Glean vs Sana vs Coveo: Which Is Better for Enterprise AI Search in 2026?

Enterprise AI search sounds simple — one search box over everything your company knows — until you hit the three questions that actually decide the purchase: which of your SaaS apps can it index, does it respect your permissions model, and how much admin work stands between the demo and the rollout?

Glean, Sana, and Coveo answer those questions very differently. Glean is the workplace-search specialist with the broadest connector catalog. Sana — acquired by Workday in late 2025 — is now an agentic AI OS embedded in Workday, with search as one piece. Coveo is a relevance platform that unifies internal search with website, commerce, and customer-service search on one index. By the end of this comparison, you’ll know which one matches your stack.

Quick verdict

If your company runs on a messy mix of Slack, Google Workspace, Confluence, Jira, and Salesforce, go with Glean — its 275+ connectors and permission-aware knowledge graph are unmatched for heterogeneous stacks. If you’re a Workday customer, Sana is the natural pick: it’s built into the Workday AI OS with enterprise search, agents, and learning on one platform. If you need one relevance layer across internal workplace search plus your website, help center, or commerce storefront, Coveo is the only one of the three built for all of those surfaces.

Glean vs Sana vs Coveo at a glance

Pricing checked against vendor pages and current buyer-reported estimates in October 2026. All three enterprise tiers are quote-based — confirm before you buy.

Glean deep dive — the workplace-search specialist

Glean (founded 2019 by former Google search engineers) defined the workplace-AI-search category and remains its reference implementation. It builds a permissions-aware knowledge graph across your wikis, docs, Slack, tickets, and databases, then layers an AI assistant and no-code agent builder on top — the company now frames itself as a Work AI platform rather than just search.

Pricing breakdown: Glean publishes no prices. All contracts are custom-quoted through sales, with per-seat licensing plus consumption-based FlexCredits for premium AI usage beyond included thresholds. Third-party buyer reports commonly put it around $50–75/user/month with roughly 100-seat minimums — but treat those as estimates, not quotes.

Use cases where it shines:

• A 500-person company with knowledge spread across Google Drive, Confluence, Slack, Jira, and Salesforce needs one permission-safe search box
• IT wants AI answers grounded in internal docs with full audit logging streamed to the SIEM
• Teams building internal agents want a governed retrieval layer rather than raw RAG plumbing

Pros:

• Broadest connector catalog (275+ native and MCP-based connectors) with real-time sync of content and permissions
• Model-neutral: works with 15+ LLMs, so the knowledge layer isn’t tied to one lab’s roadmap
• Genuine enterprise governance — SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, SSO/SCIM, audit trails, plus the Glean Protect SKU for “what did the AI show whom”

Cons:

• The most expensive option here — per-seat enterprise pricing plus real infrastructure and implementation costs (third-party estimates put implementation services at $20K–$80K)
• Deployment is real work: weeks to months to reach full value, and you need to connect most of your stack, not a pilot corner of it

Sana deep dive — the agentic AI OS inside Workday

Sana (Stockholm-founded) is the comparison that changed shape: Workday closed its acquisition of Sana in November 2025, and Sana is now the AI layer of Workday — an “agentic AI OS” combining enterprise search, AI agents, and the learning platform, delivered through Core and Enterprise tiers. Comparing Sana to Glean as pure enterprise search is now only half the picture; its center of gravity moved to orchestrating agents with Workday business context.

Pricing breakdown: Sana’s vendor-published enterprise packaging starts from $30/user/month with Flex Credits for over-usage, plus an AI Transformation fee of $45K–$65K that covers dedicated AI strategists and a change-management program. A free tier covers the agent basics for small teams.

Use cases where it shines:

• A Workday customer wants search, agents, and learning in one AI interface with native Workday context
• HR and finance teams want agents that act on Workday data (onboarding, policy answers, procurement) without custom integrations
• Leadership wants adoption support bundled — Sana’s change-management program is the differentiator that won deals over generic copilots

Pros:

• Only AI OS embedded in Workday — orchestration across tools with business context competitors can’t replicate
• Vendor-published entry pricing and a real free tier for agents, rare in this category
• No-code agent builder connecting 200+ enterprise tools; learning platform included for training use cases

Cons:

• If you’re not a Workday customer, the value story weakens considerably — Glean is the stronger standalone search play
• The AI Transformation fee ($45K–$65K) means even “from $30/user/mo” is an enterprise procurement, not a credit-card purchase

Coveo deep dive — the unified relevance platform

Coveo (Montreal; public on the TSX since 2021) takes a different approach from both: one permission-aware index and one relevance layer that serves workplace search, customer self-service, website search, and commerce. If your intranet, help center, and storefront all need AI-powered search, Coveo is the only vendor here built for all three — and its hosted MCP server (generally available since February 2026) lets external AI assistants and agent frameworks query the index.

