Seminal AI
§6

Managed RAG and enterprise search platforms

These are the products you buy instead of assembling a parser, an embedding model, a vector store, a reranker and a connector fleet yourself. They split into three shapes that are frequently confused: developer retrieval APIs you call from your own app (Vectara, Contextual AI, Ragie, LlamaCloud, Bedrock Knowledge Bases), end-user work assistants with a search and chat UI already built (Glean, Gemini Enterprise, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Onyx, Dashworks), and hyperscaler index services that sit halfway between (Azure AI Search, Google Agent Search).

Data checked 2026-09-06

The thing you are actually paying for in the second and third groups is rarely retrieval quality — it is the fleet of connectors to Google Drive, Slack, Confluence, SharePoint, Jira and Salesforce, and the ACL synchronisation that stops an employee retrieving a document they cannot open. That ACL layer is the single most underestimated part of a build, and the main honest reason to buy. This category moves fast: three of the products below were renamed or acquired in the last twelve months.

A How to choose

Start with who consumes the output. If it is employees typing questions into a box, you are buying a seat-priced assistant and connector coverage is the whole product; if it is your own application code, you are buying a retrieval API and the connector list is mostly irrelevant. The second axis is where your content already lives: whoever owns the corpus usually wins on connector fidelity and permission sync for free, so a Microsoft 365 shop should price M365 Copilot before Glean, a Workspace shop should price Gemini Enterprise, and an Atlassian-centric team should check whether Rovo credits already included in their Jira and Confluence bill cover the use case before buying anything.

Third, interrogate permission enforcement specifically — ask whether ACLs are synced from the source and enforced at query time, how stale they get, and what happens when someone is removed from a group; vendors that answer this vaguely are the ones you will end up building around. Fourth, match the pricing meter to your access pattern: per-seat pricing is dead money for an application feature, per-query pricing (Agent Search at $1.50–$4.00 per 1,000, Bedrock at $1.00 per 1,000 retrievals) punishes agents that fire twenty retrievals per turn, and per-page ingestion pricing (Morphik, Ragie, LlamaCloud credits) punishes large static corpora that are queried rarely. The obvious default is Glean, and it is the wrong default twice over: its six-figure annual floor and seat model make it a bad way to power a product feature, and if your knowledge is 4,000 documents in one Drive folder with no per-user access control, none of this is warranted — that is a weekend with pgvector and a cron job.

Be equally sceptical of the other direction: Azure AI Search and Bedrock Knowledge Bases are marketed as "managed RAG" but leave you writing chunking, indexer and evaluation code, so treat them as build, not buy. Finally, weigh corporate risk explicitly here — Vectara repriced from a free tier to $100K/year, Vertex AI Search was renamed Agent Search, Amazon Q Business is being folded into Quick Suite, Moveworks is now inside ServiceNow and Dashworks is joining HubSpot, so pin your abstraction layer at the retrieval interface and keep the raw documents somewhere you own.

