Kortix vs Glean: search or an agent platform that runs work?

Glean is genuinely the best permission-aware enterprise search you can buy. It indexes your apps, respects your ACLs, and answers in plain language with citations. So this isn't a "they're bad, we're good" post. The honest question is a different one: once you can find anything in your company, what actually does the work with it?

Compared here:

Glean

What Glean is great at

• Permission-aware search done right — it inherits your source-system ACLs, so a result you can see is a result you can act on.
• Mature connectors — it reaches across the usual enterprise stack and keeps the index fresh.
• Serious compliance posture — built for the security review that enterprise search has to survive.
• A clean assistant on top of retrieval — ask a question, get a cited answer instead of ten blue links.

Where it stops: search finds work, it doesn’t do it

Glean’s center of gravity is the index. Agents are a layer on top of retrieval, not a workforce that runs your company. The moment the job is “open the tickets, enrich the accounts, draft and send the outreach, land the fix, close the book” — search has stopped being the bottleneck and a chat assistant over the index isn’t the answer either. You need a runtime that hands a task to agents and they return finished work.

• Retrieval-first, agents bolted on. The product answers “where is it?” well; it is not built to run a fleet of agents that take real actions across your tools.
• Closed and vendor-hosted. You query Glean; you don’t own it. It is SaaS or vendor-managed cloud — your company’s knowledge leaves your walls to be indexed somewhere else.
• Seat-priced and sales-led. Public reporting puts Glean at roughly $50–75 per user/month with a ~100-seat minimum — about a $60k/year floor before infrastructure and implementation. That locks out the small team and the single-department pilot.
• Configured in a console, not as code. Connectors, assistants, and prompts live in a vendor dashboard. There is no diff to review, no version to roll back, no repo to fork.

None of that is a flaw in a search product. It is exactly the line you cross when “let me find it” becomes “let something do it.” If you want the broader framing, beyond the chat box makes the same argument against chat assistants: input→output stops short of work.

A runtime that does the work, not just retrieves it

Kortix is an open agent runtime — the command center where a workforce of agents runs your company, not a search bar over it. Hand a task to a project and agents run in isolated sandboxes, take real actions through scoped connectors, and land durable change back to one shared main through a reviewed change request. The context they need is files in a repo you own, not an index someone else rents back to you.

That is the real split. Glean makes your existing knowledge searchable; Kortix makes your company’s operating layer — agents, skills, memory, connectors, policies — into files in one repo that agents run against. One is a window onto work; the other is where the work happens.

Own the data, pick the model, skip the seat tax

Because Kortix is open-source and self-hostable, your data never has to leave your walls — your cloud, your VPC, on-prem, or your own GPUs. And because you bring your own key and run any model, the bill is not bundled into a per-seat license. An open-weight model like GLM-5.2 runs about 5–7× cheaper than Claude Opus or GPT on output (~$4.40 vs $25–30 per 1M tokens), and DeepSeek is 50×+ cheaper on output. Route a cheap model for the bulk of the work and a frontier model only where it earns its keep.

Side by side

When to pick which

They can coexist, too. Plenty of companies will keep Glean as the search layer and run the work itself on Kortix — agents that read, decide, and act, with the operating layer they need to do it governed as code. If that operating layer is what you’re missing, the company OS post and the secure connector model are the next reads.