Top 5 Glean Alternatives (2026)

Glean is what enterprise search looks like when someone finally does it properly. It indexes more than 100 workplace tools — including a Microsoft Teams connector — and for a large organization drowning in scattered knowledge, the result is genuinely impressive: one search box that actually finds things. So why do so many companies end up looking for a Glean alternative in 2026?

Three reasons dominate the evaluations:

• The price. Glean starts at $50+ per user per month, and contracts are enterprise-only — commitments routinely run into six figures annually. For a 200-person company, the conversation often ends before the pilot begins. “Glean alternative SMB” is a search query for a reason.
• Search-first, not assistant-first. Glean finds documents. It does not prepare your morning, draft your follow-ups, or act on anything it finds. You still do all the work — Glean just shortens the looking.
• US cloud. Glean runs on US cloud infrastructure. For European buyers, that puts the CLOUD Act squarely on the data protection officer’s desk, however good the search is.

In other words: the companies leaving Glean are rarely disappointed in the product. They are priced out of it, located outside its compliance comfort zone, or simply need more than retrieval.

Here are the five alternatives worth shortlisting in 2026, each with genuine strengths and honest limitations. For a direct head-to-head, see amaiko vs Glean.

1. amaiko — the proactive assistant in Teams, at Mittelstand prices

Glean and amaiko attack the same problem from opposite ends. Glean builds a search index and waits for your query. amaiko builds an assistant that already knows your business — and does not wait.

The first difference is where it lives. amaiko is Teams-native: one Teams chat, no separate search portal, no rollout project, no training sessions. You add it, you start typing, and onboarding is done. For companies that run on Microsoft Teams, the adoption question disappears before it is asked.

The second difference is memory. amaiko builds a persistent corporate memory. It learns how your company works — projects, customers, decisions, preferences — and keeps that knowledge across every conversation. Glean indexes what your tools contain; amaiko accumulates what your company knows. Every interaction makes the next one more useful.

That memory feeds a self-learning agent network: specialized AI agents for email, meetings, research and company systems, improving from how your organization actually operates — with state-of-the-art models underneath rather than a single fixed one.

And amaiko is proactive — the structural gap no search engine can close. It surfaces what needs your attention, prepares your day, and follows up on what would otherwise slip. A search box answers the questions you ask; amaiko handles the things you have not asked yet.

The integration philosophy differs too. amaiko does not merely index your systems for retrieval — it orchestrates them. SAP, your CRM, internal tools, industry software: if your business runs on it, amaiko can work with it and act in it.

Compliance and price are where the Glean comparison gets one-sided. amaiko hosts 100% in Germany with ISO 42001-compliant AI management — details on the security page — and starts at €19.92 per user per month, billed annually. No six-figure commitment, no enterprise-only sales cycle — see pricing.

One honest caveat: amaiko is not an enterprise search engine. It does not build a federated index across 100+ SaaS tools, and if pure findability at enterprise scale is genuinely your core problem, Glean remains excellent at exactly that. amaiko’s bet is different: finding a document is rarely the end of the job — and an assistant that remembers your business and acts on it is worth more than a search box that locates files.

Best for: mid-sized, Teams-centric companies — especially in the German Mittelstand — that want AI assistance rather than enterprise search, at a price that does not require board approval. You can book a demo to see it in your own tenant.

2. Onyx — the open-source route to search sovereignty

If what attracts you to Glean is the search and what stops you is the price and the US cloud, Onyx (formerly Danswer) is the obvious candidate. It markets itself explicitly as the GDPR-friendly, self-hostable Glean alternative: MIT-licensed open source, 40+ connectors including Microsoft Teams, model-agnostic — and a pricing model that inverts Glean’s: free if you self-host, $20 per user per month in the cloud.

The catch sits in the word “self-host”. Onyx requires real engineering effort to deploy and maintain — you trade Glean’s six-figure contract for your own infrastructure, updates and on-call duty. And paradigm-wise it stays where Glean is: search-first. No proactive delivery, no persistent memory that grows on its own, no German-specific compliance support when your auditor calls. Same model, different bill.

Full comparison: amaiko vs Onyx.

3. Dust — the European agent platform

Dust answers the assistant question rather than the search question. The French platform — built by ex-OpenAI and Stripe founders, Sequoia-backed — lets you deploy department-level AI assistants connected to company data across Slack, Google Drive, Notion, Confluence and GitHub, with native Teams integration on top. The compliance posture is serious: a selectable EU hosting region, SOC 2, and zero data retention with the model providers. Pro pricing lands around $29 per user per month.

The gaps: Dust assistants are built and then invoked. There is no persistent corporate memory that accumulates on its own, and no proactive push — someone has to design each assistant, and someone has to ask it. And the EU hosting region is selectable, not the default; selectable EU is not the same as German by design.

Full comparison: amaiko vs Dust.

4. Moveworks — enterprise automation for IT and HR

Moveworks does something neither Glean nor the assistant platforms attempt: agentic automation of IT and HR workflows — ticket triage, password resets, HR requests — across Teams, ServiceNow and Workday, recently expanded toward general work assistance. If your actual pain is an overloaded service desk, that focus is a feature, not a limitation.

The fit questions for a European mid-sized buyer are structural. Pricing of $15–45 per employee per year sounds accessible but is quote-based, and the sales motion is enterprise procurement. It is a US platform with no German-language UX and no DSGVO-native positioning. And it automates tickets — it does not build a persistent memory of how your company works.

Full comparison: amaiko vs Moveworks.

5. ChatGPT Enterprise — the strongest general-purpose assistant

If you are leaving Glean because retrieval without assistance feels thin, the rawest assistant capability on the market is ChatGPT Enterprise: the models everyone measures against, plus SSO, admin controls, higher usage limits, and a hard commitment not to train on your company data.

What it does not have is your context. There is no native Teams integration — your team context-switches to a separate app all day — and it knows nothing about your internal systems out of the box. Data is processed in the United States, so the CLOUD Act question follows you from Glean rather than going away. And at $30+ per user per month on an enterprise contract, it is not the budget option either.

Full comparison: amaiko vs ChatGPT Enterprise.

How to choose

Match the tool to the problem that actually made you look:

• You were priced out of Glean and your company lives in Microsoft Teams: choose amaiko. Persistent memory, proactive assistance, orchestration of all internal systems, 100% German hosting — from €19.92 per user per month, no six-figure commitment.
• You want Glean-style search with full data sovereignty and you have an engineering team willing to run it: Onyx — free self-hosted, $20 per user per month in the cloud.
• You want to build department-level assistants with an EU hosting option and a serious security posture: Dust.
• Your service desk is drowning and enterprise procurement does not scare you: Moveworks.
• You want the strongest general-purpose assistant and can accept US data processing plus the daily context switch: ChatGPT Enterprise.

And in fairness to Glean: if you are a large enterprise whose genuine core problem is finding information across 100+ tools and the budget line is already approved, Glean does that job exceptionally well. The real question is the one this whole list keeps asking — whether finding documents is what your company most needs from AI, or just the first step of work an assistant should already be doing for you.