The Search Bar Is the New Battleground for Enterprise Knowledge
Confluence has been the default home for institutional knowledge at mid-size and large companies for well over a decade. Teams write their docs there, store their meeting notes there, and bury important decisions in nested page trees that nobody ever visits again. The product works – or at least it worked well enough that most companies never seriously questioned whether there was a better option. That era is ending.
Glean is what happens when you build a search product from scratch with AI at the center rather than bolting it on later.
The startup, which raised a $260 million Series E round in 2024 at a valuation reported at $4.6 billion, has built its entire proposition around one idea: employees waste enormous amounts of time looking for information that already exists somewhere in their organization. Glean connects to over 100 enterprise applications – Slack, Google Drive, Salesforce, Jira, and yes, Confluence itself – and delivers a single search interface that actually understands context, intent, and the organizational relationships between people and content. The threat to Confluence is not that Glean replaces where knowledge lives. The threat is that Glean replaces the act of going to Confluence at all.
Why Confluence’s Architecture Is Working Against It
Confluence was designed around the idea that knowledge management is fundamentally a writing and organizing problem. Build good templates, maintain a logical page hierarchy, and your organization will accumulate useful institutional memory. The flaw in that model is that it depends entirely on employees being disciplined, organized writers who maintain their documentation over time. In practice, Confluence spaces become digital landfills – filled with outdated pages, abandoned project wikis, and contradictory information from three different teams who never coordinated. The search built into Confluence reflects that chaos back at the user with keyword-matching that has never been particularly smart.
Glean approaches the same problem from the retrieval side rather than the storage side. Instead of asking teams to organize their knowledge better, Glean’s AI learns from how knowledge is actually used – which documents get referenced in which contexts, which people are the authority on which topics, which Slack threads connect to which Confluence pages. The result is that a sales rep looking for the latest competitive positioning doesn’t have to remember which Confluence space the product team stores it in. They type a natural language question into Glean and get an answer synthesized from wherever that information actually lives. That is a fundamentally different experience than using Confluence search, and enterprise buyers are noticing.
Atlassian has not stood still. The company has been adding AI features to Confluence under the Atlassian Intelligence banner, including the ability to summarize pages, generate content, and run basic Q&A against documents. But there is a structural disadvantage in trying to make a document repository behave like an intelligent search engine. Confluence can only surface what lives inside Confluence. Glean’s entire value comes from synthesizing across every application a company uses simultaneously.
Where Glean Is Finding Its Openings
The companies most vulnerable to Glean’s pitch are the ones that have accumulated years of software sprawl. A fast-growing tech company running Slack, Notion, Salesforce, GitHub, Zendesk, and Confluence simultaneously has knowledge scattered across at least six different surfaces. Each of those tools has its own search, and none of them talk to each other. Glean’s pitch to that company is simple: stop teaching your employees to remember where things live and start giving them a search layer that already knows. For companies that have grown through acquisitions or remote-first expansion, that pitch is landing with real urgency.
Glean is also pushing aggressively into the AI assistant space with a product called Glean Chat, which functions like a company-specific version of ChatGPT. Employees can ask it questions, request summaries, get help drafting documents, and query company data in natural language. This is where the competition with Confluence becomes most direct – a Glean Chat user asking “what’s our refund policy?” or “who owns the enterprise onboarding process?” is getting an answer without ever opening a Confluence tab. The more those answers are good, the faster the habit of going directly to Confluence atrophies. It’s a dynamic worth comparing to how Dust’s enterprise AI platform has been peeling clients from Microsoft Copilot by offering a more contextually aware alternative to the built-in assistant experience.
There is a pricing angle here too. Atlassian has moved Confluence aggressively toward its premium and enterprise tiers, where Atlassian Intelligence features unlock. Companies paying for multiple Atlassian products to get the AI features they need are increasingly asking whether the combined cost makes sense against a Glean subscription that covers the entire application stack. It is not a straightforward apples-to-apples comparison, but enterprise procurement teams are running the math.
Confluence Is Not Going Away – But Its Monopoly on Attention Is
The realistic near-term outcome is not that Confluence disappears from enterprise stacks. Companies have years of institutional content stored there, and migration costs are real. What Glean is actually capturing is attention – the daily habit of going to Confluence as a first instinct when you need to find something. Once employees have a faster, smarter alternative for retrieval, Confluence becomes a passive storage layer rather than an active knowledge destination, which is a significant demotion for a product that has long positioned itself as the central nervous system of organizational knowledge. Atlassian’s Jira integration keeps Confluence stickier on the engineering and product side, but outside those teams, the gravitational pull is weakening in exactly the accounts where Glean is expanding fastest.
