The short answer
Slack's own enterprise search is now the cheaper of the two at most company sizes: Slack lists Enterprise+ at $45 per active user per month billed annually, which is $54,000 a year for 100 people, while Glean publishes no price and Vendr reports a median Glean contract of $98,890 a year. The catch is that Enterprise+ is billed on every Slack seat, and Glean usually starts at 100 to 250 users. Glean reaches far more sources than Slack's 13 connectors. Slack wins when most answers live in Slack; Glean wins when they live everywhere else. Full plan prices are on our Slack AI pricing page.
Slack figures from slack.com/pricing and the Slack help center, Glean figures from Vendr and docs.glean.com, all read September 29, 2026. Glean publishes no price.
Until late September 2026, this comparison had no numbers on either side. Glean took its pricing page down and now redirects glean.com/pricing to its homepage. Slack sold enterprise search only on Enterprise+, and Enterprise+ said "contact sales". Then, between September 26 and September 28, 2026, Slack's pricing card started showing Enterprise+ at $45 per user per month billed annually. For the first time, a buyer choosing between Slack's built-in search and Glean has one published figure to work from.
That changes the conversation for any US company already running on Slack. This piece prices both products with sources and dates, runs the numbers at 100 and 250 users, explains the Slack API change that reshaped how Glean reads Slack, and says where each one is the better buy. We sell InSearch, which competes with both, so read us as an interested party.
Is Slack AI cheaper than Glean?
At list price, usually yes. Slack Enterprise+ at $45 per active user per month comes to $54,000 a year for 100 users, below Vendr's $98,890 median Glean contract. Glean can still come out cheaper for a large Slack workspace where only a few hundred people need cross-app search, because Slack bills Enterprise+ on every active seat.
The two products are bought in very different ways. Slack's AI features are not an add-on anymore: Slack withdrew the $10 per user Slack AI add-on in June 2025 and folded AI into its plans. Business+ at $15 per user per month billed annually gets Slackbot, AI search answers, recaps and file summaries. Enterprise search across other apps, the part that competes with Glean, is on Enterprise+ only. Glean is a separate contract with a user minimum, sized and negotiated per customer.
So the real comparison is the cost of moving your whole Slack workspace from the plan you are on to Enterprise+, against the cost of a Glean contract sized to the people who will use it.
How much does Slack enterprise search cost?
Slack enterprise search is included in Enterprise+, which Slack's pricing card lists at $45 per active user per month billed annually, with no monthly option. It is not sold on its own. Business+ at $15 and Pro at $7.25 do not include it.
Slack's help center puts it plainly: enterprise search is "Available on the Enterprise+ plan", and on Enterprise Grid for organizations that kept the legacy Slack AI add-on. The $45 figure is new enough that the comparison table lower on Slack's own pricing page still says contact sales, so get it on the order form. Two more terms matter for budgeting. Turning AI off does not lower the price: Slack says "the price you pay for your Slack plan won't change if you turn all AI features off." And the Fair Billing Policy, which credits you for members inactive for more than 28 days, covers plans bought through Slack's website, not negotiated contracts.
What you get: search across 13 connected apps (Asana, Box, Confluence Cloud, Dropbox, GitHub, Google Drive, Gmail, Jira Cloud, Outlook, Microsoft Teams, OneDrive and SharePoint, Salesforce and Seismic), plus custom connectors. Confluence and Jira are limited to five subdomains each and GitHub to five organizations. Enterprise+ members also have no weekly Slackbot limit, where Business+ members get 15 messages a week.
How much does Glean cost?
Glean does not publish a price. Vendr reports a median Glean contract of $98,890 a year across 174 purchases, with a displayed range of $29,880 to $208,897, and says minimums are "often starting around 100 to 250 users". SpendHound reports averages of $142,019 a year for companies with 50 to 1,000 employees.
Those are contract values, not seat rates, and neither source publishes the seat counts behind them. Per-seat figures in blog posts range from $30 to $75 and trace to no Glean source, so we leave them out. What the procurement data does tell you is the shape of the deal: an annual commitment with a user floor, and a price that depends on connectors, AI usage and negotiation. The detail is on our Glean pricing page.
What do Glean and Slack Enterprise+ cost for 100 and 250 users?
