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Curiosity vs Glean

Two fact sheets from our own research, side by side — pricing, platforms, API access and status re-checked by us rather than quoted from the vendors. Curiosity publishes a starting price ($550); Glean does not. Only Curiosity has a free tier. Only Glean ships a public API.

Side by side

FactCuriosityGlean
CategoryEnterprise SearchPersonal & Enterprise Search
Pricing modelFreemiumContact
Starts at$550 month
Public APINoYes
PlatformsWebWeb, API, Slack App, Chrome Ext
CompanyCuriosity GmbHGlean Technologies
Launched20182019
Last verifiedSep 1, 2026Sep 6, 2026

What our research says

Curiosity

Curiosity is built for regulated engineering-heavy industries that need to search across disconnected legacy systems with clear source attribution, not for a general team knowledge base. The free developer tier is real but capped at 10 test users, and real team pricing needs a sales conversation.

Pros

  • Connects many disconnected enterprise systems into one queryable layer
  • On-premises and private-cloud deployment for data sovereignty
  • Answers carry source attribution and full audit trails
  • Free developer tier for local testing

Cons

  • Team pricing (roughly $550/month) is steep for smaller teams
  • Enterprise pricing is entirely custom, not published
  • Built for industrial/engineering data, not general office use

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

Which one fits

Choose Curiosity if you need

  • Aerospace, rail, and manufacturing engineering teams
  • Organizations needing on-premises or private-cloud AI search
  • Teams that need source-traceable answers, not just chat

Choose Glean if you need

  • Organisations above roughly 500 people whose knowledge is scattered across a dozen SaaS tools
  • Regulated or security-conscious buyers who need source-system permissions honoured exactly
  • Teams building internal agents that need governed access to company context

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