The short answer
Glean and ChatGPT Enterprise both answer questions from company data, but they reach that data in opposite ways. Glean crawls every connected app with an administrator credential and builds one permission-aware index for the whole company. ChatGPT Enterprise mostly queries each person's own connected accounts live, and only a few sources, such as Google Drive, SharePoint and Microsoft Teams, can be synced once by an admin. Neither publishes an Enterprise price. Vendr reports a median Glean contract of $98,890 a year; ChatGPT Business, the published alternative, is $20 per seat per month billed annually and stops at 200 seats.
Searchers typing "glean vs chatgpt" are usually past the demo stage. Someone has run a ChatGPT pilot and people like it, someone else has seen Glean find a document that nobody could, and the budget has room for one of them. Before that decision goes to a vote, it is worth being able to rank the purchase against the other projects on the IT roadmap, because both of these are real annual commitments, not trials.
This comparison covers the three things that end up in the contract: what each one costs, how each one reaches your company's data, and which claims in the vendors' own comparison pages hold up. OpenAI figures come from openai.com and help.openai.com. Glean figures come from glean.com and Glean's documentation, plus two procurement data sources, labeled as secondary every time. Everything was read on September 18, 2026.
How much does Glean cost?
Glean does not publish a price. Its old pricing URL now redirects to the homepage, and every contract is quoted by sales. The best available numbers are secondary. Vendr reports that the median buyer pays $98,890 a year, based on 174 purchases from 34 unique buyers, and shows a range of $29,880 to $208,897. That range is Vendr's 10th to 90th percentile, not the full spread: the underlying data on the same page runs from $11,880 to $463,366.
SpendHound, drawing on 42 teams, reports an average of $142,019 a year for companies with 50 to 1,000 employees and $259,933 above 1,000, with the smaller group up 103.57 percent year over year. Vendr also says Glean "typically requires minimum user commitments, often starting around 100 to 250 users" for enterprise deployments. Glean does not publish a minimum, so ask directly whether one applies to you, because at 80 people it changes the whole calculation. Our Glean pricing breakdown goes through the contract terms in more detail.
How much does ChatGPT Enterprise cost?
ChatGPT Enterprise has no published price. OpenAI's business pricing page says only "Contact our sales team to discuss enterprise pricing" and that "credit-based pricing and token-based pricing are available for Enterprise plans." What OpenAI does document is the billing model. Enterprise workspaces "purchase a shared credit pool at the contract level", every seat draws from it for advanced features, and "there are no per-seat usage caps by default." Seats added mid-term are "generally reconciled through quarterly true-ups".
The published option is ChatGPT Business: $20 per standard seat per month billed annually, $25 monthly, and $100 annually or $125 monthly for a premium seat with more usage. A workspace needs at least two paid seats. Since August 24, 2026 a Business subscription stops at 200 paid seats, and OpenAI states its support team "is unable to change your maximum seat limit." Workspaces created before that date keep their previous limit. So a company of 150 can buy from the price list, and a company of 500 is in a sales conversation either way. What happens at seat 201 is covered in the ChatGPT Business 200 seat cap, and the full plan breakdown is on ChatGPT Enterprise pricing.
One figure to be careful with: a "minimum contract value of $108K per year" for ChatGPT Enterprise still circulates in competitor blogs. It traces to a 2025 press report, not to OpenAI, and OpenAI's current pages say nothing about a minimum.
Glean vs ChatGPT Enterprise side by side
| Question | Glean | ChatGPT Enterprise |
|---|---|---|
| Published price | None. Quote only | None. Quote only. Business is $20 a seat billed annually, up to 200 seats |
| What companies report paying | Vendr median $98,890 a year, 174 purchases (secondary) | No reliable current figure; seats plus a shared credit pool |
| How it reaches company data | Admin credential crawls and indexes every connected app | Each member connects their own accounts; admins can sync Drive, SharePoint and Teams where eligible |
| Permissions | Source permissions carried over during the crawl | A member retrieves only what they can already access |
| Connectors | "275+" on its connectors page, "100+" on others | No fixed list; the plugin "discovers the knowledge sources available to you when it runs" |
| Models | Multiple model providers | OpenAI models only |
| Strongest at | Finding documents across dozens of apps for everyone | Writing, analysis, coding and agent work for each person |
How do Glean and ChatGPT reach your company data?
Glean indexes centrally; ChatGPT mostly connects per person. Glean's documentation says "every native connector uses an admin-level credential" to "crawl and index content", and that Glean "carries each document's source permissions over during the admin crawl." One administrator connects Slack once, and every employee can search Slack the next morning, each seeing only what they could already open.
