Glean Alternatives and Competitors (2026): 10 Options Ranked, Priced, and When to Pick Sentra

TL;DR

• The best Glean alternatives in 2026 depend on the job. For a cheaper or self-hosted search box: Onyx, GoSearch or Elastic. For search inside one suite: Microsoft Copilot, Gemini Enterprise or Notion AI. For curated answers: Guru. For no-code assistants: Dust.
• Every one of those is still search: someone asks, the tool retrieves. If the expensive problem is that nobody saw a slipping deal, a cost overrun or a missed commitment in time, no search product fixes it.
• Glean itself publishes no prices. Estimates put it at about $60 to $65 per user per month with a median contract of $98,890 a year, plus 12% support and usage credits (see our Glean pricing breakdown).
• Pick Sentra when you need context across tools, including email, chat, meetings and systems of record such as ERP, CRM and HRIS, and findings raised before anyone asks. Sentra is not a search replacement. It runs alongside Glean or any tool below, and every answer respects each source's existing permissions.

What are the best Glean alternatives?

The best Glean alternatives are Onyx, GoSearch and Elastic for organisations that want cheaper or self-run enterprise search, Microsoft Copilot and Gemini Enterprise for companies committed to one suite, Guru and Notion AI for curated knowledge, and Dust for no-code assistants. Sentra is the alternative, or the addition, when the need is a company intelligence that joins conversations with systems of record and acts first.

Glean describes itself as "complete context that makes AI work at enterprise scale" and lists 275+ connected apps (glean.com). It is a strong search and assistant platform. Teams look elsewhere for two different reasons: the price and contract shape, or a problem that search was never built to solve. The ranked table below answers both, and every price was checked on vendor pages on 26 October 2026.

When Sentra is the right choice

Sentra is the company's own intelligence. It understands how a company really runs and acts on it before anyone asks. It is not a better search box, and it does not need Glean to be removed. Pick Sentra, on its own or next to Glean, when one or more of these is true.

• Context has to cross tools, including conversations and systems of record. Search indexes documents. Sentra connects email, chat, meetings, documents, ERP, CRM, HRIS and BI through more than 200 integrations and joins them: the customer commitment made on a call, the CRM stage that never moved, the invoice in the ERP. It knows when each fact became true and when it stopped being true, so a superseded figure is never served as current.
• You want findings, not only answers to searches. A search tool waits for the right question. Sentra finds what is going wrong, works out who should act and tells them. A named person approves anything Sentra raises before it reaches anyone else, and before Sentra acts or sends anything.
• Permissions must hold for every person and every agent. Answers and actions respect each source's existing permissions. Sentra checks access at query time against synced access lists, and a failed check counts as no access. Sentra is SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certified and deploys in the cloud, in an isolated VPC or air-gapped on-premises.
• Total cost is part of the decision. The Team plan for 2 to 20 people is listed at $16 per user per month. For agents, better context lowers the model bill: on Terminal-Bench 2.1, agents using Sentra scored 88.31% against an 83.37% baseline with 72.6% lower model cost and 41.2% fewer tokens.

Alongside Glean, the split is clean. Glean stays the place employees search. Sentra gives leaders, teams and agents the joined, current picture and raises what needs attention. ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini and internal agents read the same company memory over REST and MCP, so every assistant works from one version of the truth. Our Sentra vs Glean page compares the two in depth.

Why teams leave Glean

The reasons are mostly commercial, and Glean's own documentation explains most of them.

• No rate card. Glean's pricing page offers a demo request, not a price. Metronome estimates $45 to $50 per user per month for the base platform plus about $15 for Work AI, and lists Premium Support as an official 12% of licence fees.
• Contract size. Vendr reports a median contract of $98,890 a year across 174 purchases, with commitments that often start around 100 to 250 users. At Metronome's rates, 100 seats with support cost $80,640 to $87,360 a year.
• Usage that is hard to forecast. Glean's Enterprise Flex documentation, updated 20 October 2026, meters agent runs, premium models and API calls in FlexCredits. An agent run uses about 7 credits at the median and about 114 at the 90th percentile. Learned memories, free until now, draw FlexCredits from 7 November 2026.
• Time to value. Glean's admin guide puts end-to-end setup at 1 to 3 weeks, and 3 to 4 or more weeks for large organisations, because content has to sync from every connector first.

Glean competitors by category

Glean's main competitors fall into five categories. Choosing the category first saves most of the evaluation.

