Glean vs Moveworks

Glean and Moveworks now sell almost the same sentence (one AI assistant that searches and acts across more than 100 enterprise systems) and the fact that decides between them is not on either product page. It is on the cap table. ServiceNow completed its acquisition of Moveworks on 15 December 2025, and on 26 February 2026 Moveworks’ conversational AI and deep enterprise search became the front door of a ServiceNow product called EmployeeWorks, described in the announcement as “a conversational front door for the enterprise.” Glean is still independent, privately held at the $7.2 billion valuation it raised into in June 2025, and it spent the same twelve months buying rather than being bought. If you already run ServiceNow, that is the best news in this comparison. If you do not, it is the reason to read the rest of it.

The two products are built on different primitives, and it shows in what each is good at. Glean’s primitive is the index: a permission-aware search layer over more than 100 connected systems, which the company describes on its own home page as “the Work AI platform connected to your enterprise’s data,” with an assistant and an agent builder sitting on top. Retrieval is the product; the agents are the application. Moveworks’ primitive is resolution: its AI Assistant is built to close an employee’s IT, HR, finance or sales request end to end, routed through what Moveworks calls its Reasoning Engine, with enterprise search as one component beside Agent Studio, Knowledge Studio and an AI Agent Marketplace. Read live on 2026-08-17, Moveworks frames the job as “Search and action in one” and gives as its IT example “Resolve issues, reset access, and provision tools automatically.” Glean frames the job as “Find, create, and automate anything.” Both sentences are true, and they are not the same sentence.

What each vendor chooses to publish as proof reveals which problem it actually solves. Moveworks publishes deflection: Amadeus reducing calls to its support teams by 44% and giving back more than 16,000 hours a month globally, and CVS Health cutting live agent chats by 50% in under 30 days. Those are ticket-volume numbers, and they are the numbers a service-desk owner is judged on. Glean publishes reach and scale: more than 100 million agent actions a year and over 850 employees as of its Series F announcement, with Booking.com, Zillow, Ericsson and TIME named as customers. Neither set is better than the other and they are not comparable, because they answer to different buyers. Moveworks is measured by requests that never reached a human; Glean is measured by knowledge that was findable at all.

On models the two take opposite positions, and this is the difference most likely to matter three years from now. Glean is deliberately model-agnostic: administrators enable and switch between GPT, Claude and Gemini models from an admin console, and Glean supplies the retrieval and knowledge-graph layer underneath rather than the model itself. Moveworks runs a multi-model backend of proprietary and open-source models that it does not disclose individually, orchestrated by its own Reasoning Engine. That is a legitimate engineering choice rather than a failing (a backend nobody outside the company depends on is one Moveworks can upgrade without asking permission), but it is the opposite of a control you can exercise. If your security review asks which model saw which document, Glean answers that from a console and Moveworks answers it from a relationship.

The ownership difference deserves stating precisely and in both directions, because it is easy to overstate. Moveworks’ own press release is explicit that the product survives the deal: “Moveworks continues to be offered as a standalone product within the ServiceNow portfolio. Organizations can acquire the Moveworks platform as an independent AI solution or as an integrated component of their ServiceNow deployment.” That is a commitment published by the vendor and a buyer is entitled to hold them to it. What it does not say is who sets the roadmap, and the February 2026 announcement answers that by folding Moveworks’ conversational AI and enterprise search into EmployeeWorks alongside ServiceNow’s own portal and workflows. ServiceNow also disclosed 250 mutual customers already using both technologies at the time the deal closed, which is the single strongest argument for Moveworks if you happen to be one of them. Glean went the other way in the same window: on 11 March 2026 it acquired Aryn, a document-intelligence company, to extend its index out of SaaS applications and into PDFs and contracts. Aryn’s cloud service and APIs stayed up until 15 April 2026, and its Sycamore open-source project remains under Apache License v2.0.

Neither company publishes a price. Glean's pricing page and Moveworks' site, both read on 2026-08-17, name no tier or per-seat figure; every call to action is a demo request. Vendr's tracked Glean purchases provide a third-party contract anchor, while Moveworks is described as headcount-based and has an AWS Marketplace band priced per user. Those are procurement signals, not vendor rate cards, so an actual comparison still requires matched quotes for the same employee population and scope.