comparison · pulse vs glean
Pulse vs Glean
Glean is enterprise search for thousand-person orgs. Pulse is a process graph for teams of 5 to 500.
When Glean is the right call
- The org has 10,000+ employees and a search-shaped problem. People don't know where the policy doc, the HR template, or the procurement form lives, and finding it should be a single search box across every system.
- The dominant content type is long-form documents, wikis, knowledge base articles, and HR/IT policies. The graph between them matters less than retrievable text.
- There is already a dedicated knowledge-management or IT team to maintain canonical sources, deduplicate articles, and curate Glean's content governance.
When Pulse is the right call
- The team is 5 to 500 people and the dominant work is shipping software, not authoring documentation.
- Decisions live in Slack threads, PR reviews, Linear comments, and meeting transcripts more than in a wiki. Keeping those as structured, connected records matters more than indexing static docs.
- Approval-gated agent actions (drafting Slack DMs, opening Linear tickets, leaving doc comments) are part of the value, not just retrieval.
- Confidence you can trust is required. A search box that returns ten documents is not the same as an answer that says it isn't sure when the evidence is thin.
Side by side
How the two compare, point by point.
| Area | Pulse | Glean |
|---|---|---|
| Primary shape | Process graph: decisions, commitments, PR reviews, and meetings kept as structured records | Search index: documents and messages as searchable text |
| Target team size | 5 to 500 people | Optimised for 1,000+ people |
| Permission handling | ACL mirror at retrieval (visibleDocumentIds gate) | ACL aware via permission sync; coverage varies per connector |
| Decision memory | Yes. First-class decision entities with rationale, owners, dependencies | Partial. Returned as document snippets |
| Agent actions | Drafts Slack DMs, Linear tickets, calendar invites; every send waits in the approval inbox; 5 minute undo | Glean Agents act across connected tools; the execution posture is configured per agent |
| Confidence scores | Yes. 0 to 100 confidence per answer, per workspace, per topic; holds back when it isn't sure | No. Relevance scoring; no calibrated per-answer confidence exposed |
| Model choice | Per-question picker shipped to every end user: Auto (adaptive routing), Haiku 4.5, Sonnet 4.6, Opus 4.8, OpenAI GPT-5, GPT-5-mini, GPT-5.5, Google Gemini 2.5 Flash, Gemini 2.5 Pro | Admin-curated model hub spanning multiple providers |
| Pre-built agent templates | 20 proactive templates across monitoring, digest, reminder, automation, sales, marketing, customer-success, hr, legal, ops; clone + customize in two minutes | Agent template library and shared agent catalog, built for admin-led rollout |
| Agent read permissions | Each agent reads only what its creator can see, set by an explicit grant (team, channel, source, or doc); fail-closed, no grant means no reads, and a grant can't widen past the creator's own access | Agents inherit the operator's full read scope |
| Setup | 30 minute interview + OAuth + 2 to 6 hour backfill | Multi-week rollout with IT involvement |
| Pricing posture | Simple and founder-direct today; self-serve at launch | Enterprise sales-led |
The honest verdict
Glean is the right answer for a global IT director who wants every employee to find the right policy doc in one search. Pulse is the right answer for a head of engineering who wants the decision behind that policy to survive when the person who made it leaves. Different shape, different buyer, often complementary on the rare team that needs both.
Questions teams ask before switching
Can a team run Pulse and Glean side by side?
Yes. Glean stays the global search bar. Pulse covers the decision graph and the agent actions for the engineering, product, and design org. The two don't fight each other because they answer different shaped questions.Does Pulse have an enterprise search bar?
Pulse has full-text search across the connected sources, scoped to what the asker is allowed to see. It is not the product's center of gravity though. If pure search across 50,000 documents for 5,000 employees is the requirement, Glean is the stronger fit.How does Pulse handle ACLs compared to Glean?
Pulse mirrors ACLs at retrieval as it syncs, and every answer is filtered through them, so you only ever see what you could already see in the original tool. Glean syncs permissions per connector and applies them at search time. Both honor the source tool's access controls; the difference is that Pulse keeps decisions as structured records rather than as document hits.Is Pulse a Glean replacement for a 200-person engineering team?
For a 200-person engineering team that has outgrown Slack scrollback but doesn't have a 50,000-document wiki problem, yes. Pulse is the natural shape. For a 200-person engineering team inside a 10,000-person company that already runs Glean, the answer is usually to run both: Glean for the wider org's search, Pulse for the engineering org's decision graph.
See if Pulse is the right shape for your team.
A 30 minute interview with a founder, and your tools connected in 10 more. Pulse isn't empty on day one.