Glean vs Gemini Enterprise

Glean and Gemini Enterprise sell the same shape of product: permission-aware search across your company’s systems, agents built on the same index, and one admin console governing both. After Google’s Cloud Next relaunch on 2026-04-22 and Glean’s March 2026 MCP release, the feature lists converged far enough that “which one connects to our stack” stopped deciding anything — both index the same enterprise systems and both ship an MCP server. Two numbers decide it instead, and you can check both before a sales call: what share of the answers your team needs lives outside Google Workspace, and how many seats you can commit. Gemini Enterprise publishes $21 and $30 per seat per month and sells the first tier on a credit card. Glean publishes no price and will not quote a team under 100 seats.

Where Glean wins

Connector breadth is the product, and the list is countable. Glean publishes 275+ out-of-the-box connectors across engineering, sales, documents, project management, support, HR, and SSO, reached natively, through MCP, or through its Push API. Google names its connectors — Drive, Gmail, Calendar, Groups, SharePoint, OneDrive, Outlook, Entra ID, ServiceNow, Jira, Confluence, Box, Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack — and publishes no total. For a legal ops team whose matter history sits in iManage and whose signature trail sits in DocuSign, or a recruiting team living in Greenhouse, the buying question is whether one specific system is on the list. Glean’s list is longer and you can read it; Google’s you assemble from docs pages.

Model neutrality lives inside the seat you already licensed. Glean’s Model Hub spans OpenAI, Anthropic (via Vertex AI or Amazon Bedrock), Google Gemini, Amazon, and Glean’s own Waldo model, chosen per agent and per step in an agentic workflow. You pay for the tokens one of two ways: the Universal Model Key, where Glean manages connectivity to every provider regardless of which cloud you deployed in, or your own provider credentials — which are cloud-native only, so a GCP deployment cannot reach Bedrock and an AWS one cannot reach Vertex. Google’s 200+ model Model Garden, Claude and Llama included, sits on the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform: the consumption-billed developer product that Vertex AI became, bought separately from the seat. Inside the per-seat app the model picker is Google’s own models. If “no single vendor decides which model answers our questions” is a real procurement position, Glean satisfies it on the license you bought and Google satisfies it on a second bill.

The index survives an estate change. Glean is indifferent to who owns your productivity suite. A Workspace-to-M365 migration, a Salesforce-to-HubSpot swap, or an acquisition that arrives running the other stack costs you a connector reconfiguration, not a platform decision. Gemini Enterprise reaches past Workspace competently, but its economics and its governance story both assume Google stays the center. That is a fine assumption for most buyers and an expensive one for the minority who change suites.

Where Gemini Enterprise wins

A published price and no floor. Business runs from $21 per seat per month: self-serve, no IT setup, up to 300 seats, 25 GiB of pooled indexing per seat, 30-day trial. Standard runs from $30 with unlimited seats, 30 GiB per seat, the full connector list, Agent Marketplace access, and the compliance controls. Plus is quote-only at 75 GiB per seat with raised quotas, and Frontline is an add-on for 150+ seat customers at 2 GiB per seat. Glean is quote-only end to end — glean.com/pricing is a demo form with no numbers on it — and buyers report $40-50 per user per month for the base license plus roughly $15 per user per month when the AI tier is broken out, against a 100-seat minimum and a $50-60K minimum annual contract.

Governance rides a contract you already signed. Data residency, customer-managed encryption keys, VPC Service Controls, FedRAMP, and HIPAA apply to the AI layer under the same Google agreement as the storage beneath it. On Agent Platform each agent carries a cryptographic identity, calls route through Agent Gateway, and Model Armor screens for prompt injection and tool poisoning. Glean’s certificate list is credible — SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, ISO 42001, HIPAA, GDPR, TX-RAMP Level 2 — but it arrives as a new vendor, a new DPA, and a new security review. In a regulated org that review is a quarter, not a form.

The pilot is already paid for. Google ships the Gemini app to Workspace commercial customers at no extra cost, and it reads Gmail, Drive, and Chat today. That gives you a free two-week baseline before either purchase, which no Glean pilot can match.

Pricing, quantified

At 300 seats, Gemini Standard is 300 × $30 × 12 = $108,000 a year, published, before Agent Platform consumption. Glean at the buyer-reported $55-65 all-in lands at $198,000-234,000 a year before FlexCredits. That is roughly a 2x delta, and only one of the two numbers exists before the first call.

At 60 seats there is no comparison to run: Gemini Business is $15,120 a year on a card, and Glean will not quote you at all.

Both meter the tail, and they meter it differently. Google’s quotas pool by edition — 160 Assistant queries per user per day on Standard against 200 on Plus, 3 Deep Research runs a day against 10, 1 no-code agent a day against 10 — with Agent Platform consumption arriving as a separate Cloud line you can set a budget alert on. Glean Enterprise Flex bills seats plus pooled FlexCredits, and the consumption rate card is published in credits: a Deep Research run costs 105-445, an agent run 20-200, a premium-model thinking query 8-120. What Glean does not publish is the dollar per credit, so you can model relative cost and not the invoice. A readable quota against a readable rate card with no price attached is the actual forecasting difference between these two.

MCP stopped being a differentiator

Both ship it in both directions, so “it connects to our AI tools” no longer separates them. Glean runs a remote MCP server that exposes company context to Claude, ChatGPT, and IDEs, and acts as an MCP host: 17 verified third-party servers preloaded at the March 2026 launch, a supported list that reached 176 by June 2026, admin approval per server and per tool, per-user permissions, least-privilege execution under the requesting user’s identity, human-in-the-loop verification on high-impact operations, and scanning for prompt injection. Google shipped a managed remote MCP server for Agent Platform on 2026-06-30. What replaced MCP support as the deciding feature is where the tool catalog gets governed and where the agent-run charge lands: Glean governs the catalog in the same console that governs the index and bills it in FlexCredits, while Google governs it on an Agent Platform project and bills it as Cloud consumption to a different budget owner. Ask which of your two teams — IT or Cloud FinOps — you want holding that line item.

Verdict

Pick Gemini Enterprise when Workspace holds most of the work, when you want to start this week without a procurement cycle, when the seat count sits under 300 and self-serve matters, and when data residency, CMEK, VPC Service Controls, or FedRAMP must cover the AI layer on an existing agreement. It is also the default under 100 seats, where Glean is not a choice at all.

Pick Glean when a majority of the answers live outside Google — Salesforce, Jira, Confluence, ServiceNow, iManage, Greenhouse, signed PDFs — when a countable 275+ connector list is the requirement rather than a nice-to-have, when per-agent model choice inside the licensed seat is a stated procurement position, and when you have 100+ seats and a permissions model already in shape.

Pick neither when the estate is Microsoft 365 and Copilot covers it at a published $30 per user per month; when the bundled Workspace Gemini app already answers the questions people actually ask; or when you know exactly where the data lives and need agents built on top of it rather than a knowledge layer, which is Dust’s ground — Dust vs Glean covers that fork.

If you cannot separate them on the criteria above, run the test instead of the shortlist. Spend two weeks on the bundled Workspace Gemini app, log every question it failed, and sort the failures by where the answer actually lived. Failures clustered outside Google are the Glean business case, and they are what justifies the 2x. Failures clustered inside Google that broke on reasoning rather than reach mean Gemini Enterprise Standard is the upgrade, and Glean is a $200K answer to a question you do not have.