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Glean vs Notion Labs, Inc.: Strategic Comparison

Direct Answer

Notion is an all-in-one workspace tool used to actively write documents, build wikis, and organize projects in a structured way. Glean is an enterprise AI search engine that plugs into your existing messy apps (Slack, Drive, Jira) and uses AI to instantly find and summarize internal company data.

Glean and Notion both solve the worst problem in corporate America: 'Where is that document?' But they solve it from opposite directions. Notion ($10B+ valuation) is the *creator*. Notion wants you to stop using Google Docs and messy folders. Notion is a beautiful, deeply organized wiki; if everyone writes their project specs natively inside Notion, the company's brain is organized. Glean ($2.2B+ valuation) accepts reality. Glean knows that your company is a mess—you have files in Jira, Slack, Google Drive, and Salesforce. Glean is Google Search for your company. You ask Glean, 'What is our Q3 roadmap?' and Glean's AI instantly scans all 50 of your company's messy apps to generate the perfect answer.

Editorial research by Swet Parvadiya. Figures keep each company's fiscal year; amounts reported in another currency are shown in US dollars at an approximate rate and marked with ~. Sources are listed below.

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Key Differences at a Glance

FieldGleanNotion Labs, Inc.
Latest annual revenueN/AN/A
Founded20192013
Employees1,0001,000
Market CapN/AN/A
HeadquartersUnited StatesUnited States
Revenue / EmployeeN/AN/A
Valuation MultipleN/AN/A

Strategic Positioning

Business model and competitive context from the cited profiles

Glean Strategic Vector

Glean's growth comes from expanding inside large enterprises (moving from a single department to company-wide deployments), international expansion across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, and selling agents and model usage on top of search seats.

Notion Labs, Inc. Strategic Vector

Notion's shift from a $10 AI add-on to bundling AI in its $20 Business plan in 2025 turned AI from an optional upsell into the main reason to upgrade, and CNBC reports half of Business and Enterprise customers now pay for AI features.

Comparative Divergence: Notion recently launched 'Notion Q&A' (an AI search feature) to directly compete with Glean, allowing users to ask questions about their Notion workspace. However, Glean maintains a large advantage because it deeply indexes dozens of *other* enterprise apps, not just Notion.

Glean vs Notion Labs, Inc. Market Share

Notion Labs, Inc. market share
Notion does not disclose market share, and no reliable independent share figure exists for the all-in-one workspace category. Scale indicators include 100 million+ users and use at more than half of Fortune 500 companies (CNBC, 2026).

Quick Stats Comparison

MetricGleanNotion Labs, Inc.
RevenueN/AN/A
Founded20192013
HeadquartersPalo Alto, California, United StatesSan Francisco, California, United States
Market CapN/AN/A
Employees1,0001,000
Revenue / EmployeeN/AN/A
Valuation MultipleN/AN/A

Glean Revenue vs Notion Labs, Inc. Revenue — Year by Year

YearGleanNotion Labs, Inc.Higher reported revenue

Business Model Breakdown

Overview: Glean vs Notion Labs, Inc.

This in-depth comparison examines Glean and Notion Labs, Inc. across revenue, market value, business model, competitive positioning, and long-term growth strategy. Whether you are researching Glean on its own, evaluating Notion Labs, Inc., or weighing the two companies side by side, the breakdown below highlights where each company leads and where the gap between Glean and Notion Labs, Inc. is widest.

On the headline numbers, annual revenue is N/A for Glean and N/A for Notion Labs, Inc., while their respective market capitalizations stand at N/A and N/A. Both Glean and Notion Labs, Inc. are headquartered in United States. Their local markets and applicable rules may still differ.

Glean: Glean is often described as "Google for the enterprise." Employees at large companies spread knowledge across chat, documents, tickets, CRM records and code. Glean connects to those systems, keeps an index that respects each source's permissions, and lets people search, ask questions in natural language, or hand off tasks to AI agents. It has grown from a search product launched in 2021 into a broader Work AI platform used by companies such as Databricks, Reddit, Pinterest and Samsung. The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, California.

Notion Labs, Inc.: Notion is a connected workspace where pages, databases and wikis are built from interchangeable blocks. A team can keep its handbook, product roadmap, meeting notes and project tracker in one place, link them with relational databases, and now ask AI agents to search, summarize or update them. Starting with students, startups and creators, Notion has grown into a tool used by companies such as OpenAI and Cursor. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California. Notion was founded in 2013 in San Francisco, California, by Ivan Zhao and Simon Last; after a complete codebase rewrite while living in Kyoto, Japan, they relaunched Notion 2.0 to create the iconic all-in-one connected workspace used by over 100 million people worldwide.

Business Models: How Glean and Notion Labs, Inc. Make Money

Glean and Notion Labs, Inc. pursue distinct approaches to generating revenue, and understanding how each company operates is the foundation of any fair comparison between Glean and Notion Labs, Inc..