The alternatives, reviewed

Sentra

Sentra reads everything happening across the company, works out what is true now and who is working on what, and acts first. A weekly example: a renewal is at risk because the champion said on a call that budget moved, the CRM still shows the deal as committed, and the finance forecast counts it. Search finds each document if someone thinks to look. Sentra joins the three, raises the gap and tells the account owner, after a named person approves.

People see Sentra in a morning brief, in Slack alerts, in the app and inside ChatGPT and Claude. Agents reach the same memory over REST and MCP, with the asker's permissions applied to every answer.

Onyx

Onyx is open-source enterprise search and AI chat. The core is MIT licensed and free to self-host, with enterprise features under a separate licence (github.com). Onyx Cloud Business is $20 per user per month billed annually. SAML and OIDC single sign-on and on-premise deployment sit in Enterprise, which is priced through sales.

Microsoft Copilot

Microsoft Copilot is $30 per user per month paid yearly on top of a qualifying Microsoft 365 licence (microsoft.com). Copilot Business, for smaller organisations, is $21 per user per month paid yearly or $25.20 monthly, with an $18 first-year promotion on annual plans bought by 31 December 2026 (microsoft.com).

GoSearch

GoSearch lists a Pro plan at $20 per user per month and a custom Enterprise plan that adds shared connectors, configurable models, audit logs and SSO. It supports both indexed and federated retrieval, so some sources are queried live rather than copied.

Guru

Guru no longer publishes prices. It sells one package of platform, strategy services and governance, priced to "scale, knowledge complexity, and AI maturity". Its strength is verification: subject experts keep answers current.

Notion AI

Notion's Business plan is $20 per member per month and includes Notion Agent, AI meeting notes and Enterprise Search, in beta, across connected apps such as Slack and GitHub (notion.com). Custom Agents are billed separately at $10 per 1,000 credits.

Gemini Enterprise

Gemini Enterprise is sold through Google Cloud. The Business edition starts at $21 per seat per month for 1 to 300 seats, and Standard and Plus add enterprise controls (cloud.google.com). Our Gemini Enterprise guide covers editions in detail.

Coveo

Coveo prices Workplace plans by seat, through sales. Each pricing unit includes 100,000 queries a month, and generative answering is an add-on.

Elastic

Elastic deprecated its Enterprise Search product line, including Workplace Search and App Search, in version 9.0, and the products are not available to new customers (elastic.co). New builds run on Elasticsearch itself, and existing 8.x customers are supported until 15 January 2027.

Dust

Dust lists a Pro seat at €24 per user per month on yearly billing or €30 monthly, with 8,000 credits per seat per month, and a Max seat at €120 or €150. Business teams build assistants over connected tools without engineers.

Affordable Glean alternatives for startups

Glean is enterprise-only, with no free plan or self-serve sign-up. At Metronome's estimates, a 50 person company pays $40,320 to $43,680 a year with support, before credits and implementation. The affordable paths are Onyx if you can operate it, GoSearch Pro or Notion Business at $20 a seat, Dust at €24, and Sentra, whose Team plan for 2 to 20 people is listed at $16 per user per month.

Enterprise search that powers AI agents

Agents now query company knowledge as often as people do. A search index can serve them, but it hands back ranked passages and leaves the model to work out which one is current.

Sentra serves agents the resolved picture instead: what is true now, where it came from, and when it stopped being true if it changed. Any MCP-capable agent connects to the same memory people use, with the person's permissions applied. Our guide to connecting Claude to organizational memory over MCP shows the setup, and why RAG fails explains the retrieval problem.

How to choose among Glean alternatives

1. Write down your five most expensive recurring questions. If they are "where is the document", choose among the search tools on price, connectors and who operates it.

2. Mark the ones that need several systems at once. Why margin moved, which renewals are at risk, which commitments are overdue. Those need Sentra, not a different search box.

3. Decide who acts on the answer. Search value grows with rollout to every employee. Findings value comes from the people who own the outcome, often a smaller group.

4. Test permissions on a real case. Ask each vendor to show an answer built from a source the asker cannot open. The right result is no answer.

5. Price three years, not one. Include support, credits, implementation and renewal uplift. Our Glean pricing worksheet lays out the lines.

6. Keep what works. If employees rely on Glean for search, add Sentra underneath rather than running a replacement project.

To see what Sentra would raise in your company alongside the tools you already use, book a demo.

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