B At a glance

Name DeploymentPrebuilt SaaS connectorsSource ACL enforcementOpen sourcePrimary interface Pricing
Glean Vendor SaaS only250+Yes, synced and enforced at query timeNoEnd-user search and chat app, plus REST API unknown — the pricing page publishes no figures and routes to a demo request; deals are seat-based annual contracts quoted by sales.
Onyx Self-host (Docker/K8s) or vendor cloud40+Yes, via connector permission sync (enterprise-licensed code)Yes — MIT core, proprietary ee/ modulesEnd-user search and chat app, plus developer API Cloud Business $20 per user per month billed annually; Enterprise is quote-only. Self-hosting the MIT-licensed core is free.
Vectara Vendor SaaS, customer VPC, or on-premisesMinimal — API ingestion is the primary pathNo — you pass filter attributes and enforce them yourselfNoREST API / SDK SaaS from $100,000/year (1 deployment); VPC from $250,000/year; on-premises from $500,000/year. 30-day full-feature free trial.
Contextual AI Vendor SaaS; enterprise/private options by contractMinimal — API ingestion is the primary pathNo — metadata filtering onlyNoREST API / SDK $25 free credits on signup. Parse $3 per 1,000 pages (text) or $40 per 1,000 pages (multimodal); Rerank-v2 $0.05 per 1M tokens, rerank-v2-mini $0.02 per 1M tokens; Generate $3 per 1M input tokens, $15 per 1M output tokens. Enterprise plan quote-only.
Ragie Vendor SaaS onlyYes, billed per connector ($250/mo each after the first)Partial — partitions and metadata filters; per-user source ACLs are your responsibilityNoREST API / SDK Developer free (1,000 pages, 1,000 retrievals, first connector free). Starter $100/month (10,000 pages). Pro $500/month (60,000 pages). Extra pages $0.02 fast / $0.05 hi-res; storage $0.12/GB/month; audio $0.0067/min, video $0.025/min. Every connector after the first is $250/month.
Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases AWS-managed service in your accountLimited (S3, SharePoint, Confluence, Salesforce, web crawler)Partial — metadata filtering; per-user source ACLs largely your responsibilityNoREST API / SDK Managed knowledge bases: $5.00 per GB of raw data indexed per month, $1.00 per 1,000 Retrieve API calls, $4.00 per 1,000 agentic Retrieve calls plus $1.00 per 1,000 underlying Retrieve calls. Managed parsing, embedding and reranking are included at no extra charge. Self-managed mode bills the underlying vector store separately.
Google Agent Search Google Cloud managed serviceLimited — third-party connectors are largely in Gemini Enterprise insteadPartial — filtering and identity-mapped ACLs on supported sourcesNoREST API / SDK, plus a console widget General model: Search Standard Edition $1.50 per 1,000 queries; Search Enterprise Edition $4.00 per 1,000 queries; Advanced Generative Answers +$4.00 per 1,000 user-input queries; data indexing $5 per GiB per month with the first 10 GiB free. 10,000 free queries per account per month. Configurable model: $6.00 per QPM per month plus $1/GB/month storage and per-query add-ons (Semantic $0.75 per 1,000, KPI & Personalization $0.20 per 1,000).
Gemini Enterprise Google Cloud SaaSYes — Workspace plus third-party enterprise sourcesYes for Workspace and identity-mapped connected sourcesNoEnd-user chat and search app, plus agent builder Business from $21 per seat per month (up to 300 seats, 25 GiB pooled index storage per seat). Standard/Plus from $30 per seat per month (unlimited seats, up to 75 GiB per seat). Frontline edition available as an add-on to Standard/Plus. Pay-as-you-go edition: $0 seat fee for 20+ seats, billed on tokens, memory, compute and storage (limited availability).
Microsoft 365 Copilot Microsoft 365 tenant SaaS100+ Graph connectorsYes — inherits Microsoft Graph permissions per userNoEnd-user chat and search inside Microsoft 365 apps Microsoft 365 Copilot $30.00 per user per month paid yearly, or $31.50 per user per month on an annual commitment billed monthly; a qualifying Microsoft 365 licence is required separately. Microsoft 365 Copilot Business is listed from $21.00 per user per month paid yearly (currently promoted at $18.00).
