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Glean vs Gurubase

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. Gurubase publishes a starting price ($499); Glean does not. Both ship a public API.

GleanPermission-aware search and agents across company applicationsGurubaseTurns your docs, tickets and wikis into a question-answering agent that cites its sources and answers inside Slack, Jira or Zendesk.

Side by side

FactGleanGurubase
CategoryPersonal & Enterprise SearchCustom GPTs & Bot Builders
Pricing modelContactPaid
Starts at—$499 month
Public APIYesYes
PlatformsWeb, API, Slack App, Chrome ExtWeb, API, Slack App
CompanyGlean TechnologiesDdosify Inc.
Launched20192024
Last verifiedSep 6, 2026Sep 6, 2026

What our research says

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

Gurubase

A grounded-answer agent aimed at teams that care more about a citation and a refusal than about fluent prose. The integration list is unusually deep for a product this young, and actions plus MCP mean it can do more than answer. The catch is price: $499 per guru per month before overage, with metered questions on top, prices out anything but a funded team.

Pros

  • Answers carry links back to the source passage, and the product is designed to decline when the corpus does not cover a question
  • Reaches live data through REST calls, Python execution and MCP rather than only reading a static index
  • Ships as bots for Slack, Discord, GitHub, Jira and Zendesk plus a web widget
  • Enterprise tier offers self-hosted and air-gapped deployment with SSO, RBAC and audit logs

Cons

  • The entry plan is $499 per guru per month, and cost scales with how many separate gurus you run
  • Question volume above the plan allowance is billed per thousand on top of the subscription
  • API access and custom models are held back for the Enterprise tier
  • No free or self-serve low tier is priced publicly

Which one fits

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

Choose Gurubase if you need

  • internal IT or HR helpdesks with a large document corpus
  • support teams that need answers traced back to a source
  • companies already on Confluence, Jira and Zendesk

More comparisons

Browse all Personal & Enterprise Search →