# Glean vs SurfSense

Glean records 3,301,875 monthly visits with +0.1% month-over-month growth and Contact for Pricing pricing. SurfSense records 61,868 monthly visits with -17.4% growth and Freemium, Free Trial, Contact for Pricing pricing.

| Metric | [Glean](https://openaitools.app/tool/glean) | [SurfSense](https://openaitools.app/tool/surfsense) |
| :--- | :--- | :--- |
| Website URL | https://www.glean.com | https://www.surfsense.com |
| Categories | AI Productivity Tools, AI Agent, AI Assistant, AI Search Engine | AI Report Writing, AI Cover Generator, AI Pitch Deck Generator, AI Email Generator |
| Pricing Model | Contact for Pricing | Freemium, Free Trial, Contact for Pricing |
| Monthly Visits | 3,301,875 | 61,868 |
| MoM Growth Rate | +0.1% | -17.4% |
| Primary Market | United States | United States |
| Direct Visits | 2,628,666 | 20,999 |
| Review Score | 4.6 | 4.5 |
| Saved Count | 7 | 3 |
| Supported Platforms | Website | Website |

## Glean

Glean addresses a problem most enterprises hit after their first wave of AI adoption: models are powerful but isolated from the context of the business. The platform builds an enterprise context layer by indexing and understanding content across the tools a company already runs on, then uses that grounding to improve both answer quality and efficiency. Because fewer irrelevant tokens need to be sent to a model, the same question costs less to serve.

The product surface spans four areas: enterprise search, an AI assistant for everyday work, an agent platform for automating long-running processes, and Glean Protect for security and governance. Administrators also get model routing and an AI gateway, letting them decide which models handle which requests without rebuilding integrations. Everything inherits the access permissions of the source systems, so answers stay within each employee's existing rights.

Glean serves large organisations across finance, healthcare, retail, technology, and government, with published customers including Booking.com, Zillow, and Ericsson. It holds SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, ISO 42001, HIPAA, GDPR, and TX-RAMP Level 2 attestations, and reports 275+ connectors, 40+ supported language models, and 99.9%+ uptime on core services.

**Pricing & Plans:** Contact for pricing. Glean is licensed to organisations based on seats, connectors, and deployment scope, and is evaluated through a demo rather than self-serve purchase.

- **Permission-aware enterprise search:** Ask a question in plain language and get a cited answer assembled from documents, tickets, wikis, and messages across every connected system, with permissions respected.
- **Agent builder and orchestration:** Reusable agents handle multi-step workflows such as onboarding, account research, or incident follow-up by orchestrating actions across business apps.
- **Model routing and AI gateway:** Glean automatically picks and routes requests to the right model and reasoning level, giving teams access to 40+ LLMs through a single governed gateway.
- **Grounded content and analysis:** Draft on-brand documents, summarise meetings, analyse data, and create content grounded in company context rather than generic model knowledge.
- **Governance and observability:** Administrators get usage controls, spend visibility, audit logging, and compliance-ready governance for every AI interaction.

**Strengths:** Answers cite source systems and inherit their permissions, which removes the main blocker to enterprise-wide rollout; One platform covers search, assistant, and agents instead of three separate vendors; Model routing and token efficiency directly reduce the cost per AI query at scale; 275+ pre-built connectors shorten integration work considerably

**Limitations:** Enterprise pricing is quote-based, so budget planning requires a sales conversation; Full value depends on connecting many internal data sources, which takes IT effort; Smallest teams may find the platform more than they need

[Profile (Markdown)](https://openaitools.app/tool/glean.md)

## SurfSense

SurfSense is built around a simple idea: a research assistant should not require an account, a cloud upload, or a subscription you cannot audit. You install a normal desktop app for Windows, macOS or Linux — no Docker and no terminal required — and on first launch you pick a model. A small local model downloads once and runs on your CPU, meaning you can literally disconnect the network and keep asking questions about the sources you have already indexed. Alternatively you can paste a key for OpenAI, Anthropic or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, and that key stays on the machine that uses it.

On top of that index sits a toolkit of outputs. Any set of sources can be turned into a slide deck, a written report, a briefing, a podcast-style audio conversation, a mind map, flashcards, a quiz, a spreadsheet of extracted tables, or a standalone web page. Because generation happens locally, there is no per-minute fee and nothing is uploaded, which matters for lawyers, accountants, consultants and engineers working with case files, ledgers or client documents they are not permitted to send to a vendor.

The free core is genuinely free and open source, with no account and no usage cap. Paid licences exist only to unlock SurfSense's own server-side scraper plugins (among them Google Search, Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Google Maps, Amazon, Walmart, Indeed and a general web crawler) and priority support. Plugins you add yourself — third-party plugins and MCP servers — need no licence. Enterprise agreements mirror the licensing and plugin endpoints inside a customer's own network so that nothing egresses at all.

**Pricing & Plans:** The application and all its updates are free forever — no account, no trial clock, no usage cap. A 14-day plugin licence is included with the free download (email only, no card). An Individual licence costs $60 for the first year and $120 a year thereafter and unlocks every SurfSense plugin plus priority support and one feature-build request per year. An Enterprise deployment is custom-priced and invoiced annually. Self-building from source is also free.

