Context vs Glean
Both connect to everything your company uses. The difference is what happens next: answers and lightweight agents, or governed production workflows.
Vendor sources last verified August 2026.
Durable runbook runs with rubric scores and an append-only audit trail
| Runbook | Model | Status | Eval | Last action |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Weekly pipeline review | Claude | Completed | 96 / pass | Deck exported (.pptx) |
| Fix the flaky auth test | Kimi K3 · context-code | Running | Scoring | context-code session |
| Vendor diligence memo | GPT | In review | 91 / pass | 14 sources cited |
| Support ticket triage | Gemini | Running | Scoring | Authorized: read:tickets |
Glean earned its place as the enterprise search layer: 275+ connectors that mirror source-system permissions, a strong grounded assistant, and now a no-code agent builder with scheduled and event triggers plus deliverables like generated .pptx decks. Every customer gets a single-tenant environment, either Glean-hosted or deployed into the customer's own cloud account with Glean operating it.
Context starts from the work rather than the index. Teams encode workflows as runbooks; agents run in isolated environments with identity from your IdP and per-action authorization; institutional knowledge lives in a .context filesystem agents traverse and improve through sleep-time distillation; and expert-authored rubrics score every run. Deployment is managed, VPC, on-premises, or air-gapped, operated inside your perimeter.
Pick by primary job: if the pain is 'nobody can find anything,' Glean attacks it directly. If the pain is 'this workflow eats a team's week and we cannot hand it to an unmeasured black box,' that is Context's territory.
Deployment and control
Where the platform runs and who holds the keys
Models and agents
What runs the work and how far it can go alone
Knowledge and context
How the system holds what your team knows
Quality and audit
Whether you can prove the work is good
Connectors, surfaces, price
Reach into your systems and what it costs
Where each one fits
Choose Glean when
- Findability is the actual problem.
- If people lose hours searching across wikis, drives, and tickets, Glean's permission-aware index and grounded assistant attack that pain directly, across 275+ connectors.
- You want answers plus light automation.
- Scheduled digests, triage agents, and generated decks on top of the search layer cover a lot of everyday work without engineering involvement.
- A dedicated tenant satisfies your security bar.
- Glean gives every customer an isolated single-tenant environment and can deploy it into your own cloud account, with Glean operating it. For many buyers that isolation is enough.
Choose Context when
- You need the platform operated in your perimeter.
- Glean's customer-cloud option is still vendor-operated. Context deploys managed, VPC, on-premises, or fully air-gapped, with credentials brokered at runtime and traces that never leave your deployment.
- Workflows are the unit, not queries.
- Runbooks with review gates, durable resumable runs, and per-action authorization carry real production work. Search feeds the work; it is not the work.
- You need quality you can prove and costs that fall.
- Rubric scores on every run, golden sets against regressions, and distillation of accepted work into cheaper models you own. A search index does not give you an improvement loop.
Questions worth asking both vendors
Whichever way this comparison lands for your team, these are the questions that separate a good demo from a platform that holds up in production.
- Is the bottleneck finding things or doing things?
- Hours lost to search argue for an index; a workflow that eats a team's week argues for agents. Quantify both before either vendor frames the problem for you.
- Who operates the deployment, even in your cloud?
- A single-tenant environment in your cloud account that the vendor operates is not the same as software your team runs. Ask who holds admin, who patches, and who can read what.
- How fresh and complete is the knowledge layer?
- For an index, ask about crawl lag and permission mirroring at your scale. For a knowledge filesystem, ask how corrections and new procedures enter it and how staleness is caught.
- What does an agent run leave behind?
- Answers evaporate; workflow runs should leave artifacts: the deliverable, its sources, the actions taken, and a score. Ask to inspect everything one finished run left behind.
- How is agent output quality measured?
- Both products now ship agents. Ask which of them scores runs against your experts' rubrics and catches regressions with golden sets, and which relies on spot checks.
- Compare connector claims against your actual stack.
- 275+ and 800+ are marketing numbers until mapped to your systems. Take your top 20 systems and check both catalogs for depth: read-only search versus permissioned actions.
FAQs
Glean and Context, answered plainly
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Sources
Competitor facts come from these vendor pages, last verified August 2026.
Choosing between them
Working together
Commercials
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Sources
Competitor facts come from these vendor pages, last verified August 2026.
See Context on your workflows
Bring one real use case and watch agents build it on the deployment model you need: managed, in your VPC, on-premises, or air-gapped.
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