Comparison
A Glean alternative for companies of 20–500 people
Glean is a good product built for large companies. This page is for the ones underneath that line.
The gap
Enterprise work-AI platforms are sold per seat, on an annual commitment, through a procurement cycle. That works across thousands of seats.
At 60 people it does not: the price is the same, the sales cycle costs you a quarter, and the connectors you use are three systems, not ninety.
Meanwhile the thing asking is increasingly not a person. An agent needs the same two guarantees a person does and enforces neither for itself: that what it reads is current, and that it is allowed to read it.
What Contextely does differently
Bought, not sold
Sign up, connect a source, run a query. No call, no pilot, no seat minimum. Free for 500 retrievals a month.
Yours if you want it
Run it on your own hardware with your own Postgres. Nothing leaves your network except the condensation calls.
Agent-first
An MCP server is the primary interface and the web app is secondary. Your agents are the users we designed for.
| Dimension | Enterprise work AI | Contextely |
|---|---|---|
| Buying motion | Sales-led, annual contract, seat minimum | Self-serve, monthly, free tier |
| Target size | Thousands of employees | 20–500 employees |
| Deployment | Vendor cloud | Hosted or self-hosted, same product |
| Connectors | Hundreds, most of which you do not use | The ones you point it at: Postgres/Supabase/Neon, and any MCP server |
| Permissions | Mirrors source-system ACLs across a large connector estate | Explicit entitlement scopes applied inside the retrieval scoring function |
| Freshness | Crawl and re-index on a schedule | Per-object TTL, re-fetched from the system of record at query time when it expires |
| Agent access | Increasingly available | The primary interface: MCP server plus REST mirror |
The row that matters
Permissions, as an actual screen
An enterprise platform mirrors your source systems' ACLs across a connector estate you mostly do not use. Contextely asks you to say once, explicitly, what each member may read.
Less automatic, and the whole of the permission model on one screen, which is what you can audit before trusting an agent with it.
People & scopes
Where Contextely is the wrong choice
Three cases, and all three are real. Ninety SaaS systems with their native ACLs mirrored needs a connector estate, and this does not have one.
Document search across a large corpus is better served by a search platform. And if the knowledge only exists in people's heads, no context layer fixes that.
Connect one system of record and run a query in five minutes.