- **Air-gapped, self-hosted operation:** Install a normal desktop app on Windows, macOS or Linux and run it with no account. With a local model you can pull the network cable and keep querying your indexed sources, since nothing is sent to a vendor.
- **Bring your own model, or run a local one:** Choose a bundled local Qwen or Gemma model at first launch, or paste a key for OpenAI, Anthropic or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. The model is a setting rather than a fixed vendor choice.
- **Twelve artifact formats:** Turn one set of sources into slide decks, reports, briefing notes, podcasts, mind maps, flashcards, quizzes, Markdown, Word, PDF, HTML and spreadsheet outputs — generated and stored locally.
- **Scraper plugins for live sources:** Optional plugins pull research from Google Search, Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Google Maps, Amazon, Walmart, Indeed and the open web, and anyone can register their own MCP server.
- **Open source and enterprise-deployable:** The source is public and auditable, and an Enterprise deployment mirrors licensing and plugin endpoints inside your own network with model and network policy you control and a local audit log of outbound calls.

**Strengths:** Runs fully offline with a local model, so sensitive sources never leave your machine; No account, no sign-up and no usage cap on the core application; Choice of model — bundled local models or your own OpenAI, Anthropic or compatible key; Open source and auditable, with a wide range of output formats from a single source set

**Limitations:** The first local model download and setup step takes time and some technical patience; The most useful scraper plugins sit behind a paid licence, which runs $60 the first year then $120 a year; Collaboration and cloud sync are intentionally absent, so it suits individual work better than shared team workspaces

[Profile (Markdown)](https://openaitools.app/tool/surfsense.md)

## Frequently Asked Questions

### How do Glean and SurfSense compare in monthly traffic?

Glean has 3,301,875 monthly visits, while SurfSense has 61,868. Traffic estimates describe audience size, not product quality.

### How do their growth rates compare?

Glean has a month-over-month growth rate of +0.1%; SurfSense has -17.4%.

### How does pricing compare?

Glean: Contact for Pricing. Contact for pricing. Glean is licensed to organisations based on seats, connectors, and deployment scope, and is evaluated through a demo rather than self-serve purchase. SurfSense: Freemium, Free Trial, Contact for Pricing. The application and all its updates are free forever — no account, no trial clock, no usage cap. A 14-day plugin licence is included with the free download (email only, no card). An Individual licence costs $60 for the first year and $120 a year thereafter and unlocks every SurfSense plugin plus priority support and one feature-build request per year. An Enterprise deployment is custom-priced and invoiced annually. Self-building from source is also free.

## Alternatives

| # | Tool Name | Monthly Visits | MoM Growth Rate | Pricing Model | Summary | Profile (Markdown) |
| :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- |
| 1 | [Notion](https://openaitools.app/tool/t) | 173,441,670 | +0.1% | Freemium | The AI workspace where teams and agents get work done together | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/t.md) |
| 2 | [ChatPDF](https://openaitools.app/tool/chatpdf) | 1,044,477 | -3.7% | Freemium | Chat with any PDF, video, or website and get cited answers in seconds | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/chatpdf.md) |
| 3 | [Dust](https://openaitools.app/tool/dust) | 547,217 | +1.8% | Contact for Pricing | Builds collaborative enterprise AI agents connected to company knowledge, but offers less robust out-of-the-box universal search. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/dust.md) |
| 4 | [AnythingLLM](https://openaitools.app/tool/anythingllm) | 512,269 | +12.9% | Freemium | Own your intelligence: a private AI assistant that runs entirely on your machine | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/anythingllm.md) |
| 5 | [Gumloop](https://openaitools.app/tool/gumloop) | 379,557 | -21.1% | Freemium, Paid, Contact for Pricing | Build, share, and control AI agents that actually do the work | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/gumloop.md) |
| 6 | [iWeaver](https://openaitools.app/tool/iweaver) | 336,462 | +32.9% | Freemium | AI agents that turn your own documents into summaries, mind maps and reports | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/iweaver.md) |
| 7 | [Moveworks](https://openaitools.app/tool/moveworks) | 168,527 | -4.3% | Contact for Pricing | Automates employee IT and HR support requests exceptionally well, but focuses less on general universal document search. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/moveworks.md) |
| 8 | [Kore.ai](https://openaitools.app/tool/kore-ai) | 143,328 | -18.2% | Contact for Pricing | Deploys enterprise conversational assistants and automated workflows, but lacks Glean's unified organization-wide knowledge graph search. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/kore-ai.md) |
| 9 | [Coworker AI](https://openaitools.app/tool/coworker-ai) | 129,346 | -1.8% | Free Trial, Paid, Contact for Pricing | Creates permission-aware context graphs and routes tasks across enterprise tools, but has a smaller connector library than Glean. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/coworker-ai.md) |
| 10 | [Sana](https://openaitools.app/tool/sana-labs) | 109,714 | -25.5% | Paid, Contact for Pricing | Combines enterprise search, AI agents, and corporate learning, but is less specialized for pure universal workplace search than Glean. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/sana-labs.md) |

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Source: https://openaitools.app/compare/glean-vs-surfsense

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