This comparison covers two products that buyers often line up against each other when they shouldn't. Glean is an enterprise AI search and agents. Gravity is an outcome runtime. The labels look similar at a glance, the buyer experience is not.
The point of this post is not to pick a winner. It is to help a buyer pick the right category for their specific job. Both products do real work for real customers. They do different work, and the cost of choosing the wrong category is a quarter of mismatched expectations, not a refund.
Why this comparison
The most expensive buying mistake is choosing a tool whose category does not match the job: a workflow builder for what is really a chat assistant problem, or a chat assistant for what is really a scheduled agent problem. The tools are good. The category is wrong.
So this head-to-head is written as category framing, not a feature list. The question to answer first is "which shape of work am I doing?" Once that is clear, the product choice falls out almost automatically. The comparison between Glean and Gravity below is organised around that question, not around who wins on any single benchmark.
What Glean does
Glean started as enterprise search across SaaS tools and has expanded into AI agents and an assistant that work over the same knowledge graph. The product targets large companies that want unified search, answers, and increasingly, action.
Where Glean shines:
- Large companies with knowledge spread across Slack, Confluence, Drive, Notion, and ten more tools.
- Employee Q&A grounded in internal company data.
- Workflows that need cross-tool retrieval before acting.
- Buyers with security, compliance, and SSO requirements.
- Multi-thousand-seat deployments where unified search is the wedge.
Glean owns enterprise search. The knowledge graph across SaaS tools is a genuine moat that took years to build. Their move into agents is a natural extension of "we already know everything inside your company."
What Gravity does differently
Gravity is not enterprise search. It is a self-serve runtime for founders. The user does not buy a knowledge graph; they write a sentence describing one specific recurring outcome.
"Every Thursday at 4pm, check our HubSpot for any deals that have been stuck in Demo Scheduled stage for more than 14 days, and post a list in #sales with the deal owner and a one-line nudge."
Glean answers questions about deals if asked. Gravity does the check every Thursday and posts the nudge without anyone asking. Describing outcomes is the only interface in Gravity.
Side-by-side capability comparison
| Capability | Glean | Gravity |
|---|---|---|
| GTM model | Enterprise sales | Self-serve |
| Primary value | Search and Q&A across SaaS | Recurring autonomous work |
| Audience | 500+ seat companies | Founders, ops leads, small teams |
| Time to value | Weeks to months of setup | About 60 seconds |
| Integrations posture | Many SaaS connectors, deep indexing | Many SaaS connectors, no indexing |
| Pricing | Enterprise contracts | Pay per use, credits at $1 / 1,000 |
| Best fit | Companies with knowledge fragmentation | Operators with recurring work |
The category split
Glean is the search layer for enterprise SaaS. Gravity is the runtime layer for founder SaaS work. Different problems, different buyers, different prices.
The choice is not always about features. It's about how your team works and what you optimise for. We made the same argument in bootstrapping an AI agent platform: pick the category whose default fits how you already think.
Pricing reality
- Glean: Enterprise contracts. Sticker is bespoke and seat-scaled.
- Gravity: Pay per use. Credits priced at $1 for 1,000, charged only when an agent runs. No contract, no infrastructure to manage.
For a deeper look at recurring agent cost, see our note on AI agent cost models and the breakdown of how bootstrapped agent economics change once you count infrastructure and engineer hours, not just the platform sticker.
A 60-second decision framework
If you have one minute and need to choose, run through these four questions in order. The first one to give you a hard answer is the answer.
- Does this work need to recur on a schedule without my involvement? If yes, lean Gravity. If no, Glean or another single-session tool is fine.
- Do I want to describe the outcome, or assemble the steps? Outcome means Gravity. Steps means Glean (most of the time).
- Is my buyer me, or is my buyer procurement? Self-serve means Gravity. Procurement-led means Glean if it fits that motion.
- Is my buyer a small team, or enterprise IT? Small team or solo means Gravity, self-serve and pay per use. A 500-plus seat company that needs unified search and compliance review means Glean.
The framework is biased, of course. Gravity is the product behind this blog. The point of writing it out is that the bias is visible. You can run the same four questions and ignore the recommended branch; the framework still works.
When Glean is the right choice
- You are a 500+ seat company with knowledge spread across many tools.
- Employees ask the same questions repeatedly and a search layer would save hours.
- You need SSO, audit logs, and enterprise compliance.
- You have a budget and a buyer in IT.
When Gravity is the right choice
- You are a small team or solo founder.
- You want recurring agents that do work, not just answer.
- You want self-serve onboarding and to pay only when an agent runs.
- You can describe the outcome in a sentence.
Migration: what changes if you switch
Migration between Glean and Gravity is rare because the audiences differ. A small team running Glean might find the contract heavy and the wedge mostly unused at small scale; Gravity replaces the agent feature, not the search.
- List the Glean agent recipes you actually use.
- For each, write the outcome as a sentence in Gravity.
- Connect the relevant SaaS sources.
- Dry run and compare output.
- Keep Glean for search if the company still needs it.
The biggest migration surprise tends to be how few jobs actually fit cleanly on either side. Most teams end up with a mix: a handful of recurring outcome-shaped jobs on Gravity, and a handful of category-specific jobs on Glean. The fight between "all in on one tool" and "use the right tool for each job" rarely ends with "all in." Plan for the hybrid from day one and the migration is undramatic.
Common mistakes buyers make
Across conversations with operators picking between these two categories, three mistakes show up over and over:
- Buying for a one-off and getting stuck. The first task always looks one-off. Then it recurs. Buyers who chose a tool optimised for single sessions wake up six weeks later with a manual prompt habit and a quietly growing bill.
- Confusing intelligence with action. Both Glean and Gravity use strong models. The model is not the differentiator. The differentiator is what happens between prompt and result. Asking "which has the smarter AI?" is the wrong question; both are smart enough.
- Skipping the pricing model question. Glean is enterprise contracts, with a bespoke seat-scaled sticker. Gravity is pay per use, charged only when an agent runs. Those two structures behave very differently. Run the math at 10 runs a week and 100 runs a week before committing.
Frequently asked questions
What is Glean?
Glean is enterprise AI search across SaaS tools. It indexes internal data and serves answers, with newer agent features built on top.
Is Glean a fit for startups?
Less so. The product, sales motion, and contract sizes are enterprise-shaped. Small teams rarely justify the cost.
How is Gravity different from Glean?
Gravity does not index your company. It runs single agents for specific outcomes, self-serve, with no enterprise contract.
Can Gravity search across my SaaS?
Gravity can pull from any connected SaaS to complete a specific task. It is not a search product, it is a runtime.
Which one is cheaper?
Gravity, for any small team. Glean is priced for the enterprise where the savings from unified search justify the contract.
Three takeaways before you close this tab
- Search vs run. Glean answers. Gravity acts.
- Enterprise wedge vs founder wedge. Same SaaS world, opposite ends.
- Self-serve still wins for small teams. A founder cannot wait for procurement on every new tool.
Sources
- Glean. "Official product page." www.glean.com
- Gravity. "Why we bet against workflow platforms in 2026." /blog/why-i-bet-against-workflow-platforms-2026/
- Gravity. "AI agent vs workflow automation." /blog/ai-agent-vs-workflow-automation/