comparison · pulse vs glean
Pulse vs Glean
Glean is enterprise search for thousand-person orgs. Pulse is a process graph for software 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. Modeling those as typed entities 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.
- Calibrated confidence is required. A search box that returns ten documents is not the same as an answer that refuses to synthesize below threshold.
Side by side
Feature, architecture, and posture rows. Pricing is at /pricing.
| Axis | Pulse | Glean |
|---|---|---|
| Primary shape | Process graph: decisions, commitments, PR reviews, meetings as typed entities | Search index: documents and messages as retrievable 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 | First-class decision entities with rationale, owners, dependencies | Returned as document snippets |
| Agent actions | Drafts Slack DMs, Linear tickets, calendar invites; approval inbox; 5 minute undo | Read-only assistant by default |
| Calibrated confidence | 0 to 100 confidence per answer, per workspace, per topic; refuses below threshold | Relevance scoring; no calibrated abstention |
| Setup | 30 minute interview + OAuth + 2 to 6 hour backfill | Multi-week rollout with IT involvement |
| Pricing posture | Self-serve and transparent | 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 into the ResourceAcl table during sync, and every retrieval call gates through visibleDocumentIds. Glean syncs permissions per connector and applies them at search time. Both approaches are designed to honor source-tool access controls; the difference is that Pulse models decisions as first-class typed entities 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 stack connected in 10 more. The graph isn't cold on day one.