The cheapest Glean alternative is usually one you already pay for. The dangerous one is the one that is cheap because it quietly dropped permission sync. Every product below will answer "what did we decide on Q3 pricing" with three citations in a demo. What differs is whether a contractor who could not open the board deck in SharePoint can still get its contents summarised back to them, and every vendor's documentation answers that question more carefully than its sales page.
Here is the verdict. If you pay for Microsoft 365 Copilot seats, Copilot Search is your baseline, and Glean has to beat it on the systems Microsoft cannot reach. If your knowledge lives in Jira and Confluence, turn on Rovo Search before you sign anything, because it is already in your Atlassian bill and does not consume credits. Pick Gemini Enterprise only if Google Workspace is your system of record. Pick Amazon Quick only if you are AWS-native and willing to design your document-permission setup before you create the first knowledge base, because you cannot change it afterwards. Self-host Onyx only if you buy its Enterprise Edition. The loser is Onyx Community Edition as a company-wide search: it is MIT-licensed and free, and it has no permission sync at all.
| Checked 29 Sep 2026 | Microsoft Copilot Search | Atlassian Rovo | Gemini Enterprise | Amazon Quick | Onyx |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Published price | $30/user/month, paid yearly, on top of a qualifying M365 plan | Included in Jira/Confluence Standard and up; overage $0.01/credit | No live Google price page; $30 Enterprise / $21 Business at launch | $20 Professional / $40 Enterprise per user/month, plus $250 per-account infrastructure fee | $20/user/month Business (cloud, annual); Enterprise is contact sales |
| Annual list cost at 2,000 seats | $720,000 | $0 incremental for search | ~$720,000 (Enterprise, launch price) | $480,000 (Professional) | $480,000 (Business cloud); $0 licence for Community Edition |
| Source-permission sync | Native for Microsoft 365; per connector outside it | Synced for admin-managed connectors | Test it on your own corpus | Opt-in per knowledge base, permanent once chosen | Enterprise Edition feature; Business cloud lists "permission inheritance" — confirm per connector |
| Self-host | No | No | No | No | Yes (MIT Community Edition; Enterprise on request) |
| Do NOT pick it if | Your knowledge lives in Slack | Your knowledge lives outside Atlassian | Workspace is not your system of record | You need Quick Research on permissioned content | You plan to run Community Edition company-wide |
The workload behind that cost row: 2,000 employees, about 15 source systems — SharePoint or Google Drive, Confluence and Jira, Slack, Salesforce, GitHub — with contractors who must not see everything. That is roughly the shape of the company that gets a Glean quote and flinches.
Why Are Buyers Looking for Glean Alternatives?
Because Glean publishes no price, and the median contract it signs is close to six figures. Glean's pricing page is a demo request. Procurement platform Vendr reports a median Glean contract of $98,890 a year, ranging from $29,880 to $208,897, and says minimum commitments typically start around 100 to 250 users. On top of the seat, Glean's Enterprise Flex model makes thinking-mode queries included up to 100 per user per week, with the excess, plus Deep Research, agent runs and slide generation, consuming FlexCredits — and that document carries no dollar figure at all.
Steel-man Glean before replacing it. It mirrors each source system's access-control list rather than asking an admin to decide who sees what, it has a broad connector catalogue, and it offers deployment inside your own cloud account. Those are real capabilities, and they are the ones we weighed against Copilot and Dust in August.
The case against it has sharpened, though. The unified-index pitch depends on source systems letting a third party hold a copy of their content, and the largest of them no longer will. After Salesforce rewrote the Slack API terms to block bulk data export for LLMs, Glean now retrieves Slack message bodies through a real-time search connector that "does not crawl or index Slack message content", fetching them live at query time; its original Slack connector now supplies engagement signals and proactive features. If Slack was the reason you were buying Glean, you are now buying a federated query to Slack — which is what several cheaper products can also do.
What Does Your Existing Microsoft or Google Licence Already Cover?
If you already pay for Microsoft 365 Copilot, you already own a semantic enterprise search across Microsoft 365 and a hundred-plus external connectors. Microsoft's documentation states that Copilot Search "is available to users with an eligible Microsoft Copilot license at no additional cost", requires no admin setup, and draws on "over 100 connectors now in the Microsoft Catalog." The free Microsoft Search tier, by contrast, is keyword-only with "no semantic search." Indexing synced connector data "incurs no extra cost" for licensed tenants.
The distinction a buyer has to get right is which licence. Copilot Search comes with the $30 per user per month Microsoft 365 Copilot seat, paid yearly, not with E3 or E5 alone. At 2,000 seats that is $720,000 a year, and you also get Copilot in Word, Excel and Teams. If you have not bought Copilot, "we already have it" is false, and the comparison is Copilot's full seat price against Glean's quote.
Now check the gap, not the count. Microsoft's own connector gallery, updated on 25 September 2026, lists Microsoft-built connectors for Confluence, Jira, Google Drive, Salesforce, ServiceNow and GitHub. It lists no Slack connector, and Notion appears only as a federated preview. For a Microsoft-standardised company with a Slack-heavy engineering team, that single gap is the whole Glean business case — and it is worth pricing a third-party connector before pricing a second platform.
