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Glean Platform vs IBM Watson Discovery comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Glean Platform
Ranking in Indexing and Search
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
Search as a Service (4th), AI Agent Builders (4th), AI Software Development (6th), AI Customer Support (5th)
IBM Watson Discovery
Ranking in Indexing and Search
10th
Average Rating
7.8
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Indexing and Search category, the mindshare of Glean Platform is 4.6%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Watson Discovery is 3.2%, down from 4.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Indexing and Search Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Glean Platform4.6%
IBM Watson Discovery3.2%
Other92.2%
Indexing and Search
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2810748 - PeerSpot reviewer
Analyst at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
Creating low-code agents has transformed policy queries and now saves employees hours daily
What I would like to see is an ease by which I can have different connectors set up. Right now I have to do a lot of back and forth in order to have these connectors enabled. Having them by default on the platform would be very helpful for me. Also, when developing custom actions, having a developer portal where users can track the log of how the requests are being sent to custom endpoints created would be helpful because right now I do not have anything of that nature. It is just a final response that I get and it becomes very difficult to keep track of what is happening in the backend. Also, the latency that the platform offers is a little high right now. What I have noticed is that on a particular query, the user has to wait a long time in order to get responses. If there is a way to reduce this time and improve performance by decreasing the time for responses, that would be very good. I believe that the latency offered is a little high right now. If I can get prompt responses quickly, then that would be a real user experience enhancement. Also, what I have noticed is the problem that developers face when creating custom actions in Glean Platform, where we are not able to keep track of what is happening in the backend. A logger of sorts would be very good so that I can maintain an idea of what is happening in the backend. If that issue is resolved, along with also the issue of having custom connectors available from the start rather than going to Glean Platform and having conversations about the thing, then it would be very good. If these issues are resolved, then it would be a strong 10 out of 10 from me. But as of now, it will be an 8 out of 10. Glean Platform is a very capable platform. It is good for indexing documents and reducing manual workflows by incorporating an element of AI in it. Business usage can be increased as well. The one caveat is if there are developers who are creating actions on Glean Platform, then I must keep an eye on the logging that I have for the platform because interacting with the backend systems becomes very difficult using Glean Platform. Also, what I have noticed is that it is a real challenge in terms of latency as some of the responses may take a little while to load. However, what I have noticed is that the responses are usually very accurate, and so it is a trade-off between speed and accuracy. This is what I would advise to someone who is looking at Glean Platform.
Geraldo Lima - PeerSpot reviewer
Sales Director at Kukac
Stable, scalable, and has testing and conversational AI features
The total time it takes to deploy IBM Watson Discovery depends on the documents you'll be working with. For example, I was in a situation where I was working with some painting files and folders for a painting store. The store had PDF documents, but the information was mixed up, so I had to treat the documents on IBM Watson Discovery, and discovering and understanding each PDF file took longer. The process is more straightforward for plain documents, and you have to work with questions that will help IBM Watson Discovery understand the documents. The time to deploy the product depends on the quantity and type of documents you'll be working with.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The best features Glean Platform offers include the ability to create my own agents, for example, I created a self-service agent for my stakeholders, so rather than email me, I sent them a link to an agent where the agent asks them questions and drills down to exactly what they need, and then I get a qualified response from them."
"Glean Platform offers excellent user interface design and integration capabilities with other platforms."
"When I searched for internal information spread across different systems, Glean Platform did centralize and retrieve that data for me effectively, giving me eighty percent accuracy."
"Glean Platform has positively impacted my organization by speeding up a lot of repetitive tasks and making it easier for people outside of support to understand what kind of issues impact the support groups."
"Glean Platform has positively impacted our organization, especially in terms of productivity for both us and our customers."
"I have used many solutions, but Glean Platform is the best, and I would truly appreciate it if everyone considers this platform."
"Since I have joined, I have built around ninety agents with Glean Platform, and it has saved our organization around twenty-seven hours a week for each user, and it has also positively impacted our ARR."
"Glean Platform has increased productivity by at least one hundred hours per week for my organization."
"The most valuable feature of IBM Watson Discovery is testing, mainly because the product applies conversational AI, which means I can ask questions to get the information I want from a specific test area."
"Being able to have some rules to extract the entities is valuable."
"Language support and the ability to build a natural language of speech recognition are the most valuable features."
"The most valuable features of IBM Watson Discovery are the integration with the rest of the Watson Suite and the Watson Assistant capability. If you use Watson Assistant, the ability for it to be able to determine the accuracy of your voice models and your voice response systems is a benefit."
"It has allowed us to provide longer service availability for support to users."
"Being able to have some rules to extract the entities is valuable. The capability to crawl external sites and internal documents, and then draw internal information with external contents is also valuable."
 

Cons

"Also, the latency that the platform offers is a little high right now; what I have noticed is that on a particular query, the user has to wait a long time in order to get responses."
"Currently, Glean Platform does not integrate with Teams, Microsoft-owned platforms."
"I tried pulling in an architecture diagram of a workflow, and it pulled in some other image instead."
"In workflow agents, I would prefer that we do not use AI in every step and instead we have a toggle button or something which can configure whether AI should be used in this specific search field or not, or in this specific node or not, because currently it's using AI in all nodes which sometimes messes up the output."
"My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Glean Platform reveals limited options, and I wish there was more customization available."
"I chose seven out of ten because if I could upload PDFs and have them analyzed, or have it integrate with my Gmail and help me go through my emails, that would be very useful, but I do not think it does that."
"Sometimes Glean Platform gets slowed down."
"My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that the licenses were expensive, and it was hard to convince the company to adopt based on that."
"The support from IBM Watson Discovery is good but could improve to make it great."
"IBM Watson Discovery has moved to a newer version and it is very difficult to train the newer version."
"There are probably other chatbots out there that were built for specific use cases and are easier to deploy than this. Having said that, Watson is way more flexible. While it may require a greater amount of effort, it is not substantially more than some of the other ones that are kind of prebuilt for a specific use case. It would be good to have more prebuilt and specific use cases and specific business models. It can have better phone integration, even though I think that it is actually becoming less of an issue. Most people are online nowadays."
"There are probably other chatbots out there that were built for specific use cases and are easier to deploy than this."
"It needs a lot of memory. Our index is very big. It is around 100 gigabytes. So, we need more than 100 gigabytes of memory to use Watson."
"The pricing is an area for improvement in IBM Watson Discovery because the customer initially used the free version. Still, when he needed more questions and documents, he had to move to a different version, which was paid and cost $500 per month. That change in pricing made my company lose many customers."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"Cost-wise, it is very reasonable because it is cloud-based."
"IBM Watson Discovery is an expensive product."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Outsourcing Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
8%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise9
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Glean Platform?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Glean Platform reveals limited options, and I wish there was more customization available.
What needs improvement with Glean Platform?
In workflow agents, I would prefer that we do not use AI in every step and instead we have a toggle button or something which can configure whether AI should be used in this specific search field o...
What is your primary use case for Glean Platform?
I use Glean Platform as an enterprise search tool and I am a power user of agents, so I mostly use this on a day-to-day basis for random searches that I need to do about a company, a website, or if...
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Also Known As

Glean Work AI Platform
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Prudential, Bradesco, Woodside
Find out what your peers are saying about Glean Platform vs. IBM Watson Discovery and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
916,771 professionals have used our research since 2012.