Dust
The pragmatic pick for 50–300 person teams who want purpose-built RAG without signing a Glean contract.
Dust is a European RAG-and-agents platform that sits between Notion AI's simplicity and Glean's enterprise complexity. It indexes your docs, Slack, Drive, and Notion, hosts custom assistants per team, and gives admins more control than Notion while costing materially less than Glean. Strong story for EU buyers who want a consultancy-grade tool without US-only residency.
Best for
- Teams of 50–300 people outgrowing Notion AI but not yet Glean-scale
- European buyers who want EU data residency as a default, not an upsell
- Companies building per-team custom assistants (legal, sales, support)
- Buyers who want modern RAG without a six-figure annual commit
Not ideal for
- Large enterprises with deep compliance bureaucracy — Glean's procurement story is stronger
- Teams already fully inside the Notion wiki with no cross-system need
- Buyers who need 100+ native connectors — Dust's coverage is narrower
- Anyone expecting an expert-finder feature as polished as Glean's
Where Dust wins — and where it doesn't
Dust is the pragmatic pick for 50–300 person teams who want purpose-built internal RAG without Glean's enterprise price tag or IT overhead. It's EU-built, which matters materially for teams with real GDPR constraints — most US-based alternatives treat compliance as a checkbox. For post-seed startups that have outgrown ChatGPT Enterprise but aren't ready for a $80K/year Glean commitment, Dust usually lands in the "sized right" sweet spot.
The tradeoff is surface area. Dust has a smaller connector catalog than Glean (roughly 30 vs 100+), so if your knowledge is split across 15 different systems, you'll feel the gaps. For teams whose content lives mostly in Notion, Slack, Drive, and GitHub, that's a non-issue — Dust covers the 80%. The builder interface for custom agents is genuinely good and doesn't require a dedicated ops hire to maintain, which is where Glean often stalls.
Pricing is per-seat starting around €29/user/mo for Pro and €99 for Enterprise — a real discount vs. Glean's $40–$100 band, and the gap widens with BYOK options. 20% off on annual commits at 50+ seats is a reasonable negotiation target. The "try before committing" path is strong here: a 3-month pilot on one team gives real usage data before scaling. Revisit if you grow past 400 employees or inherit regulatory constraints that require SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 attestations at a tier Dust doesn't currently hold — at that point you're usually back on the Glean evaluation.
Native integrations
Security & deployment
SOC 2 Type II, GDPR-aligned, EU hosting default. Customer data is not used for training. Admin controls include per-assistant data scopes and usage logs. Verify BYOK and VPC availability with sales — not universally available.
Implementation complexity
low
Time to value
weeks
Strengths
- Rollout is meaningfully faster than Glean — cleaner setup, fewer dials
- Per-team assistants make the product useful to non-technical buyers
- EU residency as default is a real differentiator for European buyers
- Pricing is accessible to companies under $50M revenue
Tradeoffs
- Connector breadth is narrower than Glean — check your stack list first
- Permission inheritance is good but less battle-tested than Glean at 1000+ seats
- No deep expert-finder equivalent
- Brand recognition lags in US procurement — expect to educate buyers
Worth comparing against
Glean
Glean is enterprise search built for companies with too much content in too many systems. It indexes Drive, Slack, Notion, Jira, Confluence, GitHub and 100+ others, respects source-system permissions, and layers a chat interface on top of retrieval that actually cites its sources. It's the category leader for mid-market and enterprise, and priced accordingly.
Notion AI
Notion AI is the AI layer built into Notion workspaces — Q&A over your pages, drafting assistance inline, and summaries across databases. It's the easiest 'AI over our docs' you can buy because it's already installed wherever Notion is the wiki. It's also the shallowest option if your knowledge lives outside Notion.
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