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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
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
Search as a Service (4th), AI Agent Builders (4th), AI Software Development (10th), AI Customer Support (7th)
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 August 2026, in the Indexing and Search category, the mindshare of Glean Platform is 4.6%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Watson Discovery is 3.1%, down from 4.8% 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 Discovery3.1%
Other92.3%
Indexing and Search
 

Featured Reviews

Ananya Bl - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Analyst at Capgemini
Daily orchestration of complex ai workflows has boosted my research and automation capabilities
Orchestration primarily decides which agent handles which part of a task and manages errors, retries, and complete state while maintaining the workflow effectively. On the orchestration side, branching, looping, and human approvals support non-linear workflows in production environments with real-time access. Through refined and improved prompts, this helps in closing the loop with actual users. One unique feature that stood out is that every step in the workflow can pause or recover from failures. Instead of finishing the entire agent in one go, this approach is interesting because if there is a minor change in a previously completed step regarding the state, I can re-edit and restart from the beginning. This is truly impressive.
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

"Productivity has really skyrocketed."
"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 has positively impacted our organization, especially in terms of productivity for both us and our customers."
"The major impact that I have noticed is how business users are now being impacted and they are using the platform because they understand it easily."
"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."
"I have used many solutions, but Glean Platform is the best, and I would truly appreciate it if everyone considers this platform."
"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."
"Life became so easy when we started using Glean Platform."
"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

"Sometimes Glean Platform gets slowed down."
"Currently, Glean Platform does not integrate with Teams, Microsoft-owned platforms."
"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."
"Glean Platform can implement more models. The NLP creation could be a little faster, and while debugging is amazing, the routing also needs to provide higher quality outputs sometimes rather than extensive searching."
"My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Glean Platform reveals limited options, and I wish there was more customization available."
"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."
"There are multiple ways in which Glean Platform can be improved."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The support from IBM Watson Discovery is good but could improve to make it great."
"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
"IBM Watson Discovery is an expensive product."
"Cost-wise, it is very reasonable because it is cloud-based."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Outsourcing Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
6%
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: August 2026.
911,493 professionals have used our research since 2012.