Azure AI Search Azure managed service in your subscriptionLimited — mostly Azure data sources plus SharePoint OnlinePartial — security trimming via document-level filters you populateNoREST API / SDK Free tier available. Basic $0.101/hour (~$74/month), Standard S1 $0.336/hour (~$245/month), S2 $1.344/hour, S3 $2.688/hour, Storage Optimized L1 $3.839/hour (East US). Serverless: compute $0.24/hour, storage $0.20/GB/month. Semantic ranker $1.00 per 1,000 queries ($2.00 per 1,000 overage). Agentic retrieval reasoning tokens $0.000022 per 1K (low/minimum) to $0.0001 per 1K (medium).
Amazon Quick Suite AWS-managed SaaSYes — Slack, Microsoft 365, Google, SharePoint, Confluence, ServiceNow and othersYes — permission-aware responses via IAM Identity CenterNoEnd-user chat and research app, plus embeddable APIs Free $0 (1 user, 1GB index). Plus $20/user/month billed annually ($25 monthly). Max $100/user/month billed annually ($125 monthly); both capped at 300 users. AWS-account plans: Professional $20/user/month, Enterprise $40/user/month, plus a flat $250 per account per month infrastructure fee, $3 per agent hour ($6 per research agent hour), and $5/GB/month index storage overage. Legacy Amazon Q Business: Lite $3/user/month, Pro $20/user/month, plus index units at $0.264/hour.
Dify Self-host or vendor cloudFew — mostly file upload, web crawl and plugin integrationsNoYes — Apache 2.0 with additional use restrictionsVisual app builder, plus API for built apps Sandbox free (200 message credits, 5 apps, 50 knowledge documents, 50MB storage). Professional $590/year (5,000 monthly message credits, 500 knowledge documents, 5GB). Team $1,590/year (10,000 monthly message credits, 1,000 knowledge documents, 20GB, 50 members). Enterprise quote-only. Community edition free to self-host.
Morphik Vendor cloud, dedicated VPC instance (Team), or self-host under BSLFew — file and API ingestion is the primary pathNoNo — Business Source License 1.1 with a revenue capREST API / SDK, plus a console Free $0 (200 pages, 3 research-agent calls/month, shared GPU queue). Pro $59/month (2,000 pages, 30 research-agent calls, $0.03/page overage). Team $799/month (10GB storage, unlimited queries, dedicated isolated instance, $2.50/GPU-hour autoscale). Enterprise custom.
LlamaCloud Vendor SaaS (US or EU); hybrid/VPC on EnterpriseLimited — 50 external data sources on Starter, 100 on ProNoNo — the LlamaIndex framework is MIT, the cloud service is notREST API / SDK, plus a console Free $0 (10,000 credits, 5 indexes, 50 files per index). Starter $50/month (40,000 credits, pay-as-you-go to $500/month, 50 indexes, 500 files per index). Pro $500/month (400,000 credits, pay-as-you-go to $5,000/month, 100 indexes, 2,000 files per index). Enterprise custom. Credits are $1.25 per 1,000.
Dashworks Vendor SaaS onlyYes — wikis, messaging, CRM, project management, support, codeYes — document-level access control with instant updatesNoSlackbot, browser extension and web app; API as an Enterprise add-on Team $12 per seat per month ($10 billed yearly), no seat minimum. Business $15 per seat per month ($12 billed yearly), minimum 10 seats. Enterprise quote-only. 14-day free trial, no credit card.
Moveworks Vendor SaaSYes — ITSM, HRIS, ticketing and knowledge systemsYes — permission-aware answers across connected systemsNoChat assistant in Slack/Teams, plus enterprise search unknown — no public pricing; quoted by ServiceNow/Moveworks sales, typically as an annual enterprise agreement.
Coveo Vendor SaaSYes — Salesforce, ServiceNow, SharePoint, Zendesk, Adobe, SAP and othersYes — early-binding permission model on indexed sourcesNoSearch UI components and APIs (Passage Retrieval, generative answering) unknown — the pricing page publishes no figures and routes to a sales conversation; a free trial is offered.
Atlassian Rovo Atlassian Cloud SaaSYes — Atlassian products plus third-party tools via Teamwork GraphYes — inherits Atlassian product permissionsNoSearch and chat in Atlassian apps, Slack and Teams; agents and MCP server Included in Jira and Confluence Standard, Premium and Enterprise cloud plans with allowances of 25, 70 and 150 Rovo credits per user per month respectively; Teamwork and Service Collections include more. Overage is $0.01 per credit (e.g. 7,000 credits over allowance = $70). Rovo Dev Standard is $20 per developer per month including 2,000 Rovo Dev credits.

