Glean alternatives in 2026: eight platforms by procurement profile

Most "Top 10 Glean alternatives" posts read like a tag cloud — every vendor lands in the same shape, the same five columns, the same vague "great for enterprises." This one's different. We sorted eight credible alternatives by the way procurement actually buys them in 2026, not by feature checklist.

Glean closed its Series F at a $7.2B valuation in 2025 and still won't publish a price card. Third-party quotes we've seen this year cluster between $40 and $80 per seat per month, with floor commits that knock smaller buyers out. That gap — between a category-defining product and a procurement experience that frustrates anyone under 2,000 seats — is why this category has gotten interesting. Eight vendors below. Five buying profiles. One of them is ours, flagged in the table and disclosed in full.

This article is published by ASCENDING, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner that builds Jarvis AI Agent. Jarvis appears in the comparison table below as one of eight options, flagged accordingly. We've tried to be fair about where we don't win.

Honest concession on the last row: Glean's out-of-box connector library is broader than ours. If you need 60+ pre-built SaaS connectors lit up in week one and you're fine living inside one vendor's index, Glean is still the shorter path. Jarvis Registry trades that breadth for cross-cloud control plane, MCP-native tool composition, and a real audit story — the bet is that in 2026 the connector count matters less than who the agent is allowed to be.

Two very different products live in the same procurement bucket. Microsoft 365 Copilot is a $30/user/month line item that shows up next to E5. It does exactly what M365 already authorizes a user to see, no more, and nothing it discovers escapes the Purview perimeter. That's the whole pitch. If you're 80% Microsoft, the buying committee meets once.

AWS Bedrock plus AgentCore is the opposite shape. AgentCore Gateway went GA on October 13, 2025 with Cognito-backed OAuth on the front, and Azure AI Foundry hit GA on June 16, 2025 with a similar managed-runtime story. Both are platform plays — you're not buying a finished product, you're buying primitives. Your team writes the agent. Pricing is metered tokens plus gateway runtime, which sounds cheaper until someone runs an unbounded retrieval loop on a Friday afternoon.

In practice, the hyperscaler bundle wins when finance has already pre-paid the commit and the IT director is tired of vendor reviews. It loses when the actual workload spans clouds.

These vendors started with agents, not search. Salesforce Agentforce ships as a conversation-credit SKU plus per-agent fees, and it lives inside Hyperforce alongside Data Cloud and Shield. If your customers, cases, and accounts are already there, the data-gravity argument writes itself. Where it gets weird is anything outside the Salesforce graph — connector quality drops fast.

Moveworks is the more interesting story this cycle. ServiceNow closed the $2.85B acquisition in Q4 2025 and is bundling Moveworks into the broader Now Assist roadmap. If your ITSM is ServiceNow and you've been paying for Moveworks separately, the ELA conversation just got simpler. If you're not on ServiceNow, the math gets murkier — Moveworks standalone is no longer the future-state product.

Both options are strong for one operational domain (service or sales) and weaker the further the agent has to roam.

Onyx — the project formerly known as Danswer — is the credible open-source path. You can self-host on Docker in an afternoon, or take the hosted tier at roughly $15 a seat. The catch is the one every OSS shop knows: you're now running it. Connector freshness, embedding drift, eval loops, the auth proxy in front of the LLM. Fair warning: we've watched this break before when the team that stood it up rotated off.

Mendable is the other shape of OSS-adjacent. It's not really enterprise search — it's a documentation-search widget you embed in a product. Per-message pricing, SOC 2 but not much beyond it, no real governance story. For the right job (public docs, dev-facing) it's the right answer. For internal knowledge across HR, legal, and finance? It's not in the conversation.

If your budget line is engineering hours rather than SaaS subscriptions, Onyx earns the look. Otherwise the TCO catches up by month nine.

Coveo doesn't fit in the same shape as the others, which is the point. It started in commerce search-relevance and never really left. The Trust Layer and the merchandising controls are mature in a way pure-play AI-search products aren't, and the connector library skews toward Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Sitecore, and the retail stack.

If your actual problem is "users can't find products on our site" rather than "employees can't find policy documents," Coveo is the answer and most of this article is irrelevant. We're including it because procurement teams keep putting it in the same RFP as Glean, and it shouldn't be there.

The fifth bucket exists because of a specific 2026 pressure: MCP went to the Linux Foundation on December 9, 2025, and RFC 8707 resource indicators became mandatory in the spec on March 15, 2026. What that means in plain English — every MCP tool call now has to declare which resource it's authorized to touch, and gateways have to enforce it. The agent identity question got real.

Jarvis Registry is our answer. It's a control plane that sits across AWS and Azure (public Marketplace SKUs in both), enforces RFC 8707 at the gateway boundary through our MCP Gateway, and gives auditors a single pane for which agent did what against which system. Starter is $1,500/month, Pro is $2,500, Custom Enterprise is quoted — pricing is on the listing pages, not behind a form.

The trade we already named: fewer out-of-box connectors than Glean. We're betting that the regulated buyers — financial services, healthcare, federal-adjacent — would rather wire up six tools through a governed gateway than thirty through a black box.

A few things we did and didn't do, in the interest of not being one more vendor blog dressed as research.

We talked to seven buyers actively shopping this category in Q1 2026, all between 800 and 12,000 seats. We read the public pricing where it exists and noted "opaque" where it doesn't. We didn't include vendors whose website still says "AI-powered" without saying what the model is. We didn't include Glean itself as an alternative to Glean, obviously, but we did include it as the benchmark row.

Vendors are sorted inside each bucket by how often they came up in those buyer conversations, not by alphabet and not by who pays us. Nobody paid us. The Jarvis row is ours — we said so.