Glean hit $300M ARR. Onyx runs on your servers for $20/user.
These three tools look identical on a feature checklist but sell to completely different buyers. Glean is a $7.2B revenue machine for Fortune 500 IT leaders who need 100+ connectors and can absorb a $60K minimum contract. Onyx is an MIT-licensed open-source platform that Netflix runs for 14,000 employees and Ramp credits with 30x ROI. GoSearch is the transparent mid-market bridge: $20/user listed publicly, deployed in days, and built on the same YC-backed GoLinks infrastructure enterprises already trust.
Key takeaways
Winners by dimension
Side-by-side
| Glean Technologies, Inc. | GoSearch | Onyx AI | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free Tier | — | Free plan: 3 searches/day, 3 GoAI queries/day, 1 file upload (5 MB). Personal connectors only, no workspace connectors. | Community Edition: fully functional MIT-licensed self-hosted product with 40+ connectors, AI chat, RAG, and agents. No seat limit. |
| Starting Paid Price | — | $20/user/month (Pro, publicly listed). Enterprise tier: custom pricing via sales. | $20/user/month (Business, annual billing). $25/user/month on monthly billing. 14-day free trial, no credit card required. |
| Pricing Model | — | Per-seat with transparent public tiers (Free, Pro at $20/user/month, Enterprise custom). | Per-seat with free Community Edition. Annual billing saves ~20% vs monthly. Enterprise tier is custom. |
| Connector Count | — | 100+ native, indexed, federated, and MCP-based connectors covering the full enterprise SaaS stack. | 40-50+ pre-built indexed connectors. Extensible via open-source custom connector development and MCP servers. |
| Deployment Options | — | SaaS cloud or BYO Cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP, on-prem). BYO LLM API key supported on Enterprise tier. | Self-hosted (Docker, Kubernetes, Helm/Terraform), managed cloud, on-prem, or fully air-gapped with local LLMs. Any infrastructure. |
| LLM Flexibility | — | Switchable commercial LLMs. BYO LLM API key on Enterprise tier. No local inference option. | Any LLM: OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, DeepSeek, Llama, Mistral, Qwen, Ollama, LiteLLM, vLLM. Full local inference supported. |
| AI Agent Capability | — | No-code drag-and-drop agent builder, multi-step workflows, event-driven and scheduled triggers. No-code accessible to non-technical users. | Custom AI agents with MCP tool use and OpenAPI actions. Code-based agent framework for developers. No visual no-code builder currently. |
| Security and Compliance | — | SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA. Zero data retention policy. BYO Cloud for full data sovereignty. | SOC 2 Type II, GDPR. MIT-licensed codebase is fully auditable. Air-gapped deployment. Custom code hooks for PII removal. |
| Deployment Speed | — | 1-5 days. No professional services required. No dedicated admin needed. Free plan available for pre-commit evaluation. | ~30 minutes for self-hosted Docker install. Managed cloud in under 1 minute. Kubernetes deployments require DevOps expertise. |
| Open Roles (Growth Signal) | — | 5 open roles, primarily in sales (AE, SDR) and finance. Stable headcount signal across ~70 total employees. | 5 open roles across engineering, ML research, sales, and product. Early-stage growth signal with 11-50 total employees. |
| Verified Customer Scale | — | Model N (47% productivity boost, $397K savings in 3 months), HPE, Tonal, Incode. One detailed published case study externally. | Netflix (14,000+ employees), Ramp (30x ROI, 115K queries/month), UCSD (37,000 users), Thales Group (defense). |
| Funding and Valuation | — | ~$27M Series A (GoLinks Inc., YC W2019). ~70 employees across GoLinks, GoSearch, and GoProfiles product lines. | $10M seed co-led by Khosla Ventures and First Round Capital (March 2025). YC W24. 11-50 employees. |
Who should pick whom
What we found
Three Products, Three Completely Different Buyers
Glean sells to Fortune 500 CIOs who need analyst validation, 100+ connectors, and a vendor that shows up with professional services. It's earned that position: $300M ARR as of May 28, 2026 (per Glean's press release) and Fortune 500 customer count nearly doubling YoY are not marketing claims. GoSearch sells to IT directors at 200-2,000-person companies who got a Glean quote, saw the $60K minimum, and started looking for alternatives. Onyx sells to CTOs and engineering teams who want to inspect the code, run it on their own GPU cluster, and never hand data to a vendor. These aren't the same buyer at different price points. They're genuinely different humans with different risk tolerances.