C Entries

Glean

Glean crawls connected SaaS applications into a unified index that mirrors each source's access controls, then exposes it as a search page, an assistant, an agent builder and a REST API. The differentiator against building is the connector fleet — more than 250 connectors with ACL sync — plus Glean Protect for governance and an AI gateway that routes requests across models. Unlike Onyx or Dashworks it is sold as a company-wide platform rather than a team tool, and unlike Vectara or Ragie the end-user application is the product rather than something you assemble.

DeploymentVendor SaaS only
Prebuilt SaaS connectors250+
Source ACL enforcementYes, synced and enforced at query time
Open sourceNo
Primary interfaceEnd-user search and chat app, plus REST API

Watch out: No published pricing at all, which makes budgeting a sales cycle rather than a calculation, and reported deals start in the six figures with seat minimums — badly matched to powering a single application feature. There is no self-hosted option, you cannot inspect or replace the chunking and ranking internals, and index freshness is a crawl schedule you do not control.

unknown — the pricing page publishes no figures and routes to a demo request; deals are seat-based annual contracts quoted by sales.

Onyx

Onyx, renamed from Danswer, is an open-source chat and search layer over connected company apps that you can run in your own Docker or Kubernetes environment or buy hosted at $20 per user per month. It ships around 40 connectors, custom agents, a code interpreter and developer APIs, and works with any LLM provider. It is the practical answer when Glean is the right shape but the price or the data-residency requirement is not; the trade is that you operate the index and identity plumbing yourself.

DeploymentSelf-host (Docker/K8s) or vendor cloud
Prebuilt SaaS connectors40+
Source ACL enforcementYes, via connector permission sync (enterprise-licensed code)
Open sourceYes — MIT core, proprietary ee/ modules
Primary interfaceEnd-user search and chat app, plus developer API

Watch out: Connector depth and the reliability of permission syncing lag Glean and the hyperscalers, so ACL edge cases become your problem. SSO/SAML, permission sync and other enterprise controls live in ee/ directories that are not MIT-licensed, so the genuinely free build is missing the features an enterprise rollout needs, and self-hosting means running and tuning the search and database infrastructure yourself.

Cloud Business $20 per user per month billed annually; Enterprise is quote-only. Self-hosting the MIT-licensed core is free. · open source

Vectara

Vectara is an end-to-end retrieval API: you POST documents, it handles chunking, embedding, hybrid retrieval, reranking and grounded generation, and returns answers with citations plus a factual-consistency score from its own hallucination evaluation model. It is a retrieval service rather than an employee search app, so there is no connector fleet to Slack or SharePoint. The notable 2026 change is commercial, not technical: the published entry price is now $100,000 per year for SaaS, replacing the low-cost self-serve tiers it was previously known for.

DeploymentVendor SaaS, customer VPC, or on-premises
Prebuilt SaaS connectorsMinimal — API ingestion is the primary path
Source ACL enforcementNo — you pass filter attributes and enforce them yourself
Open sourceNo
Primary interfaceREST API / SDK

Watch out: The pricing floor is the headline problem — at $100K/year for SaaS it is now unavailable to startups and small teams that used its earlier self-serve tiers, and any tutorial or comparison written before 2026 quotes prices that no longer exist. It is also a retrieval API, not an enterprise search product: there is no meaningful catalogue of SaaS connectors and no end-user application, so ingestion from Drive, Slack or Confluence is code you write.

SaaS from $100,000/year (1 deployment); VPC from $250,000/year; on-premises from $500,000/year. 30-day full-feature free trial.

Contextual AI

Contextual AI sells an assembled RAG agent platform whose individual components — a document parser, a reranker, a grounded generation model and the LMUnit evaluation model — are also callable separately and priced separately. That makes it the unusual member of this category where you can see exactly what each stage costs: $3 per 1,000 pages for text parsing, $40 per 1,000 pages for multimodal, $0.05 per million tokens to rerank. It targets accuracy-sensitive document workloads rather than employee search, and competes with Vectara on grounding quality rather than with Glean on connectors.

DeploymentVendor SaaS; enterprise/private options by contract
Prebuilt SaaS connectorsMinimal — API ingestion is the primary path
Source ACL enforcementNo — metadata filtering only
Open sourceNo
Primary interfaceREST API / SDK

Watch out: There is no end-user search application and effectively no SaaS connector catalogue, so anything involving Drive, Slack or Confluence is ingestion code you own. Component-level pricing sounds transparent but pushes cost modelling onto you, and the $40 per 1,000 pages multimodal parse tier gets expensive fast on scanned or diagram-heavy corpora — re-parsing a large archive is a bill worth estimating before you start.

$25 free credits on signup. Parse $3 per 1,000 pages (text) or $40 per 1,000 pages (multimodal); Rerank-v2 $0.05 per 1M tokens, rerank-v2-mini $0.02 per 1M tokens; Generate $3 per 1M input tokens, $15 per 1M output tokens. Enterprise plan quote-only.

