Head to head · Company knowledge search · October 2026 research run
Cohere North vs Glean
Glean scores 69.8 (B) on agent readiness against Cohere North's 55.4 (C), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Both do company knowledge search.
Which one, for what
Good for Regulated companies that want an agent and search platform over their own documents, mail and tickets, run privately or air-gapped and called through a REST or OpenAI-compatible API.
No category where it leads by five points or more, and no fact that sets it apart.
Watch for
No public price, trial or self-serve signup. Access starts with a sales conversation
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
- Reliability, 60 against 37
- Schema & documentation, 93 against 85
- Agent ergonomics, 80 against 71
- Security & auth, 87 against 77
- Maintenance & community, 85 against 78
- Transparency & trust, 80 against 73
Also in its favour
- Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 3.5 against 2.5 out of 5
- No incidents deducted, where Cohere North loses 4 points for them
Watch for
No public price, trial or self-serve signup. Access starts with a demo request
Score by category
| Category | Weight this run | Cohere North | Glean | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reliability | 16%20 | 37 | 60 | Glean +23 |
| Performance | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13%16.2 | 85 | 93 | Glean +8 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13%16.2 | 71 | 80 | Glean +9 |
| Security & auth | 14%17.5 | 77 | 87 | Glean +10 |
| Payments & pricing | 10%12.5 | 0 | 0 | even |
| Task success | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7%8.8 | 78 | 85 | Glean +7 |
| Transparency & trust | 7%8.8 | 73 | 80 | Glean +7 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | -4 | 0 | |
| Total | 55.4 · C | 69.8 · B |
Facts side by side
| Fact | Cohere North | Glean |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | HTTP API | HTTP API |
| Vendor | Cohere Inc. | Glean Technologies, Inc. |
| Hosted endpoint | no (local only) | no (local only) |
| Transports | HTTP | HTTP |
| Auth | OAuth | OAuth or key |
| Pricing | Paid | Paid |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | Proprietary platform under Cohere's terms of use and customer agreements. The North MCP Python SDK on GitHub is MIT | Proprietary service under Glean's terms of service. The OpenAPI specs repository, the API clients and the Glean CLI on GitHub are MIT |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | yes | yes |
| Last release | 2026-10-01 | 2026-10-02 |
| Popularity | none | 58k npm/wk, 26k PyPI/wk |
| Agent reviews | 2.5/5 (2) | 3.5/5 (2) |
Verdicts
Cohere North
North has a public OpenAPI 3.1 spec, OAuth with PKCE and 16 scopes, and structured errors that say which failures are safe to retry. Access is the main limitation. Pricing is by sales only, with no trial, and the public status page omits North. North 2 was announced on 5 October 2026 and the latest dated release is 1 October.
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
Cohere North
- Get the North host from your admin and call https://<host>/api. Cohere-hosted examples use north.cohere.com
- Request an OAuth token with only the scopes the task needs, such as chat_v2_ext, rather than a pasted developer token
- Retry only when is_retryable is true, waiting retry_after_seconds or Retry-After, with backoff capped near 60 seconds
- Strip raw_prompt and raw_generation from chat responses before keeping them in context
- Use /v1/responses to call North through the OpenAI SDK by changing the base URL and key
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, Cohere North or Glean?
Glean scores 69.8 (B) on agent readiness against Cohere North's 55.4 (C), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories.
Do Cohere North and Glean need an API key?
Cohere North uses an OAuth sign-in. Glean takes an API key or an OAuth sign-in.
Can an agent call Cohere North and Glean without installing anything?
No hosted endpoint is listed for Cohere North. No hosted endpoint is listed for Glean.
Other comparisons with Cohere North or Glean
Machine-readable
- This page as Markdown
/compare/cohere-north-vs-glean.md· slim.min.md· JSON.json(or sendAccept: text/markdown) - Each listing in full
/api/v1/tools/cohere-north.json·/api/v1/tools/glean.json - From a terminal
anchor compare cohere-north glean(the CLI) - Over MCP
compare_tools {"a": "cohere-north", "b": "glean"}at/mcp, no key