Glean Alternatives for Companies That Already Use Claude or ChatGPT
If your company already pays for Claude or ChatGPT, the best Glean alternative may be the assistant you already have, connected to your own systems. Glean is enterprise search and an assistant over your company data, built for large organisations. Many companies of 20 to 500 people want the same outcome, answers from their own CRM, files and finance system, without a new tool for everyone to learn.
Below: what Glean does well, the three kinds of alternative, how they compare, and when Glean is still the right call. We make one of the alternatives, Deployed OS, so read this as a vendor’s view; facts about the others are linked to their own sites, as of October 2026.
What Glean does well
Glean indexes company data across more than 100 apps and answers questions with each system’s permissions applied, so people only see what they may see. It has its own app and assistant, and now also an MCP server and MCP gateway so Claude, ChatGPT and other tools can use it. It is single-tenant and can be hosted by Glean or in your own cloud, and it states SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 and ISO 42001. Glean’s MCP documentation
It is built and priced for large organisations: per user, with model usage billed separately and no public list price. Glean’s pricing documentation
Three kinds of alternative
| Kind | Examples | Where people work |
|---|---|---|
| Another enterprise search product | Dust, Onyx, GoSearch | In the new product’s own app |
| A company AI workspace | Langdock, Dust | In the workspace’s own chat app, with several models behind it |
| Your existing assistant plus a company connection layer | Claude or ChatGPT with Deployed OS, or with another MCP gateway | In Claude or ChatGPT, which they already use |
The first two replace one tool with another. The third adds no new tool: the AI people already open every day gets access to the company’s systems, under the company’s rules.
Compared
| Glean | Claude or ChatGPT with Deployed OS | |
|---|---|---|
| Main job | Search and answers over indexed company data | Answers and actions in your systems, inside the AI tool people already use |
| How data is reached | Indexed ahead of time | Fetched live when someone asks |
| Each person sees only their own data | Yes, source permissions applied | Yes, each person signs in with their own login |
| Systems outside the connector list | Build your own with Glean’s indexing API | Built for you on request |
| Can act, not only answer | Through agents and actions | Where you allow it: drafts, notes, tasks, per group |
| Built for | Large organisations | Companies of 20 to 500 |
Glean copies and indexes data so search is fast across everything at once. A connection layer such as Deployed OS fetches only what someone asks for, when they ask. Indexing wins when people search across hundreds of sources; live fetching wins when the questions are about current numbers in a few key systems, and when you would rather not hold a second copy of your data.
When Glean is still the right call
- Search across a very large number of sources is the main need, not answers from a few key systems.
- You are a large organisation that wants one vendor for search, assistant and agents, with ISO 27001 and ISO 42001 in place.
- You want an AI tool for people who have none today, rather than connecting the one they already use.
How to choose
Start from what people do today. If the company already has Claude or ChatGPT seats and the questions are about customers, invoices, deals and documents in a handful of systems, connect those systems to the assistant you have. See the connectors in Deployed OS, or compare MCP gateways for companies. If the need is search across everything a large organisation has ever written, Glean is built for that.
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