AI enterprise search tools: Glean vs Guru vs Onyx

Finding answers across workplace knowledge

An internal answer may be split between a project document, a support discussion, and a company policy. Glean, Guru, and Onyx bring that information into a searchable AI experience. Their differences become clearer when you compare how they organize knowledge, deliver answers, and fit the team responsible for the system.

Glean

Glean puts cross-application discovery at the center of its enterprise search experience. It connects workplace sources so employees can find documents and ask questions without remembering which application contains the answer. Its company knowledge graph relates people, content, and interactions, helping personalize results to the person searching. Document summaries and follow-up questions extend that search into a conversational workflow. This makes Glean particularly relevant to larger organizations where knowledge is dispersed across collaboration, project, and business systems. A new employee researching a project, for example, needs both its documents and the people familiar with it; Glean addresses that combination. Results follow source permissions, so search coverage differs between users. Our assessment is that its strongest fit is broad discovery across an established workplace stack.

Guru

Guru approaches the same problem through knowledge quality as well as retrieval. Its platform combines search and cited answers with verification workflows and signals that help teams keep organizational knowledge useful. Knowledge Agents draw on that maintained material, while workplace integrations and MCP make it available through other tools and assistants. The current offering also includes solution engineers and knowledge architecture support, which makes it a larger engagement than a simple search subscription. Guru is worth considering when employees repeatedly ask about policies, product information, or internal processes whose answers need an identifiable owner. Its practical appeal is connecting the answer experience with the work of maintaining the information behind it. Teams still need people who can resolve conflicting guidance and own the underlying knowledge.

Onyx

Onyx combines internal search with an AI workspace that teams can configure around their own models, sources, and agents. Employees can search connected applications or use a conversational interface, while administrators decide what knowledge and capabilities to expose. Custom agents bring together instructions, selected information, and actions through supported integrations. The documented workspace also includes web search and code execution, extending its usefulness beyond looking up a company document. Onyx is distinctive here because self-hosting and customization are part of its product proposition alongside its cloud service. That makes it attractive to a technical team that wants internal knowledge search inside a broader AI environment. Free self-hosting and a cloud trial are different options; enterprise deployment features and support have their own commercial scope.

Glean vs Guru vs Onyx: knowledge organization

Glean emphasizes relationships across the information employees already produce. Guru emphasizes the processes that make shared knowledge current and usable. Onyx emphasizes configuring the knowledge sources and AI experience around a team’s requirements. These are differences in emphasis, rather than mutually exclusive feature categories. For a company whose main frustration is locating work scattered across applications, Glean presents a direct fit. If the recurring problem is deciding which policy answer should be trusted and maintained, Guru deserves closer attention. If a technical owner wants to tune the models, knowledge scope, and agent behavior together, Onyx provides a more configurable starting point.

Where employees receive answers

All three support conversational access to company information, but the surrounding workflow matters. Glean connects search, summaries, and follow-up questions around workplace discovery. Guru can deliver its maintained knowledge through familiar collaboration tools and to other AI systems through MCP. Onyx offers search and chat within a workspace that can also expose custom agents and actions. Our preference would therefore depend on the interface employees already use: a central discovery experience points toward Glean, knowledge delivered throughout an existing stack points toward Guru, and a configurable company AI workspace points toward Onyx. The relevant comparison is how each experience fits daily work, not just whether it can return an answer.

How the commercial models differ

Glean’s public pages did not establish a subscription amount. Guru currently scopes a platform-and-expertise package. Onyx publishes a Business seat rate with annual billing, while Enterprise is quoted separately. Its self-hosted starting option also introduces infrastructure and model costs. The table links to the verified plan context; none of these offers should be treated as an identical bundle of users, integrations, and support.

Which enterprise search tool should you choose?

Start with Glean for broad workplace discovery, Guru when maintaining shared knowledge is central to the purchase, or Onyx when your technical team wants model and deployment flexibility. The best fit follows who owns the knowledge and where employees need to use it.