Internal Knowledge & Research
Your answer exists. You can't find it.
What's broken
Most teams don't have a knowledge problem — they have a retrieval problem. The SOW precedent, the competitor teardown, the runbook: all written, all buried across Drive, Notion, Slack, and the SharePoint graveyard. Time leaks because senior people get pinged for answers the system already holds. The status quo persists because no one pays the tax of a search project until hiring costs make it cheaper than the tax of going without.
Common bottlenecks
- Senior staff become human search engines because RAG over the wiki was never set up
- Critical context lives in Slack threads that fall off retention
- Three copies of 'the master brand guidelines' exist and two of them are wrong
- New hires take 6–8 weeks to stop asking questions the handbook already answers
- Meeting notes are taken but never retrieved — the knowledge dies at the point of capture
- Compliance-sensitive docs get re-indexed into a tool with no permission awareness
What matters when choosing a tool
Workflow-specific criteria. Different from the 5 general OpSprint Score dimensions.
Permission-aware search — does the tool respect Google Drive ACLs and Slack channel membership?
Breadth of native connectors — Drive + Notion + Slack + Confluence + GitHub without a connector tax
Answer quality on long-tail queries — the demo always works on 'what's our PTO policy'; test the obscure ones
Expert finder — can it surface 'who wrote the last ML ops proposal' not just the doc?
Audit log and redaction — what can an admin see about who asked what?
Query latency at your corpus size — sub-3s matters; 10s turns it into shelfware
Recommended tools
Every review comes from real field deployments — not vendor decks.
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.
Dust
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.
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.
Quick comparison
| Criterion | Glean 4.2/ 5 | Dust 3.4/ 5 | Notion AI 3.4/ 5 |
|---|---|---|---|
| OpSprint Score | 4.2 / 5 | 3.4 / 5 | 3.4 / 5 |
| Company size | mid-market, enterprise | smb, mid-market | smb, mid-market |
| Deployment | saas, hybrid | saas | saas |
| Complexity | medium | low | low |
| Time to value | weeks | weeks | days |
| Pricing model | Per-seat annual, typically $40–$100/user/mo. Enterprise tier custom. Expect a connector setup fee on complex orgs. | Per-seat, typically €20–€40/user/mo on business tiers. Enterprise custom. | Add-on to Notion Business/Enterprise, typically $8–$10/user/mo on top of base seat cost. |
Glean
- OpSprint Score
- 4.2 / 5
- Company size
- mid-market, enterprise
- Deployment
- saas, hybrid
- Complexity
- medium
- Time to value
- weeks
- Pricing model
- Per-seat annual, typically $40–$100/user/mo. Enterprise tier custom. Expect a connector setup fee on complex orgs.
Dust
- OpSprint Score
- 3.4 / 5
- Company size
- smb, mid-market
- Deployment
- saas
- Complexity
- low
- Time to value
- weeks
- Pricing model
- Per-seat, typically €20–€40/user/mo on business tiers. Enterprise custom.
Notion AI
- OpSprint Score
- 3.4 / 5
- Company size
- smb, mid-market
- Deployment
- saas
- Complexity
- low
- Time to value
- days
- Pricing model
- Add-on to Notion Business/Enterprise, typically $8–$10/user/mo on top of base seat cost.
Implementation considerations
The most common failure is turning it on with every connector enabled and calling it done — permission bleeds, irrelevant sources drown relevant ones, and trust collapses on week two. Start with two high-signal sources (usually Drive + the wiki), tune retrieval on real employee queries, then expand. The second failure is skipping the 'who uses this and why' conversation — if sales and engineering share one search surface with no role-aware prompts, both groups will bounce off it.