Moveworks vs Glean: Pricing and Search Compared

This comparison comes up constantly in shortlists, and it usually comes up because both products got put on the same slide by someone who described them both as "AI that answers employee questions." That description is accurate and almost useless. The two products were built to finish different sentences, they are sold to different buyers, and as of 2026 they sit in very different corporate situations.

Here is what each one actually is, what the public evidence says each one costs, and how to tell which problem you have.

What is the difference between Moveworks and Glean?

Moveworks started as an IT service desk automation product. Somebody types "I need access to the finance drive" into Slack or Teams, and Moveworks understands the request, checks the entitlement, and either fulfills it or files and routes the ticket. Answering questions is part of the job, but the point of the product is closing the loop so a human never touches the request.

Glean started as enterprise search. Somebody asks "what did we agree with this customer about data residency," and Glean searches across the company's connected applications, respects who is allowed to see what, and returns a written answer with citations back to the source documents. It has grown a lot of assistant and agent functionality on top, but retrieval is the core.

The clearest way to feel the difference is to ask what a good outcome looks like. For Moveworks, a good outcome is a ticket that never got created. For Glean, a good outcome is a person who found the right document in ten seconds instead of asking three colleagues. Companies genuinely have both problems. They rarely have both budgets.

Who owns Moveworks now?

ServiceNow. The acquisition closed on December 15, 2025, and ServiceNow's FY2025 10-K puts the consideration at $2.407 billion. That is the single most important fact in this comparison, because it changes what you are signing up for.

ServiceNow moved quickly. On February 26, 2026 it announced Autonomous Workforce and added Moveworks to the ServiceNow AI Platform, introducing ServiceNow EmployeeWorks, which combines Moveworks' conversational AI chat and deep enterprise search with ServiceNow's workflows. The same release states plainly that "Moveworks continues to be offered as a standalone product within the ServiceNow portfolio." Then at Knowledge 2026 on May 5, 2026, ServiceNow announced Otto, described as an AI experience that combines the intelligence of Now Assist, Moveworks and AI Experience. We covered that consolidation in detail in ServiceNow Otto vs Now Assist.

So Moveworks is still buyable on its own, and ServiceNow has said so in writing. What has changed is whose roadmap it follows. Feature priorities now get set by ServiceNow's product strategy, and the direction of travel is visible in the naming: the Moveworks engine increasingly appears inside ServiceNow-branded experiences rather than as its own destination. If you are a heavy ServiceNow customer, that is a benefit. If you are not, it is a risk worth pricing into a three-year commitment.

Glean, by contrast, is still independent, which means no platform parent steering the roadmap and no platform parent underwriting it either.

How much does Moveworks cost compared to Glean?

Neither company publishes a price. Moveworks' pricing page invites you to "connect with a Moveworks expert to request a custom quote." Glean's pricing page has no plans, no tiers and no figures at all, just a demo request. Both were read on August 19, 2026.

What does exist is aggregated contract data from software buying marketplaces. These are secondary sources reporting on real signed deals, and they are the best public evidence available, so long as you read the sample sizes.

Two things in that table are worth pausing on.

First, the floors are very different. Vendr's lowest reported Moveworks contract is $89,500 while its lowest reported Glean contract is $29,880, roughly a third of it. That gap is consistent with what the two products are: Moveworks is bought as a platform for a support function, and platforms have floors. Glean is bought per seat, so a smaller deployment produces a smaller contract.

Second, the Glean data contradicts itself across sources. Vendr's average across all Glean deals ($98,890) sits below SpendHound's average for small and mid-sized businesses alone ($142,019), and both platforms describe their numbers as real contract data rather than estimates. They cannot both be representative of the same population. The honest reading is that Glean contracts vary enormously and no single number describes the market. We go through that discrepancy and what moves a quote in more detail on our Glean pricing breakdown.

The practical takeaway for a budget conversation: both of these are six-figure annual decisions for a company of any size, and neither vendor will give you a number without a call. Plan the procurement timeline accordingly.

Which is better for enterprise search, Moveworks or Glean?

For pure search and retrieval, Glean. That is what it was built for, its connector coverage is broad, and it handles item-level permissions properly. Moveworks does have real search, and ServiceNow specifically markets EmployeeWorks on Moveworks' "deep enterprise search," so this is not a case of one product having the capability and the other not.

