Glean was picked as the preferred answer 78% of the time
Glean saved 81% on token costs
Based on enterprise workflow evaluations comparing Glean against Claude Cowork, across 180+ enterprise tasks.
Glean maintains a deep enterprise index and knowledge graph that map relationships across people, content, and activity, helping teams find answers and get work done.
Glean provides single-tenant isolation, centralized audit logs, real-time permission enforcement, and built-in sensitive content protections to automatically identify and remediate sensitive data exposure.
Glean offers long-term flexibility with multi-model orchestration across 35+ LLMs, including open source models, so you can avoid provider lock-in and adapt as the AI landscape evolves.
Cowork's governance model is per-user and per-folder (an individual picks which folders to connect and approves actions in the moment) rather than access flowing from a central identity and permission model. It sits outside Anthropic's BAA, so it can't be used for HIPAA-regulated workloads even in a HIPAA-enabled Enterprise org.
Audit coverage is bolt-on rather than native. It requires a Primary Owner to stand up the Compliance API or an OpenTelemetry stream, capture only starts once enabled, and Anthropic notes the OTel stream doesn't replace audit logging for compliance purposes.
Glean is centrally managed. Every agent action inherits the user's existing role-based permissions and lands in audit logging by default.
Glean is a governed work AI platform built on a persistent enterprise knowledge graph that maps people, permissions, and activity across 275+ systems. Claude, by contrast, is a model-first offering, with work capabilities layered on through orchestration frameworks and federated MCP connectors that access external tools.
While both Glean and Claude support AI-driven task execution, Glean stands out with its unified, continuously updated enterprise knowledge graph that powers more accurate, context-aware actions across the organization.
The key difference is that Glean is designed as a centrally governed enterprise AI platform, while Claude Enterprise is primarily a model-centric offering whose governance becomes less unified when work extends into Cowork. Glean enforces source-system permissions at retrieval time, builds a centralized permissions-aware index across connected systems, and gives security teams auditability across queries, actions, agents, and administrative activity.
That distinction matters even more in regulated or security-sensitive environments. Cowork activity is not captured in audit logs, and Anthropic flags Cowork as inappropriate for some regulated workloads, including HIPAA related work.
Yes, Glean is model-agnostic and provides the enterprise context your tools need. Through Glean’s Model Hub, you can use Anthropic’s latest Claude models, alongside OpenAI, Gemini, open source, and more all grounded in Glean's secure enterprise index. Additionally, the context in Glean can be made available in other chat surfaces through MCP, meaning your users can access centralized context through Claude or Claude Code.
Yes, Glean provides a remote Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that connects Claude Desktop, Claude for Teams/Enterprise, and Claude Code to Glean’s permission-aware search, chat, document retrieval, and configured agents. Access is authenticated through Glean OAuth and respects users’ existing Glean permissions.
Foundation models like Claude are powerful reasoning engines, but they are not enterprise context systems. Glean improves performance by providing a unified context layer that understands your company’s knowledge, permissions, people, and workflows across all enterprise apps. Instead of forcing the model to search broadly across disconnected systems, Glean’s enterprise graph helps retrieve the most relevant context, improving answer quality while reducing unnecessary token usage and latency.
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