A recent Forrester Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study on Glean offers insight into the growing need for intelligent enterprise search platforms that unify knowledge and accelerate productivity. The Glean TEI report showcases an impressive Glean ROI of 141%, driven by reduced search time, faster onboarding, and less IT burden.
Yet, reading between the lines, the TEI findings also highlight real cost, complexity, and scalability tradeoffs. Below, we provide an enterprise search cost comparison and explain why GoSearch may be a stronger choice for organizations seeking simplicity, security, and value at scale.
Lower Total Cost of Ownership
The study calculated Glean’s three-year risk-adjusted present value costs at $11.03 million, driven primarily by:
- $10.5M in licensing fees for Glean’s fully managed SaaS product
- $415K in ongoing management requiring a full-time headcount
- $85K in integration and testing costs
This works out to $40+ per user per month, even with volume discounts. A self-hosted deployment drops the license to $35 per user per month but adds significant infrastructure and DevOps costs.
We broke it all down in this detailed Glean infrastructure cost analysis, showing that self-hosted deployments incur up to $30,000/month in hidden costs just to keep performance acceptable.
By contrast, GoSearch offers transparent, user-based pricing and flexible plans tailored for hybrid teams. It doesn’t require customers to hire a full-time owner just to manage the tool. With no-code connectors and minimal setup requirements, ongoing management typically takes hours — not headcount.
Faster Setup, Fewer Surprises
The TEI study notes that Glean’s implementation required custom connectors for two of eight data sources, with each custom integration taking a full month of testing and deployment. Although Glean offers connectors for popular tools, many enterprises depend on legacy or long-tail applications that demand costly customization.
GoSearch’s extensive integrations library is purpose-built for speed and flexibility, supporting intelligent search tools that include long-tail and internal systems. Our modular agentic framework lets companies spin up secure, context-aware workflows without the long tail of customization headaches. In many cases, customers are live within days, not weeks.
Enterprise-Grade Search, Without the Vendor Lock-In
While the Glean TEI report highlights strong security and access controls, Glean remains a closed ecosystem. It’s all-in-one architecture ties customers to a fixed pricing model, product roadmap, and proprietary technology stack, limiting flexibility over time.
GoSearch takes a different approach. As an open, customizable enterprise search platform, it gives teams complete control over their search workflows and intelligent search tools. Organizations can bring their own large language models (LLMs), integrate directly with internal APIs, and fine-tune how results are sourced, ranked, and displayed. This freedom enables businesses to avoid vendor lock-in while gaining an enterprise search solution that adapts to their needs, both today and in the future.
Productivity Gains Without Complexity
The Glean TEI report estimates employees save up to 110 hours per year from better search and generative AI, delivering $23.2 million in search productivity gains over three years.
GoSearch customers achieve comparable, and often faster, time-to-value thanks to AI agents and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines tailored to the way teams actually work. By optimizing workflows within an enterprise search platform built for flexibility, we eliminate unnecessary complexity from the adoption process.
And while Glean often requires significant behavior change to realize these gains, GoSearch integrates seamlessly with tools employees already use—Slack, SharePoint, Jira, or your own intranet—ensuring adoption is smooth, natural, and organization-wide.
The Glean TEI Report Shows the Value of Enterprise Search. GoSearch Simplifies It.
The Glean TEI report validates the importance of enterprise search in driving efficiency and measurable ROI. However, it also uncovers the limitations of traditional, closed platforms—higher costs, greater complexity, and less flexibility.
GoSearch delivers all the benefits of a modern, intelligent search platform—at a fraction of the cost. It includes advanced generative AI as standard and offers complete flexibility to fit your business.
Key Takeaways from the Glean TEI Report vs. GoSearch
The Glean TEI report proves that enterprise search can deliver major productivity gains and ROI—but it also shows the risks of closed, high-cost platforms. GoSearch offers a smarter, more adaptable alternative:
- Lower Total Cost of Ownership with transparent, user-based pricing
- Faster Deployment with no-code connectors and prebuilt integrations
- Advanced Generative AI Capabilities included at no extra cost
- No Infrastructure Overhead or Vendor Lock-In for maximum flexibility
- Designed for Seamless Adoption by integrating with tools employees already use
Don’t settle for high costs and limited flexibility. Discover how GoSearch can deliver higher ROI, faster results, and more control—schedule your personalized demo today.
Search across all your apps for instant AI answers with GoSearch
Schedule a demo
