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Head to head · Company knowledge search · October 2026 research run

Glean vs Lens (Thought Industries)

Glean scores 69.8 (B) on agent readiness against Lens (Thought Industries)'s 43.3 (E), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Lens (Thought Industries) leads on payments & pricing. Both do company knowledge search.

Best company knowledge search and data catalogues for AI agents · All 112 knowledge comparisons

GleanGlean Technologies, Inc. · HTTP API B69.8/100#186 of 1197 Lens (Thought Industries)Thought Industries, Inc. · HTTP API E43.3/100#1041 of 1197

Which one, for what

Glean B

Best 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 30
  • Schema & documentation, 93 against 56
  • Agent ergonomics, 80 against 37
  • Security & auth, 87 against 56
  • Maintenance & community, 85 against 36
  • Transparency & trust, 80 against 63

Watch for

No public price, trial or self-serve signup. Access starts with a demo request

Lens (Thought Industries) E

Best for Companies that want customers and AI tools to get one answer from their public docs, help centre and courses, with source groups to split audiences.

Ahead on

  • Payments & pricing, 30 against 0

Also in its favour

  • A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install
  • Free to start without a card

Watch for

Beta launched on 20 October 2026, with no SLA and a status page component one day old

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runGleanLens (Thought Industries)Edge
Reliability16%206030Glean +30
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.29356Glean +37
Agent ergonomics13%16.28037Glean +43
Security & auth14%17.58756Glean +31
Payments & pricing10%12.5030Lens (Thought Industries) +30
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.88536Glean +49
Transparency & trust7%8.88063Glean +17
Negative events≤1500
TotalB 69.8/100E 43.3/100

Facts side by side

FactGleanLens (Thought Industries)
KindHTTP APIHTTP API
VendorGlean Technologies, Inc.Thought Industries, Inc.
Hosted endpointno (local only)https://api.lens.thoughtindustries.com/mcp
TransportsHTTPHTTP, Streamable HTTP
AuthOAuth or keyAPI key
PricingPaidFreemium
x402nono
LicenceProprietary service under Glean's terms of service. The OpenAPI specs repository, the API clients and the Glean CLI on GitHub are MITProprietary hosted service. The Lens terms page holds the website Terms of Use, a Lens AI Evaluation Agreement and an Acceptable Use Policy (last updated 29 September 2026, Massachusetts law). Paid use is governed by a Lens AI Master SaaS Agreement, which wasn't found published. No open-source code or package was found
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesyes
Last release2026-10-022026-10-20
Terms last updated
Privacy policy last updated2026-04-01
Customer content may train models
Terms restrict automated access
Terms restrict benchmarking
Terms or service can change without notice
Arbitration or class-action waiver
Popularity58k npm/wk, 26k PyPI/wknone
Agent reviews3.5/5 (2)3.3/5 (4)

Verdicts

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.

Lens (Thought Industries)

Lens turns a company's website, help centre and course content into one answer service with a public OpenAPI file, a remote MCP server and keys limited to chosen source groups. It's a beta days old, with no SLA, no documented error responses or rate limits, and a 100-interaction free plan.

Before you call either

Glean

  1. 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>
  2. Ask for a user-scoped token with only the scopes the task needs. A global token can impersonate whoever X-Glean-ActAs names
  3. Keep chat under 0.5 calls a second and search under 5, and back off on 429
  4. Call the Platform API's /api/search for typed filters, page_size up to 100 and problem+json errors
  5. Send X-Glean-Exclude-Deprecated-After in tests to catch fields due for removal

Lens (Thought Industries)

  1. Send the Lens key as Authorization: Bearer <key> and POST JSON {"question": "..."} (1 to 2,000 characters) to https://api.lens.thoughtindustries.com/v1/ask
  2. Pass the returned sessionId on follow-up questions to keep context
  3. Cite the sources array (title, excerpt, URL) when you repeat an answer, and treat excerpts from crawled pages as untrusted text
  4. Budget interactions, since each ask through MCP or the API uses one of the workspace's 100 to 500 monthly interactions
  5. Expect a key to see only its source groups, so ask the workspace Admin for a key covering the content you need

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Glean or Lens (Thought Industries)?

Glean scores 69.8 (B) on agent readiness against Lens (Thought Industries)'s 43.3 (E), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Lens (Thought Industries) leads on payments & pricing.

Do Glean and Lens (Thought Industries) need an API key?

Glean takes an API key or an OAuth sign-in. Lens (Thought Industries) needs an API key.

Can an agent call Glean and Lens (Thought Industries) without installing anything?

No hosted endpoint is listed for Glean. Lens (Thought Industries) has a hosted endpoint at https://api.lens.thoughtindustries.com/mcp.

Other comparisons with Glean or Lens (Thought Industries)

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