Quick answer

Guru is a knowledge base with verification workflows (owners, review dates, stale-content flags) and an AI that answers from the wiki and connected apps, delivered in Slack and a browser extension, from $15 per user a month. Glean is enterprise search that indexes dozens of systems with permissions intact, adds an assistant and agent builder, and is sold as a platform to large organisations. Guru suits mid-sized companies wanting trusted answers; Glean suits enterprises wanting everything searchable.

Every company has the same problem: the answer exists somewhere, and nobody can find it. Guru and Glean solve it from opposite ends. Guru curates a smaller set of verified answers; Glean indexes everything and lets the AI sort it out.

Guru: trust through verification

Guru's unit is the card: a piece of knowledge with an owner and a verification date. Owners get reminded to re-verify, stale cards are flagged, duplicates are detected. The AI answers questions from those cards and from connected sources such as Google Drive and Slack, but the verified content carries the weight. For support and sales teams that must give customers correct answers, that discipline is the product.

Glean: coverage through search

Glean connects to Slack, Confluence, Jira, Google Drive, Salesforce, GitHub, and many more, builds a permission-aware index, and answers questions across all of it with citations. Its assistant and agent tools let teams build workflows on top. It is a platform sale with a deployment, priced accordingly, and it shines in organisations with thousands of people and dozens of systems.

Choosing by size and need

  • Under a few hundred employees: Guru is cheaper and the verification model keeps content trustworthy
  • Thousands of employees with sprawling systems: Glean's coverage is the point and its price is justified
  • Regulated content where a wrong answer is costly: Guru's verification, or Glean with careful source scoping
  • Both need owners; an AI over unmaintained content confidently returns unmaintained answers

Related reading

Dust and custom enterprise agents Why AI tools are consolidating into suites What is semantic search?

Bottom line

Guru for curated, verified knowledge at mid-market scale and price. Glean for enterprise-wide search and agents. The dividing line is roughly how many systems you have and whether you can afford a platform deployment.