5 Best Glean Alternatives for Small Business in 2026
Glean is the gold standard for enterprise AI search—but at $50+ per user per month, it doesn't fit every budget. Here are five alternatives that bring AI-powered company search to small teams.
Why Glean does not fit every budget
Glean is the gold standard for enterprise AI search. It indexes your Slack, Salesforce, Jira, GitHub—everything—and answers questions from across your entire company. It also costs $50+ per user per month. For a 20-person team, that is $12,000 per year before you have set anything up.
If you are a small business, that math does not work. The good news is that the Glean-shaped gap in the market has alternatives—and a few are genuinely excellent.
KogMira — company memory, not just search
KogMira is not trying to be Glean for enterprises. It builds company memory for everyone else—teams of 5 to 50 that want AI that actually remembers, not just indexes.
It connects to your tools (Slack, email, CRM), builds shared company memory that learns passively, and answers questions with source-backed context. The key differentiator: KogMira is WhatsApp-first, meaning your AI employee lives where your team already communicates—no new apps, no new logins.
Pricing is early access, without the $50 per user sticker shock. Best for teams that want AI with genuine memory, not keyword search dressed up with a chat interface.
Onyx — the open-source option
Onyx is the strongest open-source Glean alternative. The full codebase is on GitHub, it supports enterprise search across apps, and it actually works. You can self-host for free or use their paid cloud tiers.
The catch is the maintenance burden. Self-hosting means your team is the IT department: updates, troubleshooting, and infrastructure are all on you. Best for technical teams that want full control and have the engineering bandwidth to run it.
Guru — lightweight wiki with AI search
Guru started as a lightweight internal wiki and has steadily added AI features. It offers AI-powered search across your company knowledge, verification workflows to keep content from going stale, and a free plan that makes it accessible.
The limitation is that Guru works best when you already have structured content. If your company knowledge lives in Slack threads and email decisions rather than organized docs, Guru requires more upfront work. Best for teams that already have a wiki and want to layer AI search on top.
Dust.tt — custom AI agents across tools
Dust takes an agent-first approach. Instead of just searching, it lets you create AI agents that can act across your tool stack—Salesforce, Slack, GitHub, and more. It is developer-friendly and highly customizable.
The tradeoff is setup complexity. Dust is not plug-and-play; it requires someone technical to configure and maintain the agents. Best for technical teams that want to build custom AI workflows and have the engineering resources to do it.
Notion AI — if you already live in Notion
If your company already runs on Notion, their AI add-on is the path of least resistance. It does Q&A from your Notion docs, auto-fill, summarize, and translate—all within the familiar Notion interface.
The hard limit: it only works with Notion data. It does not connect to Slack, email, or CRM. It is a doc assistant, not a company brain. At $10 per user per month on top of your existing Notion plan, it is worth considering only if you are fully inside the Notion ecosystem.
How to choose
If you want company memory that learns and not just search, KogMira is built for that use case. If you want full open-source control and have technical resources, Onyx. If you have an existing wiki you want to make smarter, Guru. If you want to build custom AI agents and have a developer, Dust. If you live in Notion and stay there, Notion AI.
The Glean-shaped hole in the market is real. The mid-market—teams that need something more powerful than Notion AI but cannot stomach enterprise pricing—is where the next wave of AI tooling is landing.