Federated connectors carry their own licence condition. A Microsoft 365 Copilot add-on licence is required for every user who queries a federated source, so a federated connector does not extend search to your unlicensed population.
Google is the harder read. Gemini Enterprise is a Google Cloud product, separate from the Gemini features bundled into Workspace plans that run from $7 to $22 per user per month — those Workspace tiers do not search your third-party systems. When checked on 29 September 2026, Google's Gemini Enterprise pricing URL returned a 404; at launch, the Enterprise edition was priced at $30 per user per month and Business at $21. Treat those as launch list prices and get a quote. Google's editions documentation caps Business at 1-500 users and withholds the full data-connector ecosystem from the Frontline and pay-as-you-go editions, and storage beyond the pooled quota — 30 GiB per user on Standard, 75 GiB on Plus — costs $5 per GiB per month. Gemini Enterprise is a strong answer for a Workspace-first company. It is not a reason to become one.
Is Atlassian Rovo a Real Glean Alternative?
For an engineering organisation whose institutional memory lives in Jira and Confluence, Rovo is the Glean alternative with the best price, because search costs nothing extra. Rovo is automatically added to Standard, Premium and Enterprise cloud subscriptions with no separate purchase, and Atlassian's credit documentation lists Rovo Search, definitions and summaries as free — they consume no credits.
The metering bites on chat, not search. A basic chat message or agent invocation costs 10 credits. Jira and Confluence Standard each include 25 credits per user per month, pooled across the organisation, with overage at $0.01 per credit. At 2,000 users on one Standard product, that pool is 50,000 credits: about 5,000 basic chat messages a month for the whole company, or two and a half per person. After that, each basic message costs $0.10. Search-heavy use is free; a company that adopts Rovo Chat as its daily assistant will buy credit packs.
Rovo reaches beyond Atlassian — Google Drive, SharePoint and Slack all appear in its connector documentation — and Atlassian states that restricted content in a connected app "can only be seen and used in Rovo by those users who already have access to that content". The same page does not publish a sync interval, so test how quickly a revoked share disappears.
Who should not pick Rovo: anyone whose high-value knowledge sits in SharePoint, Salesforce and email. Rovo is Atlassian-centred search with connectors; Copilot and Gemini are the reverse. If you are still weighing whether to trust Atlassian with the corpus, read the August 2026 change to its AI-training data terms first.
Permission-Aware Retrieval: What the Docs Actually Promise
Every vendor claims permission-aware retrieval. The documentation shows three different things hiding behind that phrase: a native check, an opt-in sync, and a paid feature. Read the conditions before the claim.
Permission-aware retrieval means the search index returns a document only to a user who can open it in the source system, at the moment they ask. The failure mode is not a hacker. It is a contractor, a departed employee's recycled email address, or a reorganised team whose access changed yesterday while the index still reflects last week.
Amazon Quick documents the most honest version, and it is instructive precisely because it lists its limits. Document-level ACLs are a checkbox at knowledge-base creation, and the setting "is permanent" — you cannot turn ACLs on for a knowledge base created without them, or off afterwards. Permission changes sync on the refresh schedule, every 24 hours by default. Large-group membership "can lag behind sync completion." A reassigned email address can, in a documented edge case, reach the previous owner's documents before the next refresh. And ACL-enabled knowledge bases "aren't currently compatible with Quick Research." For SharePoint, Quick filters on the synced ACLs and then verifies candidate documents "in real time by checking the querying user's current access in SharePoint" — the strongest pattern here, and only on supported connectors. The positive design choice deserves credit: if Quick cannot evaluate permissions, it "returns no documents rather than unfiltered results."
Onyx makes permission sync a paid feature. Its connector documentation lists the permission-syncing connectors — Confluence, Jira, Google Drive, Gmail, Slack, Salesforce, GitHub, Box, SharePoint, Teams and Outlook among them — and states that "permission-syncing connectors are an Enterprise Edition feature." The Enterprise Edition feature list adds SAML/OIDC, user groups and RBAC, group-based permissions and usage analytics. Without it, a connector is either private — visible to its creator and anyone explicitly granted access — or public, "visible to all Onyx users". That is fine for a team indexing its own runbooks. For "search everything the company knows," it means connecting HR's Drive makes HR's Drive searchable by everyone.
Microsoft is native inside Microsoft 365 and per-connector outside it. Nothing is mirrored for SharePoint content, because it is the same authorisation check the file already uses — which is also why Copilot Search turns existing oversharing into a one-sentence query. If you relied on Restricted SharePoint Search while you cleaned that up, note that Microsoft blocks new enablement from July 31, 2026 and retires it on January 31, 2027, and will not migrate your settings automatically.
The test that separates them takes one afternoon: revoke a named user's access to five documents in five different source systems, then time how long each product keeps returning them.
Can You Self-Host an Open-Source Glean Alternative?
