Adapt vs Glean

Adapt

Adapt has moved from metered credits to a conventional seat price with usage on top, and published its runtime as open source, so the decision is now self-host for free or pay $14 a seat for the managed tenant layer. The substance is still the routing layer, the per-run isolated computer and the policy store that forces approvals on named actions. The bill is predictable per head but compute and inference float with how busy the agents are, and the self-hosted path comes with community support only.

Pros

• +Router chooses between frontier, open-weight and your own models per task rather than pinning one model
• +Each run gets an isolated computer, with a choice of sandbox providers or your own cloud
• +Open-source runtime, CLI and templates for self-hosting with no markup on your own model keys
• +Policy store with approvals on named actions and per-team and per-agent budgets
• +SOC 2 Type II, standard DPA and optional zero data retention on the managed plan

Cons

• −Managed plan has no free tier and requires a card up front
• −Seat fee is only the floor: compute, memory, egress and inference are metered on top
• −Inference through Adapt's keys carries a 5.5% markup over provider prices
• −SSO, SLAs and on-prem are Enterprise-only, so the mid tier lacks what larger teams usually need

Glean

Glean is the reference implementation of permission-aware enterprise search, and permissions are the hard part everyone else underestimates. It is also priced so that only companies with a real sprawl problem can justify it.

Pros

• +Permission inheritance from each connected system is done properly, not approximated
• +Answers cite and link the underlying documents rather than paraphrasing them away
• +Connector coverage across the mainstream SaaS estate is broad
• +Commercially solid: about $300M ARR by May 2026 at a $7.2B valuation

Cons

• −No published price anywhere, and contracts start in six figures
• −Value depends entirely on connector coverage of your specific stack
• −Index quality inherits whatever mess exists in the source systems
• −Overlaps increasingly with Microsoft and Google's bundled offerings, which cost nothing extra

Is Adapt cheaper than Glean?

Adapt starts at $14/seat/mo; Glean prices on request, so a quote is the only way to compare.

Does Adapt or Glean have a free tier?

Adapt has a free tier; Glean prices on request.

Which has a public API, Adapt or Glean?

Both ship a public API, so either can be built on; the fact table above shows the platforms each one runs on.