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.
This comparison is generated from the sourced Glean and Microsoft Copilot profiles. Open either profile to review its evidence and last-reviewed date.