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Glean vs Signal87 AI

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. Only Glean ships a public API.

Side by side

FactGleanSignal87 AI
CategoryPersonal & Enterprise SearchEnterprise Search
Pricing modelContactContact
Public APIYesNo
PlatformsWeb, API, Slack App, Chrome ExtWeb
CompanyGlean TechnologiesSignal87 AI
Launched20192025
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

Signal87 AI

Signal87 leans hard on traceability: every extracted fact and every chat answer is supposed to link back to a specific page in a specific document, which matters for legal and government-contract work where an unsupported answer is a liability. It's early-stage (founded 2025) with no public pricing, so buyers are evaluating a young vendor without a published track record.

Pros

  • Every extracted fact ties back to a page-level citation in the source document
  • Handles mixed formats — PDFs, Word, Excel, and scanned files — in one vault
  • Multi-document features generate briefings, timelines, and comparison reports, not just single-doc summaries
  • ARIA assistant is grounded only in the uploaded vault, reducing made-up answers

Cons

  • No public pricing — every deal starts with a sales conversation
  • Founded in 2025, so there is little independent track record to check
  • Positioned for enterprise/government buyers, overbuilt for casual document Q&A

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 Signal87 AI if you need

  • Government contractors and legal teams that need citation-backed answers across large document vaults
  • Enterprise teams tired of manually cross-referencing PDFs, contracts, and scanned files

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