Glean vs Raycast

Glean is an enterprise work AI platform that indexes a company's apps, documents and conversations and lets employees search, ask questions and run agents over that knowledge. It was founded in 2019 in Palo Alto by former Google search engineer Arvind Jain, who previously co-founded Rubrik, and it raised a $150 million Series F at a $7.2 billion valuation in June 2025.

The platform has three layers: Glean Search, a ranked enterprise search; Glean Assistant, a chat assistant grounded in company data; and Glean Agents, which automate multi-step work from natural-language instructions. Underneath sit 275+ connectors, an Enterprise Graph that maps people, content and activity, and permission enforcement that mirrors each source system in near real time. It also offers APIs and MCP support. Pricing is not published; it is sold per seat through sales, with demos instead of a self-serve trial.

Glean fits large organizations with knowledge scattered across Slack, Google Drive, Confluence, Jira, Salesforce and code hosts. It is overkill and likely too costly for small companies, and results depend on clean permissions in source systems. Microsoft 365 Copilot is the natural rival for Microsoft-centric firms, ChatGPT Enterprise offers broader general AI with connectors, and Notion AI covers search well if Notion is already your wiki.

Glean announced in December 2025 that its annual recurring revenue had passed $200 million, doubling in nine months. When evaluating, run a pilot on your messiest knowledge sources and test permission boundaries with a few restricted documents.

Raycast is an extensible launcher and productivity tool built by Raycast Technologies, a London-based company. On the Mac it replaces Spotlight with a keyboard-driven command bar that launches apps and files, and it bundles many small utilities that power users usually install separately: clipboard history, text snippets, window management, a calculator and unit converter, calendar, quicklinks, emoji search and system commands. An iOS app arrived in 2025, and a Windows version entered public beta in November 2025.

Its store offers thousands of community extensions built with React and TypeScript, covering tools such as GitHub, Linear, Jira, Slack, Notion, Spotify and cloud consoles, so many tasks can be done without opening the app itself. The free plan covers the launcher, extensions, clipboard history, snippets and window management. Pro adds Raycast AI with monthly AI credits, chat, AI commands, cloud sync, custom themes and unlimited notes, Pro+ and Max add advanced frontier models and more credits, and team plans let companies share extensions, snippets and quicklinks.

Raycast fits developers and Mac power users who live on the keyboard and want to remove friction from dozens of daily actions. It is Mac-first, with the Windows version still catching up, AI features require a subscription, some extensions depend on third-party APIs, and getting the most out of it takes setup. Alfred is the long-standing paid alternative, Spotlight has improved in recent macOS versions, and PowerToys Run covers basic launching on Windows.