For 100 users, Slack Enterprise+ lists at $54,000 a year and Glean's median contract is $98,890. For 250 users, Enterprise+ is $135,000 a year, above Glean's median but inside Glean's reported range. The Slack figure is only the upgrade if you are already paying for Business+.
| Yearly cost | 100 Slack users | 250 Slack users | How it is billed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Slack Business+ (no enterprise search) | $18,000 | $45,000 | $15 per active user, every seat |
| Slack Enterprise+ (enterprise search) | $54,000 | $135,000 | $45 per active user, every seat |
| Upgrade, Business+ to Enterprise+ | +$36,000 | +$90,000 | The real price of Slack enterprise search |
| Glean, Vendr median contract | $98,890 (range $29,880 to $208,897) | Quote only, minimums often 100 to 250 users, on top of your Slack plan | |
| InSearch Business, 100 seats | $38,400 | $38,400 if 100 of the 250 need it | $32 per seat billed annually, only the people you add |
The upgrade row is the one to hold Glean against. A company already on Business+ does not pay $54,000 for Slack enterprise search; it pays $36,000 more for the same 100 seats. A company on Pro pays $45,300 more, because the move from $7.25 to $45 covers everyone. And Glean is not instead of Slack: you keep paying for whatever Slack plan you are on, so the Glean line is added to it.
Does Glean still search Slack?
Yes, but not the way it used to. After Slack changed its API terms in 2025, Glean moved to Slack's Real-time Search API, which fetches messages live at query time instead of copying them into Glean's index. Glean stopped using Slack's Discovery APIs on March 3, 2026, and users must each authorize Glean to see their private channels and DMs.
This is the part of the comparison most write-ups miss, and it matters to anyone buying a third-party search tool for a Slack company. On May 29, 2025, Slack cut the rate limit for conversations.history and conversations.replies to "1 request per minute" for commercially distributed apps not approved for the Slack Marketplace. Slack's API terms, effective October 10, 2025, go further: a third-party app "may not create persistent copies, archives, indexes, or long-term data stores of other organizations' API Data" through the Data Access and Real-time Search APIs, and may not "use API Data to train a large language model".
Glean's documentation now describes its Slack connector as federated: it "does not crawl or index Slack message content", and message bodies are "retrieved live from Slack at query time". The setup needs a Slack admin who can install apps, and "each user must individually authorize the app to see permission-aware Slack results". Glean also notes that its Gleanbot Daily Digest in Slack is not supported in this mode. Those terms apply to every third-party search product that reads Slack, ours included. The practical effect is that Slack's own enterprise search and any outside tool now answer from Slack in a similar way, live and within each person's access, so Slack data alone is no longer a reason to pick Glean.
Glean vs Slackbot, which answers more of your company's questions?
It depends on where the answers are written down. Slackbot on Enterprise+ answers from Slack and 13 connected apps. Glean lists more than 250 connectors, including systems Slack does not reach such as Notion, ServiceNow and Zendesk. If your policies, runbooks and specs sit outside that list of 13, Glean or another cross-app tool will find more of them.
Take an engineering team. Its incidents run in Slack channels, often opened automatically by incident management software that pages the on-call engineer, while the runbooks sit in Confluence and the postmortems in Google Docs. Slack enterprise search covers all three of those sources, and it does so without a second vendor. A support team whose knowledge base lives in Zendesk, or a product team that writes in Notion, is outside Slack's connector list and gets partial answers.
Setup is closer than the price gap suggests. Both require an admin to switch the feature on and both depend on each person connecting accounts for private content: Slack says members "connect their individual accounts", and Glean needs each user to authorize Slack private channels. Both respect permissions at query time.
Which one should you buy?
Buy Slack Enterprise+ if most of your company's knowledge lives in Slack and the 13 supported apps, and you want unlimited Slackbot for everyone. Buy Glean if you have 250 or more people who need answers across many systems Slack does not connect to. Consider a per-seat tool if only part of the company needs cross-app search.
Slack's case is strong for a Slack-first company: one vendor, one contract, AI in the tool everyone already has open, and a price you can now read on a public page. Its weakness is the billing model. You pay $45 for every active member, including the people who never search outside Slack.
Glean's case is breadth. With over 250 connectors it reaches systems Slack will not, and for a large company with knowledge spread across dozens of tools that breadth is worth paying for. Its weaknesses are the unpublished price, the user minimums and the fact that it sits on top of your Slack bill, not instead of it.
InSearch sits between them. It searches Slack, Google Drive, Notion, Confluence, Jira, Gmail and Salesforce in one query and returns a written answer with citations, scoped to what each person can open. It costs $20, $32 or $49 per seat billed annually from three seats, so a company can cover the 40 or 100 people who search across apps without moving the whole workspace up a tier. If you want to see what Slack's plans cost at your headcount first, the full table is on Slack AI pricing, and Slack enterprise search covers the connector limits in detail.