Glean alternatives: AI search vs an AI company brain in biotech
The products people shortlist against Glean are named below. Then the distinction that actually separates them from what this page is offering, which is not the lazy one about search being read-only.
Glean describes itself as a horizontal AI platform for enterprise work, built on three surfaces: search, an assistant, and agents. Its connector page puts the count above 275, says source permissions are inherited and strictly enforced, and says data updates as soon as it changes in the source application. It runs in a single-tenant cloud.
And it does act. Its own frequently asked questions say Glean supports actions, letting users describe a task in natural language and trigger work across connected systems, with triggers, schedules and human approval before execution. Anyone leaning on it only searches has not read the page.
The products people shortlist instead
Each line is what the vendor says its own product is, read off its own site.
| Product | What it is | Who it fits |
|---|---|---|
| Guru | A governed knowledge layer rather than a pure index: search plus a curated knowledge base, with agents that verify and unverify entries as well as retrieve them. | Support, sales and HR teams needing a trusted answer set, not just recall. |
| Coveo | An AI relevance platform: search, conversational search, generative answering, a passage retrieval API, recommendations and personalization. | Commerce and customer service first, workplace search as one of four areas. |
| Elastic | The open source search and analytics engine, plus vector search, Kibana and an agent builder. Runs serverless, hosted or self-managed. | Engineering teams building their own search rather than buying an assistant. |
| Microsoft 365 Copilot | Assistance inside the Microsoft 365 apps over work content the user may already see, with agents pointed at your own data sources. Microsoft states it needs an add-on license. | Companies whose documents and mail already live in Microsoft 365. |
| Onyx | Open source chat and search over your docs and apps, with connectors that sync in real time and respect fine-grained access controls. | Teams that want the search layer on their own infrastructure. |
| Dashworks | An assistant for workplace questions across connected apps, with a Slackbot and an API. Its own site states Dashworks is joining forces with HubSpot. | Support, sales and product teams living in Slack. |
Two things there matter more than features. Elastic and Onyx run on your own infrastructure, which changes the security conversation in a company holding preclinical data. And an acquisition in progress, as with Dashworks, is worth raising early.
The distinction that actually holds
Every product in that table, Glean included, is a layer over systems of record it does not own. That is the design and it is a good one. Everything they know, some other application already holds. Their value scales with how much of your operation already sits in indexable apps, which makes the question for a small biotech different from the question for a five thousand person company. Not can it find the document, but is the fact in a system at all.
The question to ask before you compare anything. Pick the three things that went wrong last quarter and name the application that held the fact. If you can name it three times, buy from the table. If the honest answer by the second one is a thread and your memory, search is solving a problem you do not have yet.
What that looks like in drug development
A VP of business development is out-licensing ex-US rights to the lead program. The partner's diligence list arrives with a response date. Two of the twenty-two questions need a number from the toxicology package, one needs a manufacturing answer nobody has written down, and one asks about a comparable deal quoted from memory six weeks ago. The confidentiality agreement expires before the data room closes. A second interested party has gone quiet and nobody has decided whether that is posture or a dead end.
Now name the system of record for any of that. The diligence list is an attachment. The toxicology number is in a report in a folder. The manufacturing answer is in one person's head. The expiry date is in a signed PDF. The comparable was said out loud. None of it is in a CRM, a project tool or a wiki, because nobody had time, and nobody had time for the same reason one person is running the deal.
Search over that estate returns the documents, correctly and quickly, with permissions honored. What it cannot return is the current state of the deal, because that was never written down. Which is not a limitation of Glean, or of anything in the table. It is a description of what a thirty-person company looks like.
The other shape: a record that writes itself
The alternative here is not a better index. It is a record of your own, kept current by the assistant rather than by you. A single-seat system on the buyer's own machine, in plain files they own, that reads the mail and transcripts they are already in, files each item to the right deal or partner, moves the dates a new message changes, opens the follow-ups it creates and drafts the reply for approval. It watches sent mail too, so an outbound promise becomes tracked rather than remembered.
Once that record exists, search over it is trivial, which is the point: search is downstream of the record. That is what the idea of an AI company brain is about, and the discipline is covered in AI knowledge management for a drug development team.
Where search is the right buy, and where it is not
With hundreds of people, a decade of documents across many apps and an IT function to run connectors, search is exactly your problem: buy from the table. If the pain is onboarding, search wins outright, because a single-seat record does nothing for people who do not have one. At thirty people, one per function, most facts in mail and calls, there is not enough indexed estate for search to pay yet.
One more piece of context. Glean is enterprise-shaped, organized by department, with an enterprise graph, admin governance and a single-tenant cloud, and the customers on its platform page are large brands. If one person is your whole department, that is a fit observation to weigh, not a fault.
If you want one place to put everything rather than a layer that finds it, read Notion for biotech. If the problem is program status rather than retrieval, Smartsheet alternatives covers it. And the side-by-side of biotech software alternatives is where to start.
Nothing indexable yet, so the record gets written first
A comparable quoted out loud six weeks ago, a manufacturing answer nobody ever typed up, a counterparty that has gone quiet: each becomes a dated item on the deal in plain files, built from the correspondence and transcripts one person was already in. Indexing is easy afterwards; the demo is about the writing.
See the demo