Productivity · Head-to-head
n8n vs Glean
n8n (freemium, AI Score 8.7/10) vs Glean (paid, AI Score 8.4/10). Side-by-side pricing, features, pros and cons, and which to pick.
The verdict
Pick n8n if…
- →you need a genuinely free option
- →budget is the constraint
- →your primary use case is developer-adjacent ops and engineering teams who want ai agents and internal integrations running on infrastructure they control, with server costs instead of a per-task meter.
- →you need: development
Pick Glean if…
- →your primary use case is enterprise it and knowledge-management leads at 1,000+ seat companies whose work is split across both google and microsoft plus slack, jira and salesforce, and who need search that respects existing permissions.
- →you need: research, support
Side-by-side specs
| Spec | n8n | Glean |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Productivity | Productivity |
| Pricing model | freemium | paid |
| Headline pricing | Free self-hosted + Cloud from ~$20/mo | Custom enterprise pricing — check website for current rates |
| Free tier | Community edition is free and self-hosted with unlimited workflows and executions; you pay only for the server. Cloud plans have a time-limited trial. Cloud tier prices and execution allowances change periodically — check n8n.io/pricing before quoting them. | — |
| AI Score | 8.7/10 | 8.4/10 |
| Best for | Developer-adjacent ops and engineering teams who want AI agents and internal integrations running on infrastructure they control, with server costs instead of a per-task meter. | Enterprise IT and knowledge-management leads at 1,000+ seat companies whose work is split across both Google and Microsoft plus Slack, Jira and Salesforce, and who need search that respects existing permissions. |
| Editor's pick | — | — |
| Use cases | productivity agents development | research productivity agents support |
| Date added | 2025-08-01 | 2026-05-01 |
Pros and cons
n8n
Productivity · freemium
Pros
- ✓Self-hosted community edition runs unlimited workflows and executions for infrastructure cost only, with no per-task meter
- ✓Model-agnostic AI nodes span OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, Groq and xAI plus local models via Ollama, so an agent can run with zero external API calls
- ✓MCP support works both ways — consume external MCP servers as agent tools, or expose a workflow as an MCP server to outside assistants
- ✓Code node runs JavaScript or Python inline, so a missing connector is solvable rather than blocking
- ✓Large public template library and an unusually active community, which shortens the path from idea to working workflow
Cons
- ×Fair-code, not open source — the Sustainable Use License bars offering it as a service, and SSO, RBAC, environments and log streaming are gated behind the enterprise license
- ×Running it seriously means queue mode with Redis and worker containers; the one-container Docker demo does not survive real agent load
- ×Cloud plans meter by execution, and an agent that retries and branches burns through an allowance far faster than the old two-step automations those tiers were sized for
- ×Steeper than Zapier or Make for non-developers — expression syntax and n8n's item-array data model are where most newcomers get stuck
Glean
Productivity · paid
Pros
- ✓Mirrors each source system's permissions per user, so answers can't surface documents the searcher lacks access to — the failure mode that sinks most in-house RAG projects
- ✓Genuinely broad connector library (100+) covering both the Google and Microsoft worlds, plus Slack, Atlassian, Salesforce and developer tooling
- ✓Model-agnostic: not locked to one lab's stack, with customer-hosted and BYO-model paths for regulated buyers
- ✓Agents can write back into source systems and speak MCP, so it functions as an action layer rather than only a question-answering surface
Cons
- ×No self-serve tier and no published pricing — every deployment routes through sales and an IT-led rollout
- ×Microsoft 365 Copilot and Google Gemini Enterprise now ship comparable grounded search bundled with suites most buyers already own, making Glean a second line item to justify
- ×Answer quality tracks source-data hygiene: stale wikis and over-shared drives produce confidently wrong answers, and cleanup is on you
- ×Value scales with how fragmented your stack is — a company living almost entirely inside one suite gets far less out of it
Related comparisons
Updated 2026-08-10. Spec data sourced from official product pages and tracked in our public directory at /tools.