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

Glean is the best permission-aware enterprise search. But search finds work — it doesn't do it. Here's where you outgrow it, and the open runtime alternative.

Canonical page: https://kortix.com/blog/kortix-vs-glean

Published: 2026-07-13
Author: team
Tags: Comparisons, Enterprise, Open Source

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 (glean.com)

## 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](https://www.gosearch.ai/faqs/glean-enterprise-search-pricing-explained-costs-tiers-hidden-fees-gosearch-comparison) — 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](/blog/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](/blog/introducing-kortix) 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.

> No 100-seat floor, no sales process to start — [see the plans](/pricing). Open-source means you can run one project today and a whole company on it tomorrow — on infrastructure where the data, config, and model belong to you.

## Side by side

| Dimension | Glean | Kortix |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Core job | Find & answer over company data | Build & run agents that do the work |
| Runs a fleet of agents in parallel | Assistants bolted onto search | Thousands of agents, isolated sandboxes |
| Self-hostable / own your data | No — SaaS or vendor-managed cloud | Yes — your cloud, VPC, on-prem |
| Choose your models | Vendor-managed, bundled in seat | Any model — your keys |
| Pricing model | ~$50–75/user/mo, ~100-seat min | Open-source; cloud or self-host, any size |
| Accessible below 100 seats | No — sales-led, large-enterprise floor | Yes — start with one project |
| Agents, skills & policies as code | Configured in a vendor console | Files in one repo you own |
| Versioned, reviewable, roll-back-able | Console settings, no diff | Git history + change requests |
| Multi-tenant governance | Enterprise permissions on search | Departments, roles, scoped connectors |

## When to pick which

### Choose Glean if

you want the best permission-aware enterprise search and assistant, you’re fine with a closed SaaS and a sales-led ~100-seat contract, and “find the answer” is the job.

### Choose Kortix if

you want to run agents that actually do the work — [across departments](/enterprise), any model, self-hosted, with everything versioned and owned by you.

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. (The desktop side has its own parallel: [how Kortix compares to Claude Cowork](/blog/kortix-vs-claude-cowork).) If that operating layer is what you’re missing, the [company OS post](/blog/ai-transformation-company-os) and the [secure connector model](/blog/secure-ai-agent-tool-access) are the next reads.

## Don't just find the work. Run it.

Connect your tools and hand a Kortix agent a real task. Free to start, free to self-host.