Glean alternatives for small companies in 2026

Glean's own homepage says it plainly: it makes AI work "at enterprise scale" and was "built for enterprise from day one." Its featured story is Booking.com scaling AI across 14,000 employees. The main button is "Get a demo," and on October 5, 2026, glean.com/pricing redirected to the homepage with no published prices.

That is a fine fit for a company with an IT team, a security review, and thousands of people searching millions of documents. A 40-person company has a different problem. It has Slack, Google Drive, a CRM, and an issue tracker, and the question is usually not "where is that file?" but "what is going on with this customer, and what do we do next?"

So the right alternative depends on which half of Glean you need: the search index across everything, or the AI that answers and acts on your team's tools. This guide covers both kinds, says where each one is stronger, and ends with when Glean is still the right call.

We compared each option on what it actually is, whether it publishes pricing, whether a small team can start without a sales call, and where people use it. Prices are as listed on each vendor's pricing page on October 5, 2026.

Glean and Onyx are index-first. Glean's connectors page describes 275+ connectors, permissions inherited from each source, and real-time sync across billions of documents. That is the right design when the hard part is finding the one relevant page among millions.

Small teams rarely have millions of documents. Their hard part is that the answer is spread across four tools and nobody owns the follow-up. A shared AI workspace starts from the question instead: the AI reads the connected tools at the moment someone asks, combines what it finds, and posts the answer where the team can see it, correct it, and act on it.

Neither design is better in every case. If people mostly ask "where is the doc about X?", an index wins. If they ask "what is the status of X and what should we do?", the workspace wins, because the answer needs reasoning over live data and someone needs to act on it.

In type.com, a Space is a shared computer for a team, such as Sales or Customer Success. Everyone in it shares the same connections, skills, memory, and AI setup. You add connections once, such as Slack, Google Drive, HubSpot, and Linear, and every channel and thread in that Space can use them. Shared systems like the CRM can use an organization connection, while email and calendars stay personal.

Over time, Space memory carries forward decisions and recurring context, and skills hold how your team does repeat work, like an account review. If your team lives in Slack, map a Slack channel to a Space and people can ask from Slack while the thread, connections, and memory stay in type.com.

Be clear about what type.com is not. It does not crawl and index every document in your company ahead of time, and memory is context, not the source of truth. The AI checks the connected tool when it needs a current fact. If you need instant keyword search over a huge archive, pair type.com with a search tool or pick an index-first option.

On pricing, type.com Basic is $50 per month for 2 members and $100 of AI usage, Pro is $100 for 4 members and $200, and Enterprise tiers run $250, $500, and $750 for 20, 40, and 60 members. AI usage is metered at provider rates, and people who connect their own Claude or ChatGPT subscription do not draw on the workspace allowance. New workspaces get a 14-day trial with $10 of AI usage.

The Onyx repository shows an MIT license badge, lists 50 or more sources, and offers a Slack and Discord bot, an MCP server, and a Chrome extension. The Onyx Business plan is $20 per user per month billed annually, with 40+ app connectors, RBAC, and permission inheritance. SSO and on-premise deployments are on the Enterprise plan.

Where Onyx is stronger than type.com: it builds an index, so retrieval over a large document set is fast and cheap, and it can run fully inside your own network with a local model. Where it is weaker for a small team: self-hosting is real infrastructure work, and its center of gravity is search and chat rather than shared threads, skills, and automations your team runs together.

Guru's pricing page describes an AI knowledge layer with verification workflows, cited and permission-aware answers, 100+ integrations, and MCP delivery. It says Guru is "not just a per-seat tool" and that investment is tailored to your scale, with a team of solution engineers included.

That model suits a support or sales team where a wrong answer is costly and someone owns keeping the knowledge current. For a 30-person company that wants to get going this week, a scoped package can be more than it needs.

In its announcement, Dashworks said it was built for SMBs and mid-market companies "locked out of enterprise search." HubSpot's release says the team joins HubSpot's AI product group to improve search across Breeze. The Dashworks pricing page still lists Team and Business plans with a 14-day trial, so check with the company about its roadmap before you commit.

Notion's Business plan lists $20 per member per month and includes Notion Agent and Enterprise Search, marked beta, which searches across connected apps like Slack and GitHub. If your wiki, specs, and meeting notes already live in Notion, it is the lowest-friction way to get cross-tool answers. If they do not, you would be adopting a new workspace to get search.

The Claude Team plan is listed for teams of 2 to 150 at $20 per seat per month billed annually or $25 monthly, and includes enterprise search across your organization. Claude's connector directory includes Slack, Google Drive, HubSpot, and Linear. For a small company, that is a serious Glean alternative on its own.

ChatGPT Business is $20 per seat per month billed annually or $25 monthly and connects to Google Workspace, Slack, GitHub, Microsoft 365, and more. OpenAI's help center notes that some connected apps can sync content in advance for faster answers when an admin manages them.

The difference with type.com is where the work lives. In Claude or ChatGPT, each person mostly works in their own chats. In type.com, the thread is shared, the tools are connected once for the Space, and you can use your existing Claude or ChatGPT subscription inside it. See Claude Team vs type.com for a direct comparison.

The mistake small teams make is buying a search tool for a problem that is really about follow-through, or the reverse. Your own questions tell you which one you have.

Glean is genuinely strong at the things large companies need: 275+ connectors, permissions inherited from every source, real-time sync at a scale of billions of documents, and controls such as approval before agent actions. If your company is growing past a few hundred people and finding information is the daily pain, that investment can pay off.

For a small company, the trade-off usually goes the other way. You want to start this week, connect the handful of tools you use, and have the answers turn into work the team can see. That is what type.com is built for.

For a wider view, read our guide to the best AI agent platforms for teams, and see how shared AI memory and permissions and approvals work in a shared workspace. Plans are on the pricing page.