Glean business model: Glean sells enterprise software to large companies, usually through IT and CIO organizations, on multi-year contracts. According to CEO Arvind Jain (TechCrunch, May 2026), customers can choose a consumption-based model that charges per use, or a hybrid model that combines a fixed monthly fee per active user with separate usage fees for AI model consumption. Revenue therefore grows with seat expansion inside existing accounts and with how heavily employees and agents query the platform. Because part of the top line is usage-based, TechCrunch noted that some of Glean's reported $300 million is closer to an annualized run rate than classic subscription ARR.

Notion Labs, Inc. business model: Notion uses a freemium subscription model. Individuals can use a Free plan; teams pay per member per month for Plus (about $10 billed annually), Business (about $20, which since May 2025 includes full Notion AI such as agents, AI Meeting Notes and Enterprise Search) or custom-priced Enterprise contracts with SSO, audit logs and admin controls. Revenue grows as free users bring Notion into their employers and teams upgrade to higher tiers. The former standalone Notion AI add-on was retired for new buyers in 2025 when AI moved into the Business plan.

Competitive Advantage: Glean vs Notion Labs, Inc.

The durability of a company's moat often decides long-term winners. Here is how the competitive advantages of Glean stack up against those of Notion Labs, Inc..

Glean competitive advantage: Glean's main advantages are neutrality and depth of integration. It indexes Microsoft, Google, Slack, Atlassian, Salesforce and other systems into one enterprise graph, while suite vendors have little incentive to index rivals' data. Its permission model mirrors source-system access controls so that search results, assistant answers and agent actions only use content a user can already see. Jain also argues that grounding AI in Glean's context graph lets models answer with fewer operations, which cuts customers' token bills.

Notion Labs, Inc. competitive advantage: Notion's edge is a flexible block-and-database model that lets non-engineers build their own wikis, trackers and lightweight apps, plus a large creator and template community that drives organic sign-ups. Bottom-up adoption means many enterprise deals start with employees who already use Notion personally. Bundling AI agents, email, calendar and meeting notes into one workspace raises switching costs as more work lives inside Notion.

Growth Strategy: Where Glean and Notion Labs, Inc. Are Headed

Future prospects matter as much as current results. The growth strategies below explain how Glean and Notion Labs, Inc. each plan to expand from here.

Glean growth strategy: Glean's growth comes from expanding inside large enterprises (moving from a single department to company-wide deployments), international expansion across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, and selling agents and model usage on top of search seats. It is also expanding its sales footprint, including a Nashville, Tennessee sales office announced in April 2026, and launched the Work AI Institute in late 2025 with researchers from Stanford and Harvard to publish guidance on enterprise AI adoption.

Notion Labs, Inc. growth strategy: Notion's growth plan has three parts: move AI into higher-priced plans (full Notion AI now sits in Business and Enterprise), expand the workspace into adjacent apps (Notion Calendar, Notion Mail, Sites, Forms, AI meeting notes), and sell upmarket to large enterprises with connectors to Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Gmail and Slack plus Enterprise Search across those tools.

Financial Picture: Glean vs Notion Labs, Inc.

A closer look at the financial trajectory of Glean and Notion Labs, Inc. rounds out the comparison.

Glean: Glean does not publish audited financials, so figures come from company announcements and press. It said it passed $100 million in ARR in its fiscal year ended January 31, 2025, doubled to $200 million by December 2025, and reached $300 million in May 2026, roughly tripling in 15 months. Funding milestones: a $100 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation (May 2022), more than $200 million in Series D at $2.2 billion (February 2024), $260 million in Series E at $4.6 billion co-led by Altimeter and DST Global (September 2024), and $150 million in Series F at $7.2 billion led by Wellington Management (June 2025). Profitability has not been disclosed.

Notion Labs, Inc.: Notion does not publish audited financials. Its key disclosed figure is annualized revenue of more than $500 million, stated to CNBC in September 2025 alongside the launch of Notion AI agents. CNBC later reported that half of Notion's Business and Enterprise customers pay for AI features, up from 10-20% a year earlier. Notion has raised roughly $330 million in total, most of it the $275 million Series C at a $10 billion valuation in October 2021, and has since used secondary tender offers rather than new primary rounds; the latest, at an $11 billion valuation, gave employees and early investors liquidity. Third-party estimates (e.g. Sacra) put 2026 ARR well above $500 million, but these are not company-confirmed.

Company-Specific SWOT Notes

Glean

Strength

Connects securely across 100+ enterprise SaaS tools (Slack, Jira, Google Drive, Microsoft 365, GitHub), understanding workplace context and organizational permissions to deliver accurate search.

Strength

Unlike basic search tools, Glean inherently respects incredibly strict corporate permissions, ensuring employees cannot accidentally search and view highly confidential HR or financial documents.

