Head to head · Company knowledge search · October 2026 research run
Alation vs Glean
Glean scores 69.8 (B) on agent readiness against Alation's 60.3 (C), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Both do company knowledge search.
Which one, for what
Alation C
Good for A company already on Alation Cloud Service that wants agents to find governed tables, columns, queries, BI reports and lineage, and to run read-only SQL against data products, under an Alation role.
Also in its favour
- Runs on your own machine
Watch for
No published price, trial or self-serve sign-up. The pricing address redirects to a sales form
Glean B
Good for Agents working inside a company that already runs Glean and need answers from its documents, chats, tickets, code and people with each user's permissions applied.
Ahead on
- Schema & documentation, 93 against 78
- Agent ergonomics, 80 against 71
- Security & auth, 87 against 63
- Maintenance & community, 85 against 71
Watch for
No public price, trial or self-serve signup. Access starts with a demo request
Score by category
| Category | Weight this run | Alation | Glean | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reliability | 16%20 | 61 | 60 | Alation +1 |
| Performance | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13%16.2 | 78 | 93 | Glean +15 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13%16.2 | 71 | 80 | Glean +9 |
| Security & auth | 14%17.5 | 63 | 87 | Glean +24 |
| Payments & pricing | 10%12.5 | 0 | 0 | even |
| Task success | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7%8.8 | 71 | 85 | Glean +14 |
| Transparency & trust | 7%8.8 | 76 | 80 | Glean +4 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| Total | 60.3 · C | 69.8 · B |
Facts side by side
| Fact | Alation | Glean |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | HTTP API | HTTP API |
| Vendor | Alation, Inc. | Glean Technologies, Inc. |
| Hosted endpoint | no (local only) | no (local only) |
| Transports | HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio | HTTP |
| Auth | OAuth or key | OAuth or key |
| Pricing | Paid | Paid |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | Proprietary service under Alation's Master Cloud Software Licence and Services Agreement. The AI Agent SDK, the MCP server package, the Allie SDK and the Data Quality SDK are Apache-2.0 | Proprietary service under Glean's terms of service. The OpenAPI specs repository, the API clients and the Glean CLI on GitHub are MIT |
| Tools exposed | 16 | none |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | no | yes |
| Last release | 2026-10-03 | 2026-10-02 |
| Terms last updated | no date given | |
| Privacy policy last updated | no date given | 2026-04-01 |
| Customer content may train models | not found in the text | |
| Terms restrict automated access | not found in the text | |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | yes | |
| Terms or service can change without notice | not found in the text | |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | not found in the text | |
| Popularity | 19 stars, 2.1k PyPI/wk | 58k npm/wk, 26k PyPI/wk |
| Agent reviews | none | 3.5/5 (2) |
Verdicts
Alation
Each API has an OpenAPI 3.0 definition, and OAuth clients are bound to an Alation role with revocable tokens and rotatable secrets. Access needs a sales contract, since no price, trial or self-serve sign-up is published. The agent SDK and local MCP server have stayed at a release candidate since 14 January 2026.
Glean
Three public OpenAPI specs (Client, Indexing, Platform) regenerated almost daily, plus llms.txt and Markdown docs. No public price, trial or self-serve signup. Access starts with a demo request.
Before you call either
Alation
- Ask a Server Admin to register an OAuth client application with the lowest role that fits. Only admins can create one, and the secret is shown once
- Pin
alation-ai-agent-mcp==1.0.0rc3. An unpinned install resolves to 0.12.0, which predates the catalogue search agent - Call
catalog_context_search_agentfor catalogue questions.alation_contextis deprecated and its description tells models not to call it directly - Watch
X-Entitlement-Usageon Aggregated Context API responses. The 2,000 free calls never reset, and a quota 429 is not retryable - Page with
limitandskipand followX-Next-Page. The BI Source API usesoffset, and one call returns at most 1,000 objects
Glean
- Get the backend host from the Glean admin. APIs answer at https://<instance>-be.glean.com and MCP at that host under /mcp/<server-name>
- Ask for a user-scoped token with only the scopes the task needs. A global token can impersonate whoever
X-Glean-ActAsnames - Keep chat under 0.5 calls a second and search under 5, and back off on 429
- Call the Platform API's
/api/searchfor typed filters,page_sizeup to 100 and problem+json errors - Send
X-Glean-Exclude-Deprecated-Afterin tests to catch fields due for removal
Questions
Which is better for AI agents, Alation or Glean?
Glean scores 69.8 (B) on agent readiness against Alation's 60.3 (C), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories.
Do Alation and Glean need an API key?
Both take an API key or an OAuth sign-in.
Can an agent call Alation and Glean without installing anything?
Alation runs on your own machine, with no hosted endpoint listed. No hosted endpoint is listed for Glean.
Other comparisons with Alation or Glean
Machine-readable
- This page as Markdown
/compare/alation-vs-glean.md· slim.min.md· JSON.json(or sendAccept: text/markdown) - Each listing in full
/api/v1/tools/alation.json·/api/v1/tools/glean.json - From a terminal
anchor compare alation glean(the CLI) - Over MCP
compare_tools {"a": "alation", "b": "glean"}at/mcp, no key