Ragie

Ragie is a developer-facing managed pipeline: connectors pull from SaaS sources, it parses, chunks, embeds, reranks and serves hybrid retrieval, with partitions for multi-tenant isolation and whitelabel connectors for products that need to embed their customers' OAuth flows. It sits between the pure retrieval APIs and the employee search apps — it has real connectors, but no end-user UI. The pricing structure is unusual and worth reading carefully: retrievals are unlimited on paid plans, but each connector past the first is a separate $250 per month line item.

DeploymentVendor SaaS only
Prebuilt SaaS connectorsYes, billed per connector ($250/mo each after the first)
Source ACL enforcementPartial — partitions and metadata filters; per-user source ACLs are your responsibility
Open sourceNo
Primary interfaceREST API / SDK

Watch out: The $250 per month per connector charge is the real cost driver — a product touching six sources pays $1,250/month in connector fees on top of the plan, which can exceed the plan price several times over. It is also a small vendor with no end-user application, so you build the search and chat surface yourself, and there is no self-hosted option if data residency is a hard constraint.

Developer free (1,000 pages, 1,000 retrievals, first connector free). Starter $100/month (10,000 pages). Pro $500/month (60,000 pages). Extra pages $0.02 fast / $0.05 hi-res; storage $0.12/GB/month; audio $0.0067/min, video $0.025/min. Every connector after the first is $250/month.

Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases

Bedrock Knowledge Bases turns a data source into a queryable index and a Retrieve/RetrieveAndGenerate API, with the managed option bundling document parsing, embedding generation and reranking at no separate charge. A self-managed mode lets you point it at your own OpenSearch, Aurora or Pinecone index instead. It is the natural choice if your application already runs on AWS and your documents already sit in S3; it is not an employee search product and has no chat UI of its own.

DeploymentAWS-managed service in your account
Prebuilt SaaS connectorsLimited (S3, SharePoint, Confluence, Salesforce, web crawler)
Source ACL enforcementPartial — metadata filtering; per-user source ACLs largely your responsibility
Open sourceNo
Primary interfaceREST API / SDK

Watch out: The connector list is short compared with the workplace-search products — S3, SharePoint, Confluence, Salesforce and a web crawler — and per-user permission propagation is limited, so multi-tenant ACL enforcement is largely on you. Per-call retrieval pricing punishes agentic loops that fire many retrievals per turn, feature availability varies by region, and you still write the application, evaluation and chunking-strategy work around it, which makes this closer to build than buy.

Managed knowledge bases: $5.00 per GB of raw data indexed per month, $1.00 per 1,000 Retrieve API calls, $4.00 per 1,000 agentic Retrieve calls plus $1.00 per 1,000 underlying Retrieve calls. Managed parsing, embedding and reranking are included at no extra charge. Self-managed mode bills the underlying vector store separately.

Gemini Enterprise

Gemini Enterprise is Google's packaged answer to Glean and Microsoft 365 Copilot: a seat-licensed application that indexes connected company data, answers questions over it, and lets staff build no-code agents in a workflow builder. It absorbed the Agentspace product line and sits on top of the same retrieval stack as Agent Search, with pooled index storage sized per seat. A pay-as-you-go edition with a $0 seat fee is rolling out to a limited set of customers for organisations that prefer usage billing.

DeploymentGoogle Cloud SaaS
Prebuilt SaaS connectorsYes — Workspace plus third-party enterprise sources
Source ACL enforcementYes for Workspace and identity-mapped connected sources
Open sourceNo
Primary interfaceEnd-user chat and search app, plus agent builder

Watch out: It is the newest of the three big workplace assistants and the edition structure is still moving — Agentspace was folded into it, the pay-as-you-go edition is only rolling out to selected customers, and Gemini Notebook is not yet included there. Value depends heavily on already being a Workspace shop; if your documents live in SharePoint and Teams the connector story is weaker than Microsoft's, and the Business edition's 300-seat ceiling forces a migration to Standard/Plus mid-rollout for larger companies.

