104,100, so one article carries two Coveo estimates that sit nearly 20 times apart. That spread tells you more than either number: nobody outside a signed contract knows what Coveo costs at your size.

How does Coveo charge for employee search?

Coveo's pricing page now says it uses "Entitlement-based pricing for Service & Websites plus seat-based plans for Workplace". Workplace plans are priced per seat through a quote, and generative answers and passage retrieval are metered separately on top of base search units.

The live page has no dollar figures, only a Request Pricing form. It states that "Each pricing unit includes 100k queries per month." Generative Answering is counted in Generative Queries per Month and the Passage Retrieval API in Passage Queries per Month, both separate from base search. The AWS Marketplace listing is no help on price: it offers a 36-month contract with Pro and Enterprise dimensions, each "100K Query per month (QPM)/Contact Coveo for details", shown at a $0.01 placeholder. The real number arrives in a private offer.

The entitlement details matter more than the headline. From Coveo's product documentation, Pro versus Enterprise:

• Connectors: Pro lets you pick 3 cloud connectors. Enterprise follows the connector directory. "The SAP, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Shopify native connectors are excluded and must be purchased separately."
• Security: document-level security is included on both. SSO on Pro is "Salesforce, Google & Office 365 only"; Enterprise supports SSO generally.
• Compliance and uptime: HIPAA is not available on Pro and is an add-on on Enterprise. Uptime is 99.9% on Pro and 99.99% on Enterprise.
• Administrators: 10 on Pro, 50 on Enterprise.
• Index size for Coveo for Intranet: Pro gets a fixed 500,000 items. Enterprise gets 2,500 items per user, up to 60 million. An email counts as an item.

That last line has a quirk worth raising in negotiation. At 2,500 items per user, Enterprise only matches Pro's 500,000 items at 200 users. A 100-person company on Enterprise gets a smaller index (250,000 items) than it would on Pro, and if you connect mailboxes, email alone can fill that fast. At 1,000 users, Enterprise allows 2.5 million items. More on the plan structure is on our Coveo pricing breakdown.

What does Glean's contract include?

Glean does not say publicly. Its pricing URL redirects to its homepage, so what we know comes from procurement data: SpendHound's averages of $142,019 and $259,933 a year, and Vendr's note that minimums often start around 100 to 250 users and renewals carry 3 to 7% escalations.

What Glean does publish is scope. It lists more than 250 connectors and is built for employee search from the ground up, with the assistant and agents layered over one permission-aware index. Vendr's Glean page showed a $98,890 median in August 2026 and no longer shows a dollar figure at all. For a company of 100 to 150 people, the minimum is the number to ask about first: paying for 250 seats to cover 120 people doubles your effective per-user cost before anyone runs a search. Our Glean pricing page covers the procurement data in more depth, and Guru vs Glean pricing runs the same math against a smaller competitor.

Where does each one win?

Coveo wins on vendor maturity, transparency of the company itself and customer-facing search. Glean wins on ease of setup and breadth of workplace connectors. They overlap less than a shortlist suggests.

Coveo's case is strong. It is a twenty-year search vendor and a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for search. It is listed on the TSX (CVO), so its financials are public: SaaS subscription revenue of $37.4M in Q1 of fiscal 2027, up 9%, with full-year guidance of $160.0M to $164.0M in total revenue. Procurement teams that worry about vendor risk can read those filings. Document-level security is on both plans. And Coveo does something Glean does not: search for your customers, on your website, commerce catalog and support portal. If one contract could cover both the intranet and the service site, that changes the math. Coveo also offers a 14-day free trial with no credit card.

Glean's case is also strong. G2 reviewers find it easier to set up, its 250+ connectors cover most of the workplace stack without separate purchases, and the product is designed around employee questions rather than adapted from site search. If your need is purely internal, that focus shows. For a wider field, see our lists of Coveo alternatives and Glean alternatives, or Coveo vs Elasticsearch cost if building your own is on the table.

Which one should you buy?

Buy Coveo if you also need customer-facing search or want a publicly audited vendor with document-level security on every plan. Buy Glean if the job is purely internal, you have 250 or more people and the budget matches SpendHound's averages. Budget for a 3-year term with either.

Before the first call, write down three things: your seat count, the apps you need connected, and whether any of them are SAP, Salesforce, ServiceNow or Shopify, since Coveo sells those native connectors separately. Ask each vendor for the price at your real headcount, the renewal cap, and what happens to the price if you add generative answers. If your company routes software buys through a formal process, putting both quotes into a procurement platform that tracks purchase requests and approvals keeps the comparison and the sign-offs in one record.

There is a third case. If you are a 20 to 300 person team whose knowledge sits in Drive, Slack, Notion, Jira and SharePoint, and you want a price you can see before you talk to anyone, that is what we built InSearch for. It searches those apps in one box, returns answers with citations, and honors each app's own permissions. Plans are $20, $32 and $49 per user per month billed annually ($24, $38 and $59 monthly), from three seats, and you can buy them by card. At 100 users on Team, that is $24,000 a year, in writing, today.