The difference is where the depth sits. Moveworks is strongest in the systems an employee support function touches: the service desk, identity and access, HR systems, the knowledge base. Glean is strongest across the general working estate: documents, wikis, chat, tickets, CRM. If the answer your people need lives in a Google Doc that three teams edited last quarter, that is Glean's home ground. If the answer is "your access request is approved and provisioned," that is Moveworks'.

One more thing that shows up in real evaluations and rarely in comparison charts: both products need to reach people where they work. Moveworks lives in chat, which is excellent if your company genuinely runs on Slack or Teams and much weaker if a large share of your people are in a browser, a help desk console, or a field application all day. The teams who most need fast answers, support agents, new hires, finance during close, are often not the ones sitting in a chat client.

Do I need Moveworks if I already have ServiceNow?

Ask ServiceNow what is in your existing entitlement before you price Moveworks separately, because the answer moved twice in 2026. EmployeeWorks packages Moveworks capability inside ServiceNow, and Otto is now the umbrella experience above Now Assist, Moveworks and AI Experience. Depending on your contract and rollout timing, some of what you would be buying may already be arriving through your platform agreement.

This is the single highest-leverage question in the whole evaluation and it takes one email. It is also a question your account team may not volunteer, because the two products are sold by different motions inside the same company.

Do I need Glean if I already have Microsoft 365 Copilot?

Sometimes, and the deciding factor is usually coverage rather than quality. Microsoft 365 Copilot is strong inside the Microsoft estate and lists at $30 per user per month on an annual commitment. It is far weaker when a meaningful share of your knowledge lives in Google Drive, Notion, Confluence, Jira or Salesforce, because it cannot ground answers in what it cannot see.

The honest test is to write down the last ten questions your team could not answer quickly, then mark which system held the answer. If eight of them are in SharePoint and Outlook, you probably do not need a second product. If they are spread across five vendors, no single-vendor assistant will close the gap, which is the case we make on enterprise search tools.

How to decide between them

Run this in order, and stop at the first line that describes you.

1. Your IT and HR teams are buried in repetitive, fulfillable requests. That is a workflow automation problem. Moveworks, or ServiceNow's own packaging of it, is the right category.
2. Your people cannot find things across many disconnected applications. That is a search problem. Moveworks is an expensive way to solve it, and a search-first tool will do it better for less.
3. You are all-in on ServiceNow. Check your entitlement first, then compare the incremental cost of EmployeeWorks against a standalone tool.
4. You have fewer than 100 people. Both vendors' reported minimums are likely to disqualify you before features matter. Look at tools with published per-seat pricing and no seat floor, and check what happens to that rate when you grow, because several products in this category reprice sharply once a team passes a hundred users.
5. You need a number this quarter. Neither company will give you one without a sales cycle. If your timeline is weeks rather than months, start with vendors that publish prices.

Both companies are also moving toward agents that take actions rather than only return answers, which is where the category is going generally, and a market of ready-made AI agents has grown up around exactly that shift. That direction is real, but it should not distract from the boring question underneath a six-figure commitment: can your people find the answer, and does the tool check whether they were allowed to see it? That is what permission-aware AI search is about, and it is the part that is hardest to retrofit later.

What to verify before you sign

Vendor packaging in this category changed three times in the first half of 2026 alone, so treat every figure here, including ours, as something to confirm rather than something to budget from.

• Ask both vendors for the minimum seat count and minimum contract term in the first call. This disqualifies more buyers than price does.
• Ask whether AI or agent functionality is included in the quoted per-seat number or priced as a separate line.
• Ask for the renewal uplift mechanism in writing during the first negotiation, not at renewal.
• For Moveworks, ask specifically what your existing ServiceNow agreement already entitles you to under EmployeeWorks and Otto.
• For both, get the list of connectors included versus connectors delivered as professional services. This is where two quotes silently stop being comparable.

If you want the fuller picture on what each vendor discloses, our Glean pricing breakdown covers the marketplace data and its caveats, Glean alternatives covers the wider field, and unified search explains the approach we take to the same problem with a per-seat price you can read before you talk to anyone.