You operate everything
Docker Compose, Kubernetes, or Helm in your VPC, data center, or disconnected network. Deploy it, patch it, modify it. No vendor access required for it to run.
Comparison
KnowWiz vs Glean: an honest comparison.
Glean is an excellent managed enterprise search product. KnowWiz is a different architecture for a different constraint: deployments you operate yourself, including air-gapped, with sensitive values tokenized in the pipeline. This page is about which constraint you have.
Architecture, not features
The difference is who operates it.
| KnowWiz | Glean Hosted (SaaS) | Glean Customer-Hosted | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Runs inside your cloud account | Yes | No | Yes |
| Operated by your team, not the vendor | Yes | No | No |
| You can deploy, patch, and modify the stack | Yes | No | No |
| Works fully disconnected (air-gapped) | Yes | No | No |
| Fully managed for you, zero ops | No | Yes | Yes |
| Mature product at enterprise scale | Early; design partners | Yes | Yes |
The honest split
Choose by constraint, not by feature list.
Per Glean's own documentation, its Customer-Hosted model deploys an isolated tenant in your cloud environment (GCP or AWS, per its documentation), run by Glean as a managed service and kept current alongside its SaaS fleet. Customers do not deploy, patch, or alter the stack. That is a strength if you want zero operations, and a blocker if your policy requires operator control.
2
Different answers to one question.
Who operates the system that indexes your company's knowledge: the vendor, or you?
Choose Glean if
You want managed, and your data can live with that
You want enterprise search as a service, your compliance posture allows a vendor-operated tenant (in their cloud or yours), and you value zero operational load over control of the stack.
Choose KnowWiz if
The system must be yours
Your documents cannot sit in a vendor-operated system, you need air-gapped or sovereign deployment, you want to choose and self-host the models, and you want sensitive values tokenized before they reach the index or a model.
What KnowWiz adds
Built for the constraint Glean does not serve.
Sensitive values tokenized
Detection and format-preserving tokenization before a document enters the index and before a prompt reaches a model, covering regional identifiers like Aadhaar, PAN, IFSC, and Gulf national IDs. Raw values never sit in the index.
Your models, including local ones
Anthropic, OpenAI, or Gemini if you want hosted models; Ollama or vLLM inside your network if nothing may leave. Swap without re-indexing.
Citations on every answer
Hybrid retrieval with agentic search, and every claim links back to the source document, so answers are verifiable against your own content.
Common questions
KnowWiz and Glean, asked directly.
Statements about Glean on this page are drawn from Glean's public documentation as of July 2026. If we have anything wrong, email hello@knowwiz.ai and we will correct it the same day.
For a specific buyer, yes. If your requirement is enterprise AI search that your own team deploys and operates, including fully air-gapped, KnowWiz is built for exactly that. If you want a fully managed service and your data can live in a vendor-operated tenant, Glean is a strong product and may be the better choice.
Glean's Customer-Hosted model does deploy an isolated tenant inside your cloud environment (GCP or AWS, per its documentation), which provides data-residency guarantees. Per Glean's documentation, that tenant is still operated by Glean as a managed service, and customers do not manually deploy, patch, or alter the architecture. KnowWiz is the opposite trade: your team operates the whole stack, with no vendor access in the loop.
Glean's published deployment models are its hosted SaaS and the Glean-operated Customer-Hosted tenant, both of which involve Glean operating the service. A fully disconnected deployment is not one of its published options. KnowWiz runs air-gapped with self-hosted models, with no outbound calls required.
No. Glean is an established product with a large team and enterprise customer base. KnowWiz is early and works with design partners, which is exactly why early customers get direct access to the founding team, same-week fixes, and founding-customer terms. If maturity is your primary criterion, we would rather tell you that plainly than argue it.
Glean publishes its own pricing motion; we will not characterize it here. KnowWiz is priced per seat through a conversation, with pilots that run on your own infrastructure. Because it is self-hosted, you also control the model bill: bring your own API keys or run local models on your own hardware.
Evaluate on your terms
The comparison that matters is on your documents.
KnowWiz is self-hosted, so you can run the evaluation yourself: deploy it, connect a source, and judge the answers. Or book a working session and we will help you stand up a pilot.
Glean statements sourced from docs.glean.com, July 2026. Glean is a trademark of Glean Technologies, Inc.; KnowWiz is not affiliated with or endorsed by Glean.