Glean
Enterprise search and agent platform that indexes company systems with permissions intact, then exposes that context to internal agents and outside AI clients.
Overview
Glean sells enterprise search, an unglamorous category with a long history of failure. The difference is the permission model. The index carries each source system's access controls through to query time, so a result is filtered by what the person asking is genuinely allowed to see. With more than 275 connectors and a model hub spanning over 40 LLMs, the practical outcome is that a new engineer can ask where a service's on-call runbook lives and get an answer rather than a Slack thread and a shrug.
The platform has moved decisively toward agents. Glean Agents ships a natural language builder, an agent library and an agentic reasoning engine, and the March 2026 MCP work turned the whole index into a tool surface. The MCP Gateway exposes more than 2,000 governed tools to external clients like Claude Code, Cursor and ChatGPT, with admins allowlisting which servers and tools are reachable per group and Protect+ applying prompt injection detection, malicious code inspection and agent alignment checks on each call. For a team already pointing coding agents at internal systems, that governance layer is the real reason to look at Glean, more than the search box is.
The people who should not buy this are small teams and anyone whose knowledge lives in systems Glean has no connector for. The seat floor sits near 100 and buyer reported contracts start around $60,000 a year, so the maths only works when a large share of the company will use it daily. Rollout is a project too: connectors to configure, permission edge cases to validate for inherited and channel-shared access, then content hygiene that never really stops. All of it needs an owner. Companies that treat Glean as a purchase rather than a programme end up paying platform prices for a better search bar.
Key Features
- ✓ More than 275 connectors across Slack, Google Drive, Jira, Confluence, SharePoint, GitHub and Salesforce, indexed with source permissions preserved to query time
- ✓ Model hub spanning more than 40 LLMs, so the answer engine is not locked to a single vendor
- ✓ Glean Agents with a natural language agent builder, an agent library, quickstart agents and an agentic reasoning engine
- ✓ MCP Gateway exposing over 2,000 governed tools to outside clients including Claude Code, ChatGPT, Cursor, Gemini and Copilot
- ✓ Glean Protect with prompt injection detection, malicious code inspection, agent alignment checks and per-group restricted topic policies on tool calls
- ✓ Central MCP registry where admins allowlist which servers and tools each group may call, with an MCP Insights dashboard
Where it holds
- • The permission aware index is the hard part and Glean has done it at scale. Results respect the source system's access controls instead of flattening them
- • The MCP Gateway is the piece an engineering org should care about. It turns a governed enterprise index into a tool surface for whatever coding agent the team already runs
- • Commercial momentum is real. Around $300M ARR reported in May 2026, up from $208M at the end of 2025, which lowers the odds of buying into a dead end
Where it breaks
- • No published pricing, a seat floor near 100 and a FlexCredits meter on top make budgeting genuinely hard before you are deep in a sales cycle
- • Value collapses where a connector does not exist. Anything niche or homegrown becomes a dark corner the index never reaches
- • Permission mapping needs real validation at rollout. Inherited and channel-shared access is exactly where wrong answers leak
- • It is a platform purchase, not a tool purchase. Without a named owner for implementation, governance and content hygiene it becomes expensive shelfware
My Take
This one is for the engineering lead who has already lost the argument about where the runbook lives. Glean indexes more than 275 systems while carrying each source's permissions through to query time, which sounds dull until you compare it against tools that cheerfully surface a document the asker was never meant to read. The 2026 addition worth attention is the MCP Gateway, publishing over 2,000 governed tools to Claude Code, Cursor and ChatGPT with Protect+ guardrails running prompt injection detection and agent alignment checks on every call. Pricing is the sore point and it is nowhere near transparent: expect roughly $50 per seat per month plus an AI add-on, about 100 seats minimum and a FlexCredits meter you will not model accurately until month three.
Quick Info
- Pricing:
- paid
- Openness:
- Proprietary
- Starting at:
- No public price list, everything is quoted through sales. Buyer reported figures for 2026 cluster around $45 to $50 per user per month for the base seat plus roughly $15 per user per month for the AI add-on, with a practical floor near 100 seats, putting entry contracts around $60,000 a year. Compute heavy features meter through FlexCredits above included thresholds, with thinking mode included at 100 queries per user per week. Large deployments are reported well past $200,000 annually.
- Added:
- Aug 2026
- Updated:
- Aug 2026
Use Cases
Judge it on your own work
The notes above say where Glean holds and where it breaks. The fastest check is your own workload.
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