Yes — Onyx is the credible open-source option, and running it means running an OpenSearch cluster sized to your corpus. The Onyx repository is MIT-licensed for the Community Edition, with 32.3k GitHub stars when checked, and ships chat, search, agents and 50-plus connectors. The managed Business plan is $20 per user per month billed annually and lists "permission inheritance"; self-hosted Enterprise Edition and on-premise deployment are contact-sales.
The hardware is modest to start and grows with your data. Onyx's resourcing guide sets a Standard-mode minimum of 4 vCPU, 10 GB RAM and 32 GB of disk plus roughly 2.5 times your indexed data, prefers 8+ vCPU, 16+ GB RAM and 500 GB for organisations under 5,000 users, and budgets storage at source data × (1 + replicas) × 1.45. It also warns that OpenSearch puts indices into a read-only block when disk reaches 95%. That warning is the operational reality of self-hosting: someone on your team owns disk alerts, upgrades and connector breakage, forever.
The steel-man for self-hosting is strong in two cases: regulated data that cannot sit in a vendor's multi-tenant cloud, and a platform team that wants to choose its own model and inspect the retrieval code. Both are legitimate. Neither survives Community Edition, because the regulated case is exactly the one that needs source permissions. Self-host Onyx as Enterprise Edition, or buy something else. The same logic runs through our RAG build-vs-buy analysis: buy the index, build the evaluation.
Is Amazon Q Business Still an Option?
Not for a new deployment. AWS still publishes Amazon Q Business pricing — $20 per user per month for Pro, $3 for Lite, plus index units billed hourly — but the same page describes Quick Suite as "the next evolution of Amazon Q Business." Starting on Q Business today buys a migration. If AWS is where your identity and data already live, evaluate Amazon Quick directly: $20 Professional or $40 Enterprise per user per month, a $250 per-account infrastructure fee, 25 or 50 GB of pooled index storage per user, and $5 per GB per month beyond it.
Who should not pick Quick: a company whose knowledge is mostly outside SharePoint, Google Drive, S3, Confluence and OneDrive — the sources with documented ACL support — or anyone who needs Quick Research to work on permissioned content.
What Does Migrating Off Glean Actually Cost?
The licence saving is the easy number. The migration cost is in the things employees built on top of Glean after they started to rely on it. Glean's own documentation lists Go Links, Collections, the People Directory and user-built agents as included features. Each is sticky in its own way:
- Go links live in wiki pages, slide decks and muscle memory. Export them and stand up a redirect before cutover, or every stale link becomes a support ticket.
- Agents and collections have to be rebuilt by hand. None of these platforms imports another's agents.
- Relevance tuning — boosted sources, verified answers, synonyms — is invisible until it is gone. Copilot Search has admin-curated acronyms and bookmarks, which covers some of it.
- Contract timing. A Vendr-reported minimum of 100 to 250 users means a partial rollback is often not cheaper than a full one. Plan the switch against the renewal date, not the budget cycle.
Run old and new side by side for a month on real employee questions before switching off Glean. If the alternative loses on a class of question, you will find out while you can still renew.
How to Decide
The criteria that predict regret are permission behaviour and source coverage. Seat price is third.
This week:
- List your 15 most-queried sources and mark which ones each finalist syncs with permissions — not merely connects to. Microsoft's gallery and Onyx's permission-sync list are public; ask the others in writing.
- Check which licences you already own. If you have Copilot seats or Atlassian Standard, you have a working alternative to trial for free.
This month:
- Run the revocation test: revoke five documents across five systems and time how long each product keeps returning them.
- Build 100 real questions with known answers, including ten whose correct answer is "you do not have access," and run them under a real employee's identity, not an admin's.
Before renewal:
- Price every meter — Glean FlexCredits, Rovo credits, Copilot agent usage, Quick agent hours — with a written annual cap, the standing rule for consumption-priced AI.
What changes the answer: if Microsoft ships a first-party Slack connector, the Glean case for Microsoft shops shrinks further. If Onyx moves permission sync into Community Edition, it becomes the default self-hosted answer overnight.
The Bottom Line
The last time enterprise search looked like this, specialist indexes were worth real money until the platforms bundled a good-enough one. That is happening again, and faster, because the platforms also own the sources. Glean is still the strongest neutral index. For most companies it is no longer the necessary one.
Buy the search your identity provider already governs. Pay for a neutral index only where you can name the sources it reaches with permissions that the bundled one cannot. And never adopt a free tier whose permission model is "public to everyone."
A cheaper seat that forgets who is allowed to read what is not a discount. It is a breach with a subscription.
Continue Reading
Glean vs Copilot vs Dust: Buy the Permission Model RAG Build vs Buy: Buy the Index. Build the Eval Set. Best RAG Platforms for Regulated Industries: Permissions First True Cost of a Copilot Seat: The Licence Is the Floor Agentic AI Pricing: Don't Buy Consumption Without a Cap Google Gemini Enterprise vs. ChatGPT Work: Pick Wisely