Weakness

Maintaining real-time vector embedding updates and generative AI inference across petabytes of corporate communications requires significant cloud infrastructure expenditure.

Weakness

Because Glean requires deep, read-only access to every single piece of data a corporation owns, the sales cycle requires massive, highly complex security audits before deployment.

Opportunity

Capitalizing on corporate demand to replace generic LLMs with enterprise-grounded generative AI assistants capable of automating multi-step administrative workflows.

Threat

Microsoft embedding Copilot deeply into Microsoft 365 and Google embedding Gemini into Google Workspace, discouraging CIOs from purchasing standalone third-party enterprise search.

Notion Labs, Inc.

Strength

A large worldwide ecosystem of template creators and influencers drives viral top-of-funnel customer acquisition with near-zero marketing spend.

Strength

Notion reached $500M+ annualized revenue with about 1,000 employees and no primary funding raised since 2021.

Weakness

While simple notes are intuitive, setting up complex multi-table relational databases and rollups can overwhelm non-technical enterprise users.

Weakness

Agents, mail, calendar and workflow features risk diluting the simplicity that made Notion popular, as CNBC has noted.

Opportunity

Displacing legacy Atlassian Confluence and SharePoint across large enterprise IT departments unlocks multi-million-dollar software contracts.

Threat

Microsoft Loop and Copilot in Microsoft 365, and Gemini in Google Workspace, come with suites enterprises already pay for.

Factual Scorecard

CategoryResultWhy
Same-period Revenue ScaleNot comparableGlean: N/A. Notion Labs, Inc.: N/A. Different or missing fiscal periods prevent a like-for-like ranking.
Founded EarlierNotion Labs, Inc.Glean was founded in 2019; Notion Labs, Inc. was founded in 2013.
Verdict

Comparison Takeaway: Glean vs Notion Labs, Inc.

They are complementary. Notion wins on organized creation. A startup should build its core 'Employee Onboarding' wiki in Notion because it is beautiful and structured. Glean wins on chaotic retrieval. A 5,000-person enterprise cannot force everyone to use Notion perfectly; they buy Glean because it acts as a magical AI layer that finds the data no matter what random app an employee hid the file in.

Methodology and sourcing reviewed by Swet Parvadiya. No date is shown unless this comparison has its own editorial review date.

Frequently Asked Questions: Glean vs Notion Labs, Inc.

Does Glean replace Notion?

No. Glean is not a place to write documents. You still need Notion (or Google Docs/Confluence) to actually write the project brief. Glean just makes sure nobody ever loses that brief again.

How does Glean handle security permissions?

This is Glean's large technical moat. If a low-level employee asks Glean 'What are the CEO's salaries?', Glean won't answer. Glean deeply mirrors the security permissions of your Google Drive and Slack, ensuring the AI only reads documents the employee already has legal access to.

What is Notion Q&A?

It is Notion's newest AI feature. Instead of using the search bar, you can ask Notion 'What is our policy on remote work?' and the AI will read your entire Notion wiki and type out a perfect paragraph summarizing the policy.

Why is Glean valued over $2 Billion?

Because Enterprise Search has historically been terrible. CIOs happily pay Glean large amounts of money because the amount of time paid software engineers waste just looking for a Jira ticket is astronomically expensive.

Can Glean search inside Notion?

Yes! Glean integrates with over 100 enterprise apps, including Notion. So if a company uses Notion for wikis and Slack for chat, Glean will search both simultaneously to find the answer.

Which company was founded first, Glean or Notion Labs, Inc.?

Notion Labs, Inc. was founded in 2013; Glean was founded in 2019.

What revenue did Glean and Notion Labs, Inc. report?

Comparable verified revenue rows are unavailable for Glean and Notion Labs, Inc..

How do Glean and Notion Labs, Inc. make money?

Glean: Glean sells enterprise software to large companies, usually through IT and CIO organizations, on multi-year contracts. Notion Labs, Inc.: Notion uses a freemium subscription model.

Which is better, Glean or Notion Labs, Inc.?

There is no evidence-based single winner. Compare Glean and Notion Labs, Inc. on the same fiscal period and the metric relevant to the question, such as revenue, profitability, growth, product fit, or market value.

Sources & References

Quick Answer

Notion is an all-in-one workspace tool used to actively write documents, build wikis, and organize projects in a structured way. Glean is an enterprise AI search engine that plugs into your existing messy apps (Slack, Drive, Jira) and uses AI to instantly find and summarize internal company data.

Verdict

They are complementary. Notion wins on organized creation. A startup should build its core 'Employee Onboarding' wiki in Notion because it is beautiful and structured. Glean wins on chaotic retrieval. A 5,000-person enterprise cannot force everyone to use Notion perfectly; they buy Glean because it acts as a magical AI layer that finds the data no matter what random app an employee hid the file in.

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Content is for informational purposes only. Not financial advice. Data sourced from SEC filings, annual reports, and public records. See our full disclaimer and methodology.