Exa vs Glean
Dive into the comparison of Exa vs Glean and discover which AI Search Engine tool stands out. We examine alternatives, upvotes, features, reviews, pricing, and beyond.
When comparing Exa and Glean, which one rises above the other?
When we compare Exa and Glean, two exceptional search engine tools powered by artificial intelligence, and place them side by side, several key similarities and differences come to light. The community has spoken, Glean leads with more upvotes. The number of upvotes for Glean stands at 7, and for Exa it's 6.
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Exa
What is Exa?
Exa is a search API built for AI agents, not traditional keyword search. The company indexes hundreds of billions of web pages and exposes search, page contents, deep research, and monitoring through a single API so developers can give agents live web context without building their own crawl stack.
The product spans several endpoints. Search returns ranked URLs with optional highlights that strip pages down to the tokens an LLM actually needs. Contents fetches full page text. Deep Search runs multi-step research with structured outputs and citations. Agent handles async list building and enrichment. Monitors watches the web on a schedule and pushes updates through webhooks.
Latency is configurable by search type, from sub-200ms instant mode to deep modes that take several seconds for harder queries. Category indexes cover companies, people, research papers, news, and more. Customers include Cursor, Cognition, HubSpot, OpenRouter, and Monday.com, with over 400,000 developers on the platform.
Glean
What is Glean?
Glean connects your company's apps, documents, and permissions into one enterprise search and Work AI platform. Employees ask questions in natural language, get answers grounded in Slack, Google Drive, Jira, Confluence, Salesforce, and hundreds of other sources, then automate follow-up work with assistants and agents. The system respects existing access controls so people only see what they are already allowed to view.
Generic AI chat tools send broad prompts to models without your org chart, ticket history, or doc permissions baked in. Glean indexes enterprise context once, maps relationships in an Enterprise Graph, and claims a 30% reduction in token usage compared with off-the-shelf MCP tools because less irrelevant text reaches the model. That matters when every department is spinning up agents on the same data.
IT, engineering, sales, support, and HR teams at companies like Booking.com, Zillow, and Samsung use Glean to find answers faster, build no-code agents, and cut internal support tickets. Deployment is demo-led: you request access through Glean's sales flow rather than self-serve signup.
Exa Upvotes
Glean Upvotes
Exa Top Features
One API covers search, page contents, deep research, agents, and scheduled web monitors
Search types from ~250ms instant to multi-step deep research with structured JSON outputs
Highlights extract only the relevant passages from a page, cutting token use by up to 90%
Category indexes span 50M+ companies, 1B+ people profiles, and 100M+ research papers
Python and JavaScript SDKs plus an MCP server for plugging search into agent frameworks
SOC 2 Type II certified with zero data retention and single sign-on for enterprise teams
Glean Top Features
275+ out-of-the-box connectors sync Slack, Google Drive, Jira, Confluence, GitHub, and Salesforce
Supports 35+ unique LLMs with flexible model choice across the platform
Glean claims 110 hours saved per user per year and 20% fewer internal support tickets
Permission-aware search inherits source-app access rules so users only see allowed content
SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, ISO 42001, HIPAA, and GDPR compliance badges listed on the homepage
Exa Category
- Search Engine
Glean Category
- Search Engine
Exa Pricing Type
- Freemium
Glean Pricing Type
- Paid