Pricing breakdown: Coveo publishes no list prices. Quotes are built per deployment: entitlement-based pricing for Service and Website, seat-based for Workplace, consumption-based for Commerce, with each pricing unit including 100,000 queries/month. Generative AI answering, multi-region hosting, and HIPAA cloud are add-ons. Third-party directories cite base Relevance Cloud plans from around $600/month — treat that as a floor for small deployments, not an enterprise number.

Use cases where it shines:

• A retailer wants one relevance platform powering site search, product recommendations, and the internal support knowledge base
• A SaaS company wants its help center and in-app search to share one permission-aware index
• Teams building agents want governed retrieval exposed over MCP without building their own index

Pros:

• Unique unified story: internal + external search on one platform, with ML relevance tuned from user behavior
• Permission-aware unified index across 55+ sources; strong Salesforce, ServiceNow, and SharePoint story
• Generative answering with citations grounded in your indexed content, plus the MCP server for agent access

Cons:

• Pure workplace-search buyers get more connector breadth from Glean — Coveo’s 55+ sources trail there
• Setup is a services engagement (months, in most cases) — heavier admin lift than Glean for workplace-only use

Head-to-head: the three criteria that matter

1. Connector breadth — which SaaS can each index?

Glean wins outright: 275+ native and MCP-based connectors is roughly 5x Coveo’s 55+ indexable sources, and the catalog covers the long tail (GitHub, Zendesk, Confluence, and hundreds more) that heterogeneous stacks actually run on. Sana connects 200+ enterprise tools, but its real integration story is depth inside Workday rather than breadth everywhere else. Winner for heterogeneous stacks: Glean. Winner for Workday shops: Sana. Winner for website + workplace combined: Coveo.

2. Permission-aware retrieval — the security model

This is the criterion buyers under-weight and security teams don’t. All three enforce source permissions, but the implementations differ: Glean syncs content and permissions in real time and sells governance as a product (Glean Protect, SIEM streaming, audit trails). Coveo runs one permission-aware unified index with HIPAA and ISO 27001 coverage. Sana brings SOC 2 and GDPR with SSO/SCIM at the Enterprise tier. For the strictest regulated environments, Glean and Coveo have the deepest compliance paper trails — but no vendor here wins on permissions alone; all three will pass a security review that a DIY RAG stack won’t.

3. Admin and setup effort

Sana is fastest to value if you’re on Workday — the business context is already there, and the change-management program is built into the package. Glean takes weeks to months: real connectors, real indexing, real governance configuration (and budget $20K–$80K for implementation services per third-party estimates). Coveo is the heaviest lift for workplace-only buyers — a multi-month services engagement — though it’s the lightest lift if you were going to buy separate vendors for website, service, and workplace search anyway.

Final verdict

• Heterogeneous enterprise stack (Slack + Google + Jira + Salesforce)? → Glean. Broadest connectors, real-time permission sync, model-neutral agents. Expensive and sales-led, but it’s the category leader for a reason.
• Workday customer? → Sana. Native Workday context, vendor-published pricing from $30/user/mo, and a change-management program competitors charge extra for. Non-Workday shops should look elsewhere.
• Need one relevance layer across intranet, help center, and storefront? → Coveo. Nobody else here does internal and external search on one index.

For broader context on enterprise AI tooling, see our guides to AI data analysis tools for business teams and AI customer support software for small business.

How we compared

We scored the three platforms on connector breadth, permission-aware retrieval, and admin/setup effort — the factors that determine whether enterprise search survives procurement, not demo quality. Pricing checked against the vendors’ pricing pages in October 2026; Glean and Coveo publish no list prices (all enterprise tiers are quote-based), while Sana’s vendor-published Enterprise entry is from $30/user/month with Flex Credits. Confirm any numbers with the vendors before you buy.

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