Business from $21 per seat per month (up to 300 seats, 25 GiB pooled index storage per seat). Standard/Plus from $30 per seat per month (unlimited seats, up to 75 GiB per seat). Frontline edition available as an add-on to Standard/Plus. Pay-as-you-go edition: $0 seat fee for 20+ seats, billed on tokens, memory, compute and storage (limited availability).

Microsoft 365 Copilot

Microsoft 365 Copilot grounds its answers in the Microsoft Graph — your SharePoint, OneDrive, Outlook and Teams content — with each user's existing permissions applied automatically, and extends to external systems through Graph connectors, of which Microsoft advertises over 100. It is sold as a per-user add-on requiring a qualifying Microsoft 365 licence underneath, and a cheaper Business SKU now exists for smaller organisations. Because the ACL model is inherited from the tenant rather than reconstructed by a crawler, it is the lowest-effort permission-correct option for organisations already on M365.

DeploymentMicrosoft 365 tenant SaaS
Prebuilt SaaS connectors100+ Graph connectors
Source ACL enforcementYes — inherits Microsoft Graph permissions per user
Open sourceNo
Primary interfaceEnd-user chat and search inside Microsoft 365 apps

Watch out: Answer quality is a direct function of SharePoint hygiene — over-shared sites and stale document libraries surface as confidently wrong or inappropriately visible answers, and cleaning that up is usually a bigger project than the deployment itself. It requires a qualifying M365 licence underneath, so the real cost is well above $30 per user, and grounding on data outside the Graph means building and paying for Graph connectors with their own indexing quotas rather than pointing at a database.

Microsoft 365 Copilot $30.00 per user per month paid yearly, or $31.50 per user per month on an annual commitment billed monthly; a qualifying Microsoft 365 licence is required separately. Microsoft 365 Copilot Business is listed from $21.00 per user per month paid yearly (currently promoted at $18.00).

Amazon Quick Suite

Quick Suite is AWS's employee-facing assistant and the stated successor to Amazon Q Business, combining chat over connected company data, research agents, automation flows and QuickSight analytics under one seat licence. Existing Q Business customers are being moved onto it. Two licensing paths exist: consumer-style Free/Plus/Max plans capped at 300 users, and AWS-account Professional and Enterprise plans with pooled index storage, agent-hour metering and a flat monthly infrastructure fee.

DeploymentAWS-managed SaaS
Prebuilt SaaS connectorsYes — Slack, Microsoft 365, Google, SharePoint, Confluence, ServiceNow and others
Source ACL enforcementYes — permission-aware responses via IAM Identity Center
Open sourceNo
Primary interfaceEnd-user chat and research app, plus embeddable APIs

Watch out: You are buying into a product mid-transition — Q Business is being superseded, migration paths and feature parity are still settling, and documentation written for either name may not describe what you get. The $250 per account per month infrastructure fee is a floor that makes small pilots disproportionately expensive, agent-hour metering at $3-$6 per hour makes spend hard to forecast, and the enterprise path requires standing up AWS IAM Identity Center before anyone logs in.

Free $0 (1 user, 1GB index). Plus $20/user/month billed annually ($25 monthly). Max $100/user/month billed annually ($125 monthly); both capped at 300 users. AWS-account plans: Professional $20/user/month, Enterprise $40/user/month, plus a flat $250 per account per month infrastructure fee, $3 per agent hour ($6 per research agent hour), and $5/GB/month index storage overage. Legacy Amazon Q Business: Lite $3/user/month, Pro $20/user/month, plus index units at $0.264/hour.

Dify

Dify is an open-source platform for building LLM applications visually — workflows, agents, prompt management — with a built-in knowledge base that handles upload, chunking, embedding and retrieval. Its appeal in this category is that a non-specialist can stand up a working RAG chatbot in an afternoon and self-host the whole thing. It is an application builder that includes retrieval rather than a retrieval platform, which shows in the document limits and the absence of enterprise connector and permission machinery.

DeploymentSelf-host or vendor cloud
Prebuilt SaaS connectorsFew — mostly file upload, web crawl and plugin integrations
Source ACL enforcementNo
Open sourceYes — Apache 2.0 with additional use restrictions
Primary interfaceVisual app builder, plus API for built apps

Watch out: The knowledge base is deliberately simple — hard document caps of 500 on Professional and 1,000 on Team, no SaaS connector fleet, and no per-user ACL synchronisation — so it does not scale into company-wide search. The licence is not plain Apache 2.0: it forbids offering Dify as a multi-tenant service and removing branding, which rules it out as the backbone of a product you resell.

