Glean vs Microsoft Copilot
A side-by-side comparison of capabilities, autonomy, integrations, and pricing to help you choose.
Short answer: choose Glean if you want enterprise work ai platform: permission-aware search, assistant, and agents (Supervised agent, enterprise); choose Microsoft Copilot if you want microsoft's ai: an in-app copilot plus a copilot studio agent platform (Copilot, subscription).
| Glean | Microsoft Copilot | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Enterprise Work AI platform: permission-aware search, assistant, and agents | Microsoft's AI: an in-app copilot plus a Copilot Studio agent platform |
| Type | platform | product-with-agents |
| Autonomy | Supervised agent | Copilot |
| Pricing | enterprise | subscription · $30/user/mo (M365 Copilot, annual) |
| Best for | enterprise, mid-market, developers | enterprise, mid-market, developers |
| Deployment | saas, self-hosted | saas, api |
| Modalities | text, api | text, api |
| Models | model-agnostic, gpt, claude, gemini | gpt, claude, proprietary |
| Protocols | mcp, rest-api | mcp, a2a, rest-api |
| Integrations | Slack, Google Workspace, Jira, Salesforce, Confluence, GitHub | Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, Power Platform |
| Capabilities | 5 documented | 6 documented |
Glean
- +Best-in-class unified, permission-enforced index across many apps with citation-grounded answers
- +Genuinely model-agnostic and open: MCP host plus server, bring-your-own model, and on-prem deployment
- +One governed platform spanning search, assistant, and agents with built-in certification and monitoring
- -Opaque, expensive pricing with high seat minimums and add-on fees; reported fully-loaded deployments run into the hundreds of thousands
- -The autonomous-agents marketing outpaces demonstrated autonomy; in practice agents are supervised
Microsoft Copilot
- +Deepest integration into tools people already live in, grounded in org data via Microsoft Graph
- +A genuine agent platform with open MCP and A2A interop and multi-model choice (OpenAI, Anthropic, in-house)
- +Enterprise-grade controls, with licensed-user agent usage zero-rated in M365 apps
- -Layered, confusing pricing: the $30 seat is an add-on on top of a base license, and agents bill in separate credits that were renamed in 2025
- -The flagship in-app experience is assistant/copilot, not autonomous, so agent marketing can overstate it
Which should you choose?
Glean is enterprise work ai platform: permission-aware search, assistant, and agents, best for enterprise, mid-market, developers. Microsoft Copilot is microsoft's ai: an in-app copilot plus a copilot studio agent platform, best for enterprise, mid-market, developers. The right choice depends on the autonomy level you want, your existing integrations, and your budget, all compared above.