ChatGPT works the other way round. OpenAI states that installing the Company Knowledge plugin "does not connect your app accounts". Members sign in to each provider themselves, and only administrator-managed sources skip that step. OpenAI's sync article says those "may include Google Drive, SharePoint, and Microsoft Teams" depending on workspace, region and settings, that "individually authorized app sync is no longer available", and that "GitHub does not offer administrator-managed sync." Everything outside the admin-managed sources is queried live, per person, when they ask.
Work that through for 400 employees and five apps. Drive, SharePoint and Teams can be handled once by an admin. Slack and Jira mean 800 individual sign-ins, and the people who skip them are invisible until someone asks why the assistant never finds last quarter's decision. That is a design choice with a genuine security benefit, since ChatGPT never holds access a person lacks, but it is the main reason a connected assistant is not the same product as a company index. The details are in ChatGPT Enterprise connectors.
What Glean's comparison page gets wrong about ChatGPT
Glean publishes its own Glean vs ChatGPT Enterprise page, and it ranks near the top for this search. Some of it holds up. Some of it does not survive a read of OpenAI's current documentation.
- "Limited to approximately 14 connectors, missing core enterprise systems like ServiceNow, Salesforce, Workday and Zendesk." OpenAI lists a Salesforce plugin with read and write capabilities for permitted CRM records. Glean may mean only apps that support file search and sync, but the page does not say so.
- "Relies on user-level credentials." Mostly true, but no longer entirely: OpenAI documents administrator-managed indexed sync for Google Drive, SharePoint and Microsoft Teams.
- "Company Knowledge is incompatible with web search and image generation." This comes from OpenAI's October 2025 launch post, which said so. The current help article does not repeat it, so the claim is at best dated.
- "Glean results are preferred about 2x." Glean's own write-up of that study says it "used ChatGPT Business with company knowledge", not Enterprise, with Glean's own deployment as the test data and four graders. It is a vendor test, and a different plan.
Two of Glean's points stand. ChatGPT Enterprise runs on OpenAI's models only, and we found nothing in OpenAI's documentation offering a customer VPC deployment. If either matters to your security team, that is a real point for Glean.
Can you use Glean inside ChatGPT?
Yes. Glean is listed in ChatGPT's app marketplace, and Glean's documentation walks an admin through enabling it under Workspace settings, Apps and plugins. Two limits apply: "only search and fetch equivalents are available", and "users need to activate the Glean connector in each new conversation". The combination works, but you pay for both products, and adoption depends on people remembering to switch it on.
Which should you buy?
Buy ChatGPT Enterprise if the goal is making each person faster at writing, analysis and code, and company search is a secondary benefit. Under 200 people, start with ChatGPT Business at a published $20 a seat and upgrade only when you hit the cap or need Enterprise controls.
Buy Glean if the goal is finding information across dozens of apps for a large company, you can support a quoted contract with a median near $100,000, and you can meet a user minimum that may start in the hundreds. Compare it against the rest of the field on Glean alternatives first.
Consider a dedicated search product if the complaint is simply that people cannot find answers across Drive, Slack, Notion, Confluence, Gmail, Jira and Salesforce, and neither a six-figure quote nor hundreds of individual sign-ins fits. InSearch connects each source once, centrally, enforces that source's permissions per person at query time, and returns one written answer with citations. It is published at $20 per user per month on Team, $32 on Business and $49 on Scale, billed annually, on our pricing page. It does not write your code or draft your board deck, so many teams run it alongside ChatGPT rather than instead of it.
Frequently asked questions
Is Glean better than ChatGPT Enterprise?
For company-wide search across many apps, Glean is built for the job and ChatGPT Enterprise is not: Glean indexes every source for everyone with an admin credential, while ChatGPT mostly queries each person's own connected accounts. For writing, analysis and coding, ChatGPT is the stronger product. Most buyers are choosing which problem to fund first.
Does Glean work with ChatGPT?
Yes. Glean is available in ChatGPT's app marketplace and connects through Glean's MCP server. In ChatGPT it offers search and fetch only, and users have to activate the Glean connector in each new conversation. You keep paying for both Glean and ChatGPT seats.
Is ChatGPT Enterprise cheaper than Glean?
Probably on seats, but neither publishes an Enterprise price, so compare quotes. The published reference point is ChatGPT Business: 200 seats at $20 a month billed annually is $48,000 a year, against a Vendr median of $98,890 for Glean. Enterprise adds a shared credit pool on top of seats, so model your usage before comparing.
Does ChatGPT Enterprise index company data like Glean?
Only partly. Administrator-managed sync, which OpenAI says may include Google Drive, SharePoint and Microsoft Teams, indexes approved content in advance. Every other app is queried live through each member's own connected account. Glean indexes all connected sources centrally. For the same comparison against Anthropic, see Glean vs Claude Enterprise.