Glean alternatives and Glean competitors: enterprise search replacements compared on price, connectors and permissions

The best Glean alternative depends on which constraint pushed you off Glean in the first place, and there are only three that matter. If it was the seat minimum, look at vendors with no floor: InSearch, GoSearch and Dropbox Dash all sell to teams well under 100 people. If it was the price, the published options are Dash at $15 per user per month billed yearly, GoSearch Pro at $20, and Onyx at $20 for Business or free if you self-host. If it was the deployment timeline, the smaller products install in days rather than running a guided rollout.

What none of the listicles will tell you is that the reverse case is real too. If you have 2,000 employees, a wide application estate including on-prem systems, and a genuine budget line for internal productivity, Glean is very likely still the right answer, and the per-seat economics at that size look nothing like they do at 100 seats. Switching away from the category leader to save money you were never going to spend is not a win.

Our honest shortlist for a US company between roughly 50 and 500 people: InSearch and GoSearch if you want published per-seat pricing and a fast start, Dropbox Dash if you are already a Dropbox shop and stay under 100 users, Onyx if you have engineers who want to self-host, and Microsoft 365 Copilot if nearly everything you know is already in SharePoint and Teams. Above 500 people with complex sources, put Glean and Coveo back on the list.

Glean enterprise search competitors fall into four groups that get muddled together in most comparisons, and telling them apart saves you weeks. Direct cross-app search is the like-for-like group: InSearch, GoSearch, Dropbox Dash and Onyx all do the same core job, one query across your apps, a written answer with citations, scoped to your permissions.

Platform-native assistants are a different animal. Microsoft 365 Copilot, Gemini Enterprise and Slack enterprise search are excellent inside their own ecosystem and progressively weaker outside it. They are usually cheaper on paper because you are already paying for the platform, and the question to ask is what share of your answers live outside that platform. If it is 30 percent, a platform-native tool leaves a third of your problem unsolved.

Knowledge management platforms like Guru and Bloomfire are frequently listed as Glean competitors and mostly should not be. They are very good at curating and verifying content somebody wrote on purpose, and structurally weaker at surfacing the answer that only ever existed in a Slack thread from March. If your problem is that nobody wrote the documentation, a knowledge base does not fix it.

Agent and workflow platforms such as Dust sit at the far end. They expect somebody to build the thing that finds the answer before you get one, which is powerful if you have that person and an expensive detour if you do not. Dust vs GoSearch covers that fork in detail.

Yes. Onyx, formerly Danswer, is the serious open source Glean alternative: MIT licensed, genuinely self-hostable, with more than 40 connectors, AI chat and agents. If your objection to Glean is that you do not want your company knowledge in somebody else's index, Onyx answers it properly, and the license means you can read exactly what the software does.

The caveat is important and Onyx is upfront about it: permission-syncing connectors are an Enterprise Edition feature rather than part of the free tier. That matters because permission sync is the hard part of enterprise search, not the search. A self-hosted index that returns documents a person is not entitled to see is worse than no search at all, so budget either for the Enterprise Edition or for the engineering time to handle entitlements yourself.

Free also is not free. Self-hosting means somebody owns the infrastructure, the connector breakages, the model costs and the upgrade path. That is a fair trade for a team with platform engineers and a poor one for a 60-person company with an overloaded IT manager. The right way to compare is total cost of ownership against a published per-seat price, not license cost against license cost.

This is the most common head-to-head in the category, and it usually resolves on a single question: what share of the answers your people need lives inside Microsoft 365? Microsoft 365 Copilot at $30 per user per month annual is deeply integrated with SharePoint, Teams, Outlook and Office, and if 85 percent of your institutional knowledge is in those systems, it is very hard to beat on value because you are already paying Microsoft.

The moment a meaningful share of answers lives in Salesforce, Jira, Notion, Zendesk or Slack, the calculation inverts. Copilot reaches outside Microsoft 365 only through Graph connectors, which is real work, and the experience is noticeably better inside the walls than outside them. Glean was built cross-app from the start, and that is what you are paying the premium for.

One live detail worth knowing before you budget: Microsoft has repriced this twice in eight weeks. Copilot Business went from $18 to $21 per user per month in July 2026 and, checked on August 21, 2026, is showing as discounted back to $18 paid yearly, with the monthly option at $25.20. The enterprise M365 Copilot add-on remains $30. We put the full comparison in Glean vs Microsoft 365 Copilot.

The cheapest published options in this category are Dropbox Dash for Teams at $15 per user per month billed yearly for up to 100 users, then GoSearch Pro and Onyx Business at $20 per user per month. Onyx is free if you self-host and can live without permission-syncing connectors on the free tier. InSearch publishes its per-seat price with no hard seat minimum.

Cheaper is only a meaningful word once coverage and permissions match your requirement, and this is where most cost comparisons quietly fail. A tool at $15 per seat that cannot reach the two systems holding your answers costs infinitely more per answer than one at $30 that can. Before you sort by price, write down the five systems that actually contain the things people ask about, then check each vendor against that list. Two of your five will usually eliminate half the shortlist.

Watch the cliffs, too, because they are where cheap stops being cheap. Dropbox Dash more than doubles from $15 to $35 per user the moment you pass 100 users. Dust caps its Business tier at three connectors. Glean's reported seat floor means the entry ticket, not the seat rate, is the real cost. A price is only comparable once you know the threshold that changes it.

1. Write down twenty real questions your team asked last month, in the words they used. Not benchmark queries, actual ones, including the awkward ones where the answer lives in a Slack thread.
2. List the systems those answers live in and rank them by how many of the twenty they hold. This list, not a feature matrix, is your requirement.
3. Ask every vendor two questions on the first call: what is the minimum seat count and minimum contract term, and is the AI functionality included in the per-seat number or billed separately. These disqualify vendors faster than anything else.
4. Connect the top two systems only in each trial. Full connector rollouts turn a two-week evaluation into a two-month project and do not change the answer.
5. Run the same twenty questions through each product and score whether the answer is correct, cited and current. Citations are the whole game: an uncited answer cannot be checked, so it cannot be trusted.
6. Test permissions deliberately. Have someone in a restricted role run five questions whose answers sit in documents they are not entitled to open. This is the test that catches the most serious failures, and almost nobody runs it. Our write-up on permission-aware AI search explains what a correct result looks like.
7. Compare total first-year cash, including implementation, support percentages and the true-up terms if headcount grows 30 percent mid-term.

If you would rather start with step five than step three, that is precisely the case for a product with a published price. You can put unified search in front of your twenty questions this afternoon and find out whether the answers are actually there before anyone books a call.