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Glean vs Oi

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. Oi publishes a starting price ($19); Glean does not. Only Oi has a free tier. Both ship a public API.

GleanPermission-aware search and agents across company applicationsOiShared contexts, guardrails, and workflows so ChatGPT, Claude, and Codex act on the same knowledge.

Side by side

FactGleanOi
CategoryPersonal & Enterprise SearchKnowledge Management & Wikis
Pricing modelContactFreemium
Starts at—$19 month
Public APIYesYes
PlatformsWeb, API, Slack App, Chrome ExtWeb, API
CompanyGlean TechnologiesOi
Launched2019—
Last verifiedSep 6, 2026Sep 1, 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

Oi

Oi's premise is that most companies repeat the same context and guardrail setup separately in ChatGPT, Claude, and Codex, and centralizing that once is worth a subscription. It is a genuinely industry-agnostic infrastructure layer, which also means the payoff depends heavily on how many AI tools and workflows a given team is actually running.

Pros

  • Centralizes context and guardrails across multiple AI tools instead of duplicating setup
  • Free plan is enough to test the core workflow and connection concept before paying
  • Pro plan includes API access, useful for teams that want to build on top of it

Cons

  • Value depends on already running multiple AI tools, so it is less useful for single-tool teams
  • Governance and analytics features are reserved for the higher Team and Business tiers
  • As infrastructure rather than a finished vertical product, setup requires real configuration effort

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 Oi if you need

  • Companies already using multiple AI chat tools that want shared context instead of repeating setup in each one
  • Organizations that tried AI pilots without governance and want guardrails before scaling up
  • Teams that want API access to plug their own guardrails and workflows into other systems

More comparisons

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