Cost & comparisons for governed AI knowledge platforms

This guide was meant to be a side-by-side cost table. It is mostly not one, because building an honest version turned out to be impossible, and the reason why is more useful to a buyer than a table of estimates would have been.

In September 2026 we checked eleven knowledge and enterprise-search platforms against each vendor's own pricing page. Five of them publish no price at all, and a sixth publishes figures that would not render. Among the tools a Guru or Glean buyer would realistically shortlist, published per-seat pricing is now the exception rather than the norm.

So this guide does three things instead. It states what AnswerVault costs, with the arithmetic shown. It sets out the cost components that decide the real number and are usually absent from a first quote. And it says plainly which competitor figures we could verify and which we could not.

01Why the comparison you want is hard to build

Enterprise software pricing has been drifting behind sales calls for years, but this category has moved quickly. Guru published per-seat rates until 2026 and has since withdrawn them; its pricing page now describes an investment tailored to organisational scale, knowledge complexity and AI maturity, and directs buyers to a conversation. Glean has never published list pricing. Neither offers self-serve signup.

That is a commercial choice, and there are reasonable arguments for it when deployments genuinely vary. But it has a specific consequence for you: you cannot compare on price until you have been through a sales cycle with each vendor, and running three parallel sales cycles to get three numbers is itself a project cost.

It also means that any comparison article quoting a confident per-seat figure for these vendors is repeating a number from somewhere else, usually a customer quote reported months or years ago. Those numbers may be broadly right. They are not published prices, and a procurement paper should not present them as though they were.

02What AnswerVault costs at 50, 200 and 1,000 users

Published rates, with the multiplication shown so you can check it. Pro is £7 per user per month with a five-user minimum; Business is £14 per user per month with a ten-user minimum and adds SSO and SAML, API access, data residency and per-query audit trails.

Two things to be clear about. All plans are billed monthly; annual billing at a discounted rate is on the roadmap and is not available today, so the annual column is twelve monthly payments and carries no discount. And Enterprise is quoted on application, with a twelve-month minimum term, because it is a bespoke deployment. We are not going to publish a number for it, and by the standard set in section 01 we should say so rather than imply the whole range is published.

There is also a free Starter tier, single user, which exists so you can test against your own documents before any of the above becomes relevant. Current pricing is published in full.

03The line items that are not on the quote

Per-seat rate is the number everyone compares and rarely the number that decides. Four others usually matter more.

The seat minimum. This sets your floor regardless of how many people actually use the product. A platform with a 100-seat minimum costs a 40-person organisation the same as a 100-person one, which changes the effective per-user rate by two and a half times. Ask for the minimum before the rate.

The commitment term. A monthly rolling contract and a three-year commitment at the same headline rate are not the same purchase. The second is a bet on a product you have not used at scale yet, and the exit cost of being wrong is the remainder of the term.

Implementation and onboarding. Deep-connector platforms often carry a professional services line for connector provisioning, permission mapping and user onboarding. It may be justified, and at large scale that work is real. It should still appear in your model, and it frequently does not appear in a first quote.

Whether AI usage is metered. This is the one that has changed most recently. Some platforms include AI in the seat price; others meter it separately through credits or usage-based billing, which means your cost varies with adoption and is hard to forecast in year one. Microsoft, for example, restructured Copilot licensing during 2026 across several plan types with usage-based credits alongside them, so the applicable rate depends on your existing agreement rather than on a single list price. AnswerVault includes AI in every plan with no separate per-query charge.

A fifth, which matters more than it should: exit cost. If the knowledge lives in the vendor's system rather than in your own document sources, leaving means extracting and re-homing it. A platform that indexes documents where they already live has a materially lower exit cost than one that becomes the system of record, because your documents never moved.

04What we could and could not verify

Checked against each vendor's own pricing page on 24 September 2026. This is a snapshot with a date on it, not a permanent fact.

Figures circulating for Glean, commonly £40 to £50 or more per user with a seat minimum around 100, come from reported customer quotes rather than from Glean. They may be accurate. They are not verifiable, and this guide will not present them as though they were. The full eleven-vendor check, including the smaller wiki tools that do still publish, is in our Guru alternatives comparison.

05Five questions that get you a comparable number

If you have to run a sales cycle to get a price, these five questions make the resulting numbers comparable to each other.

1. What is the seat minimum, and what is the rate at exactly our headcount? Not the rate at the tier we would grow into.
2. What is the shortest commitment term you will contract on, and what is the rate at that term? The gap between that and the three-year rate is the price of your optionality.
3. What professional services are required before first value, and what do they cost? Required, not recommended.
4. Is AI usage included in the seat rate, or metered? If metered, ask for the unit and a worked example at our expected volume.
5. If we leave in eighteen months, what do we take with us and what does extraction cost? The answer tells you whether you are buying a layer or a system of record.

Cost is rarely the deciding factor in this category, and it should not be. But it is the factor most often compared badly, and a number that is not like-for-like is worse than no number, because it carries false confidence into a decision.

Next

If jurisdiction shapes your shortlist before price does, read the sovereignty guide. For what a vendor's compliance claims are actually worth, see compliance and assurance. For the vendor-by-vendor detail behind the table above, see our comparison pages.

AnswerVault's Starter tier is free. Connect a document source and see how governed knowledge search works.