The Pricing Gap Is Real, and It's Architectural
Glean's estimated $45-65/user/month (per Workativ's February 2026 TCO analysis and Onyx's own comparison page) isn't just a margin decision. It reflects the cost of running a fully indexed, single-tenant cloud architecture that continuously crawls and syncs billions of documents. GoSearch's hybrid federated model reduces that infrastructure footprint, which is why it can list $20/user/month publicly. Onyx's $20/user/month Business plan works because the compute runs in your environment. The Sacra research note from January 2026 put Glean's Series F multiple at 36x revenue, which means Glean's price needs to stay high to justify the valuation. Don't expect a public free tier from them anytime soon.
Where Onyx's Open-Source Bet Actually Pays Off
Onyx's 29,900 GitHub stars and 4,100+ forks (verified on GitHub, May 2026) aren't vanity metrics. They represent a community that has contributed more than half of Onyx's integrations, per TechCrunch's March 2025 reporting on the $10M seed round. The practical payoff: UCSD built a fully air-gapped deployment for 37,000 users with local LLMs, and Ramp embedded Onyx into its own product to auto-resolve more than 93% of actionable customer service requests. Neither deployment was possible with a closed-source vendor. The weakness is equally real: Onyx has 40-50+ connectors vs Glean's 100+, and no visual no-code agent builder, which kills deals with non-technical operations buyers.
GoSearch's MCP Bet Is the Most Interesting Strategic Wager
GoSearch is the only vendor in this group whose content strategy is almost entirely focused on MCP connector integrations. Its blog published MCP integration guides for Salesforce, Coda, and Lucid in the 60 days before this report. That's a bet that federated, real-time MCP-native architecture becomes the standard for enterprise AI connectivity, making Glean's heavy indexing model look expensive and brittle. It's a credible thesis. The risk: GoSearch has only 5 open roles and one published detailed case study. Brand recognition and social proof are the real gaps, not the product.
Who Should Pick Whom
Pick Glean if you're a 1,000+ person company with a dedicated IT team, a six-figure software budget, and a CIO who needs to show a Gartner badge to the board. Pick GoSearch if you want to be live in a week, you don't want to negotiate a minimum contract, and your security team cares about zero data retention. Pick Onyx if you're in healthcare, defense, or financial services with data residency requirements a cloud vendor can't satisfy, or if you're an engineering-led company that wants to run local LLMs and extend the platform yourself. The worst outcome is paying Glean prices for a 50-person team that doesn't need the Enterprise Graph.
Sources & references
Every claim in this report was triangulated against 14 third-party sources (analyst reports, developer surveys, news coverage, and pricing pages). Sources are listed below in citation order.
- Glean Surpasses $300M ARR: Unrivaled Enterprise Context Fuels AI Adoption (Business Wire via Yahoo Finance, May 2026)(headline | key_stat | winners | narrative | side_by_side)
- Glean at $200M ARR | Sacra (January 2026)(narrative | winners | key_stat)
- Why Onyx thinks its open source solution will win enterprise search | TechCrunch (March 2025)(narrative | winners | side_by_side | personas)
- Onyx raises $10M to help teams find knowledge faster with open source AI agents | Onyx AI Blog (March 2025)(side_by_side | winners | narrative | personas)
- Benchmarking agentic RAG on workplace questions | Onyx AI (February 2026)(winners | narrative | side_by_side)
- Best Enterprise RAG Platforms for 2026: A Buyer's Guide | Onyx AI (May 2026)(narrative | side_by_side | winners)
- Best Glean Alternative (2026) | Onyx vs Glean Comparison | Onyx AI(side_by_side | key_stat | narrative)
- Glean Pricing Comparison: GoSearch vs Glean on Cost, AI and Architecture | GoSearch Blog (February 2026)(side_by_side | narrative | winners)
- 4 Best Glean Alternatives for AI Enterprise Search in 2026 | GoSearch Blog(narrative | winners | personas)
- Glean Pricing: Costs, Hidden Fees and TCO 2026 | Workativ (February 2026)(side_by_side | key_stat | narrative | winners)
- Glean Press Coverage and Newsroom | Glean.com(headline | winners | side_by_side | key_stat)
- GitHub: onyx-dot-app/onyx (verified star and fork counts, May 2026)(side_by_side | narrative | winners | key_stat)
- Glean revenue, funding and news | Sacra(side_by_side | key_stat)
- Glean Raises $150M Series F at $7.2B Valuation | Crunchbase News (June 2025)(side_by_side | winners)
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Glean just announced $300M ARR at a 36x revenue multiple. Onyx runs on your own servers, costs $20/user/month, and beat ChatGPT Enterprise in a blind benchmark. Here's what that gap actually means for buyers:
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