Glean Alternative for Engineering Teams: When Workplace Search Can't Read Code
By Fahad Ijaz · · 6 min read
Glean built a great product: enterprise search across every SaaS tool your company uses, with permissions handled properly. If your problem is 'our knowledge is scattered across Google Drive, Confluence, Slack, and Jira', Glean genuinely solves it. But engineering teams keep hitting the same wall: Glean searches what people wrote about the system. It can't tell you what the system actually does. Those are different things, and the gap between them is where engineering time disappears.
The Document Problem
Workplace search is only as good as the documents it indexes. For engineering questions, the documents are the weakest source: they were written months ago, by someone describing the system as it was then, at a level of detail chosen for a different audience. When a support lead asks 'does our export include archived records?', the wiki page about exports may not say, may be wrong, or may not exist. The code knows. A search tool that can't read the code is answering from secondhand sources.
Code-Grounded vs Document-Grounded Answers
This is the evaluation axis that matters in any Glean alternative for engineering use: where do answers come from? Glean's AI assistant synthesizes from indexed documents and chats. Figorit indexes the repositories themselves: every file, every commit, every PR, updated on every push. Ask the same question of both and Glean tells you what someone once wrote; Figorit reads the current implementation and cites the files and lines it used. For anything that changes with the code, grounding in the code is the difference between an answer and a guess.
Procurement and Price
Glean is an enterprise sale: per-seat pricing that lands around $30-40/user/month at typical contract sizes, an annual commitment, and a sales process. That's proportionate if you're deploying company-wide search for a 2,000-person org. It's wildly disproportionate if what you need is 'let our product team ask questions about our codebase'. Figorit is self-serve and flat-priced ($100-250/month, unlimited users), which means the decision is a team-lead decision, not a procurement project.
They're Complements, Not Substitutes
The honest framing: Glean and Figorit barely overlap. Glean is horizontal (every app, shallow on each). Figorit is vertical (one source, the codebase, at full depth: history, blame, ownership, semantics). Companies that have both route HR and policy questions to Glean and product/engineering questions to Figorit. If you can only justify one and your pain is engineering interruptions, the vertical tool moves that metric; the horizontal one doesn't.
The Bottom Line
Choose Glean when your problem is scattered documents at company scale. Choose a code-grounded answer engine when your problem is that the truth lives in the code and everyone keeps pulling engineers away from it. If the question that triggered your search for a Glean alternative was ever answered with 'let me check with engineering', it's the second problem.
Written by Fahad Ijaz. About Figorit.