Sandbox free (200 message credits, 5 apps, 50 knowledge documents, 50MB storage). Professional $590/year (5,000 monthly message credits, 500 knowledge documents, 5GB). Team $1,590/year (10,000 monthly message credits, 1,000 knowledge documents, 20GB, 50 members). Enterprise quote-only. Community edition free to self-host. · open source

Morphik

Morphik focuses on documents where the layout carries meaning — engineering drawings, medical scans, financial statements — using multimodal ingestion rather than text extraction alone, plus knowledge-graph construction and a research agent over the corpus. The core is on GitHub and self-hostable. It is a narrower bet than Ragie or Vectara: strong on hard document types, thin on connectors and end-user search.

DeploymentVendor cloud, dedicated VPC instance (Team), or self-host under BSL
Prebuilt SaaS connectorsFew — file and API ingestion is the primary path
Source ACL enforcementNo
Open sourceNo — Business Source License 1.1 with a revenue cap
Primary interfaceREST API / SDK, plus a console

Watch out: The Business Source Licence is the catch: production use is only granted while the revenue attributable to it stays under $2,000 per month, so this is not free software for a commercial product and calling it open source is inaccurate. Page-based pricing with $0.03 overage penalises large archives that are queried infrequently, the team is small with correspondingly limited support, and there is no SaaS connector fleet or ACL model for workplace search.

Free $0 (200 pages, 3 research-agent calls/month, shared GPU queue). Pro $59/month (2,000 pages, 30 research-agent calls, $0.03/page overage). Team $799/month (10GB storage, unlimited queries, dedicated isolated instance, $2.50/GPU-hour autoscale). Enterprise custom.

LlamaCloud

LlamaCloud is the hosted side of LlamaIndex: LlamaParse for document parsing with several quality tiers and auto-routing, structured extraction to a schema, classification and splitting, plus managed indexes and a workflow builder. Everything is metered in credits at 1,000 credits per $1.25, so parsing, indexing and extraction all draw from one pool. Its real strength is the parser — it is frequently used purely as an ingestion stage in front of someone else's vector store.

DeploymentVendor SaaS (US or EU); hybrid/VPC on Enterprise
Prebuilt SaaS connectorsLimited — 50 external data sources on Starter, 100 on Pro
Source ACL enforcementNo
Open sourceNo — the LlamaIndex framework is MIT, the cloud service is not
Primary interfaceREST API / SDK, plus a console

Watch out: The per-index file caps are the blocking constraint — 2,000 files per index even on the $500/month Pro tier means any real document archive needs the Enterprise plan or sharding across indexes. Credit-based billing spanning parse, extract and index makes forecasting awkward, and the hosted index and connector features are noticeably less developed than the parsing side, so this is usually a component purchase rather than the assembled thing.

Free $0 (10,000 credits, 5 indexes, 50 files per index). Starter $50/month (40,000 credits, pay-as-you-go to $500/month, 50 indexes, 500 files per index). Pro $500/month (400,000 credits, pay-as-you-go to $5,000/month, 100 indexes, 2,000 files per index). Enterprise custom. Credits are $1.25 per 1,000.

Dashworks

Dashworks answers questions across connected wikis, chat, CRM, ticketing and code with document-level access control, and its most-used surface is a Slackbot rather than a separate search portal. It is the cheapest credible per-seat option in this category, with no seat minimum on the Team plan. The company has announced it is joining HubSpot, which should factor into any multi-year commitment.

DeploymentVendor SaaS only
Prebuilt SaaS connectorsYes — wikis, messaging, CRM, project management, support, code
Source ACL enforcementYes — document-level access control with instant updates
Open sourceNo
Primary interfaceSlackbot, browser extension and web app; API as an Enterprise add-on

Watch out: The company has announced it is joining HubSpot, so the standalone roadmap, pricing and long-term availability are genuinely uncertain — a bad moment to sign a multi-year deal without an exit clause. The connector catalogue is narrower than Glean's or Microsoft's, there is no self-hosted or VPC option, and API access is a paid Enterprise add-on rather than part of the standard plans.

