The short answer
Guru costs less than Glean on every public figure, and it is also easier to buy at small headcounts. Guru's last published price was $25 per seat per month billed annually with a 10-seat minimum (January 2026), so 100 seats listed at $30,000 a year. Glean has never published a price, and its pricing URL now redirects to its homepage. The best outside data, from SpendHound, puts average Glean spend at $142,019 a year for small and mid-sized businesses and $259,933 for enterprises, and Vendr reports Glean minimums often starting around 100 to 250 users. Neither vendor lists a price today, so both end in a quote.
Guru prices from its pricing page as archived by the Internet Archive and its AWS Marketplace listing; Glean figures from SpendHound and Vendr. All read September 26, 2026.
If you are comparing Guru and Glean, you have probably already found that neither will tell you what it costs. Guru took its prices off its website this spring. Glean never put them there. So the comparisons that rank for this query mostly compare features and leave the budget question to a sales call, which is the one question a buyer can't skip.
This article answers the cost side with every public number we could verify, each with a source and a date, and then says which product fits which team. We sell InSearch, a cross-app enterprise search tool, so we are not neutral. Where Guru or Glean is the better buy, we say so.
Is Guru cheaper than Glean?
Yes, on every public figure. Guru's last list price put 100 seats at $30,000 a year, while SpendHound's average Glean spend for small and mid-sized businesses is $142,019 a year. The gap narrows once you account for what each contract covers, but it does not close. Glean is sold as a large platform purchase with a high seat floor, and Guru, until this year, sold a self-serve plan to teams of ten.
Two cautions before you lean on that. First, Guru's $25 rate was retired between January and April 2026. Its pricing page now describes Guru as "a platform and expertise solution" and sells a custom package that includes solution engineers, so a 2026 Guru quote will not match the old list price. Second, the Glean numbers are procurement averages across contracts of unknown size. They show the scale of a typical Glean deal, not the price of your deployment.
What do Guru and Glean cost for 50, 100 and 500 users?
At Guru's last list price, 50 users was $15,000 a year, 100 users $30,000 and 500 users $150,000. Glean has no list price to multiply, and under about 100 users you may not meet its minimum at all. The table runs Guru's two published rates at each headcount and sets Glean's reported floor and averages beside them.
| Annual cost | 50 users | 100 users | 250 users | 500 users |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Guru at $15 (Aug 2025 list, annual) | $9,000 | $18,000 | $45,000 | $90,000 |
| Guru at $25 (Jan 2026 list, annual) | $15,000 | $30,000 | $75,000 | $150,000 |
| Glean (no list price) | Likely below the minimum | At the low end of the reported 100 to 250 user floor | SpendHound averages: $142,019 (SMB) and $259,933 (enterprise) a year | |
| InSearch Business at $32 (annual) | $19,200 | $38,400 | $96,000 | $192,000 |
We put our own Business plan in the table because leaving it out would be convenient for us and useless for you. On list price, Guru's retired $25 seat was cheaper than our $32 Business seat, which is the tier that adds Confluence, Jira and Salesforce connectors. Our Team plan at $20 covers Drive, Slack and Notion. The honest difference is not the rate, it is that ours is on a public page and theirs is not. The full dated history of Guru's rates, including the 10-seat minimum, is on our Guru pricing page.
Why is Glean so much more expensive than Guru?
Because they are priced for different jobs. Glean indexes everything a company already has, across more than 250 connectors, and sells to organizations large enough to clear a 100 to 250 user minimum. Guru sells a curated knowledge base that people write and verify, and it used to sell it to teams of ten.
That difference shows up in what you are paying for. Glean's cost is mostly the index: crawling Slack, Drive, Jira, Salesforce and the rest, keeping permissions in sync, and running an assistant and agents over the result. Guru's cost is the curation layer: cards with named owners, verification schedules that ask experts to confirm an answer is still right, and delivery of those answers into Slack, Teams and the browser. Guru also connects to more than 100 tools, but its center of gravity is the content your team has chosen to maintain.
Glean even ships a Guru connector, so a company running both can search its Guru cards alongside everything else. That tells you how the two vendors see the market: Glean treats Guru as one more source, and Guru positions itself as the governed layer underneath other AI tools.
Do AI agents cost extra on Guru or Glean?
On Guru, no. Guru's AWS Marketplace listing states that "AI systems that pull knowledge through MCP connections are not billed as users" and that pricing "is not usage-based". On Glean, machine access is metered: Glean documents its MCP server under its Client API, which consumes FlexCredits.
This is the line item most comparisons miss, and it is growing fast. If your plan is to let Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or an internal agent pull company knowledge, Guru's model keeps that traffic inside the per-user contract. Glean's model bills it separately, and the open-source license on Glean's MCP client package does not change that. We walk through what Glean actually meters, and how to cap it, in Glean MCP server cost.
Which one is easier to buy?
Neither, in 2026. Both now require a sales conversation. Guru replaced its self-serve plan and free trial with a call booking, and Glean has never sold without one. The difference is the floor. Guru's last published minimum was 10 seats. Vendr reports that Glean typically requires minimum user commitments, often starting around 100 to 250 users for enterprise deployments.
For a 40-person company, that floor decides the question before features do. Paying for 100 Glean seats to cover 40 people more than doubles the effective per-user cost, and a quote-only vendor has little reason to go below its minimum for a small deal. For a 2,000-person company, both floors are irrelevant and the choice comes down to what problem you are solving.
Whichever you sign, read the renewal terms as closely as the price. Vendr notes that Glean renewals often carry annual price escalations of about 3 to 7 percent unless capped, and multi-year terms are where both vendors trade discount for commitment. If your team does not already track renewal dates centrally, contract management software that flags auto-renewal dates is worth having in place before the order form arrives.
Guru or Glean: which one should you choose?
Choose Guru when the problem is trust in a small set of critical answers. Choose Glean when the problem is that knowledge is scattered across dozens of apps and you have the budget and headcount for an enterprise platform.
- Guru fits support and customer-facing teams who need macros, policies and product facts verified by an owner before anyone repeats them. Its package lists SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA and GxP compliance, which matters in healthcare and life sciences.
- Glean fits companies well past 250 people with a mature IT function, a security review process and a need to search, summarize and build agents across the whole stack.
- Neither fits well when you are a 20 to 200 person company whose knowledge lives in Slack threads, Drive folders and Jira tickets that nobody will ever curate, and you want a price you can see today.
That last case is the one we built InSearch for. It searches Google Drive, Slack, Notion, Confluence, Jira, Gmail and Salesforce as they are, with no cards to write, and returns one written answer with citations back to the source documents. It only uses content each person is already allowed to open, and it never trains on your data. Plans are $20, $32 and $49 per user per month billed annually, from three seats, and you can buy them without a call. If you are still weighing curated wikis against live search more broadly, our list of Guru alternatives covers the options on both sides, and Glean pricing goes deeper on the procurement data behind Glean contracts.
Can you use Guru and Glean together?
Yes, and plenty of large companies do. Glean's Guru connector indexes Guru cards, so verified answers show up inside Glean search next to everything else. The catch is cost: you are paying for both a curation platform and an enterprise index, which only makes sense when the curated content is critical enough to justify its own tool. For most mid-sized teams, one layer is enough, and the right one depends on whether your bottleneck is accuracy of a few answers or findability of everything.