Team $12 per seat per month ($10 billed yearly), no seat minimum. Business $15 per seat per month ($12 billed yearly), minimum 10 seats. Enterprise quote-only. 14-day free trial, no credit card.

Moveworks

Moveworks, now formally acquired by ServiceNow, is an AI assistant for employee support that resolves IT and HR requests conversationally and includes enterprise search across connected systems, with Agent Studio and Knowledge Studio for building and curating on top. It is sold as a front door to service workflows rather than as a retrieval platform, and post-acquisition it is being positioned alongside ServiceNow's own agentic products. Choose it when the goal is deflecting service tickets, not when the goal is general document retrieval.

DeploymentVendor SaaS
Prebuilt SaaS connectorsYes — ITSM, HRIS, ticketing and knowledge systems
Source ACL enforcementYes — permission-aware answers across connected systems
Open sourceNo
Primary interfaceChat assistant in Slack/Teams, plus enterprise search

Watch out: The ServiceNow acquisition means you are buying into a platform consolidation rather than an independent product, and the go-forward roadmap points at ServiceNow's unified AI experience — pricing and packaging should be expected to move. It is scoped for employee service, so using it as a general-purpose developer retrieval layer fights the product, and deployments are professional-services heavy with long implementation timelines rather than something a team self-serves.

unknown — no public pricing; quoted by ServiceNow/Moveworks sales, typically as an annual enterprise agreement.

Coveo

Coveo is the long-established relevance platform in this space, with unified indexing across enterprise sources, machine-learned ranking tuned on behavioural signals, a Passage Retrieval API and generative answering, packaged for commerce, customer service, websites and workplace. Its behavioural relevance tuning and analytics are more developed than anything the newer RAG vendors ship. It is a public company sold through enterprise agreements, with implementation typically running through partners.

DeploymentVendor SaaS
Prebuilt SaaS connectorsYes — Salesforce, ServiceNow, SharePoint, Zendesk, Adobe, SAP and others
Source ACL enforcementYes — early-binding permission model on indexed sources
Open sourceNo
Primary interfaceSearch UI components and APIs (Passage Retrieval, generative answering)

Watch out: No pricing is published anywhere, so evaluation begins with a sales cycle and the entry cost is enterprise-scale. Deployments carry real implementation weight — indexing pipelines, relevance tuning and front-end integration usually mean professional services — which makes it over-scoped for an internal employee Q&A bot where Onyx or Dashworks would land in days rather than quarters.

unknown — the pricing page publishes no figures and routes to a sales conversation; a free trial is offered.

Atlassian Rovo

Rovo indexes Confluence, Jira and connected third-party tools into Atlassian's Teamwork Graph and exposes search, chat and agents across them, including inside Slack and Teams. Its distinguishing commercial fact is that it is no longer a separate purchase — it is automatically activated in Standard, Premium and Enterprise cloud subscriptions with a monthly credit allowance per user, so many organisations already own it. Usage beyond the allowance is metered at $0.01 per credit.

DeploymentAtlassian Cloud SaaS
Prebuilt SaaS connectorsYes — Atlassian products plus third-party tools via Teamwork Graph
Source ACL enforcementYes — inherits Atlassian product permissions
Primary interfaceSearch and chat in Atlassian apps, Slack and Teams; agents and MCP server
Open sourceNo

Watch out: The included credit allowances are small — 25 credits per user per month on Standard is a handful of interactions, not daily use — so realistic adoption means either a plan upgrade or metered overage, and the credit-per-action model makes spend hard to predict across a large org. It is also strongly Atlassian-centric: coverage of non-Atlassian sources is thinner than Glean's or Microsoft's, and it is not a general-purpose retrieval API you can point your own application at.

Included in Jira and Confluence Standard, Premium and Enterprise cloud plans with allowances of 25, 70 and 150 Rovo credits per user per month respectively; Teamwork and Service Collections include more. Overage is $0.01 per credit (e.g. 7,000 credits over allowance = $70). Rovo Dev Standard is $20 per developer per month including 2,000 Rovo Dev credits.