Perplexity is built to help you explore web content and get quick answers from public sources. It’s a solid choice if you’re looking for a smarter alternative to traditional search engines. Glean focuses on an internal company knowledge base. It connects with your workplace tools to help employees find information buried in emails, documents and chats.
Both tools are powerful, but they serve different needs and have their limitations when it comes to business. In this article, we’ll break down the differences between Perplexity and Glean, and introduce you to Tanka—an AI-powered messenger with smart search across internal and external data.
What is Perplexity?
Perplexity is a smart search engine that combines regular search results with the helpful, chat-like answers of AI assistants. It’s designed to help teams and companies access, organize, and act on information, both from the public web and internal files.
Key features
Spaces for collaboration: Perplexity Spaces let teams organize threads, share files, and set custom AI instructions within secure, private workspaces. Enterprise Pro users also get more privacy—their data isn't used for AI training.
Custom prompts and collections: Users can create custom prompts and keep them inside “Collections” to guide AI tone and format. This keeps responses consistent and reduces the need to repeat instructions across projects.
File uploads: Works with PDFs, CSVs, and other formats; can summarize documents using GPT-4 Omni. Paid plans allow unlimited uploads and image analysis.
Enterprise Pro: Offers SOC2 compliance, SSO, user management, and alerts for new uploads. It also connects with external data sources like Crunchbase and FactSet.
Market research: Analyze customer feedback, social media, and industry trends to improve products and marketing strategies.
Customer service: Categorizes queries and responds to customers by drafting messages and sending them automatically, if configured to do so.
Competitive analysis: Extract insights from market data sources to track competitors and spot trends.
Risk assessment: Evaluates financial and industry data to predict market shifts and inform strategic decisions.
Brand monitoring: Track online mentions and sentiment to manage reputation and respond proactively to emerging issues.
Professional development: Teams can stay updated on industry best practices, new technologies, and compliance requirements, ensuring everyone is informed and aligned.
What is Glean?
Glean is an AI knowledge management tool designed to help employees quickly find information across all the tools and documents their company uses. Unlike general-purpose AI search engines, Glean focuses exclusively on internal company knowledge.
Key features
AI chat assistant: Glean’s chat assistant provides answers, summaries, and analysis of work documents. Employees can ask questions in natural language and get concise, cited responses drawn from internal data.
Personalized knowledge access: Builds a user-specific knowledge graph, adapting search results to each employee’s role, projects, and past interactions.
App integrations: Glean connects with over 100 workplace tools. This unified search covers emails, documents, tickets, wikis, and more, so employees can find what they need without switching platforms.
Security and compliance: Glean supports SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, and GDPR. It uses strict permissions, full encryption, audit logs, and offers flexible deployment, including private cloud.
You might be interested in: Glean Competitors: Best AI Knowledge Tools 2025
Glean use cases for enterprise search
Engineering: Engineers can quickly search technical documentation, code repositories, and past discussions to solve problems and onboard faster.
Sales: Sales teams use Glean to track client communications, retrieve important files, and access up-to-date product information.
Customer support: Support agents resolve issues faster by searching help articles, past tickets, and knowledge base entries, all from one place and designed for AI customer success.
HR and knowledge management: HR teams manage policies, personnel files, and training materials, while knowledge managers organize and share resources across the company.
General document discovery: Glean is good at finding employee handbooks, HR policies, training materials, and process documentation.
Tanka is an AI-powered team messenger and collaboration platform with persistent long-term memory, advanced AI messaging, and a centralized knowledge base. Unlike traditional chat tools, Tanka remembers conversations, projects, and shared resources over time—enabling powerful, AI-driven search across your entire team’s memory. It allows users to instantly find information from internal chats, documents, and past decisions, all in context, whenever they need it. With enterprise-grade security and seamless integration with Slack, Outlook, WhatsApp, and more, Tanka is ideal for teams who need to keep information organized, accessible, and actionable.
Key features
Long-term AI memory: Tanka’s memory bank captures and organizes past conversations, files, and workflows, preserving an institutional AI knowledge base, even when team members leave.
AI search: Tanka's AI assistant allows users to search across internal chats, documents, and shared knowledge using the team's stored information. Search results clearly indicate their source, helping users quickly locate relevant information within their organization.
Memory and knowledge management: Tanka AI captures and organizes data from chats, documents, project notes, and company materials such as training resources into a unified, searchable knowledge base—making it easy to find and retrieve important information whenever users need it.
AI-powered messaging: Tanka’s AI memory adapts over time, learning from every conversation, message, and file shared. It helps each employee access the information they need immediately.
Smart reply: Tanka delivers instant, context-aware suggestions for messages, emails, and chats, saving hours on repetitive communication and helping teams respond faster and more consistently.
Centralized communication hub: Tanka integrates with Slack, WhatsApp, Outlook, Gmail, and other tools. All your team’s chats, files, and tools come together in one place.
Global team support: Built-in real-time translation helps teams working across different languages and locations.
Task Automation: Prompts in the AI Assistant help users create customized task automations: easily set up daily to-dos, recurring reminders, follow-ups, and more.
Data security: Enterprise-grade encryption and strict access controls protect the team’s communications and stored information, ensuring privacy and compliance.
Team Wiki: A customizable, shared knowledge base that organizes information by team, project, or department. The AI learns from it to provide context-aware responses.
Co-memory: A shared space for project documents and resources. The AI uses it to generate relevant, context-rich responses.
Recruitment: HR teams use Tanka to draft job descriptions from group chat discussions, track candidate history, and retain interview notes, reducing time-to-hire. Tanka supports the full hiring process, from generating job descriptions to drafting offer letters, all powered by AI memory.
Catch-up after time off: Employees returning from leave can get AI-generated summaries of missed discussions.
OKRs and performance reviews: Managers can track team progress, milestones, and blockers with AI-generated insights, making performance reviews more data-driven.
CRM: Sales and support teams can track client interactions, preferences, and historical conversations. Smart Reply and Team Wiki features help resolve support tickets faster and maintain consistent communication.
Legal and compliance documentation: Law firms and compliance teams use Tanka to store case discussions, regulatory updates, and legal insights in Tanka’s long-term memory.
Marketing campaign coordination: Marketing teams monitor campaign performance and audience engagement.
Cross-functional collaboration: Teams across HR, marketing, sales, finance, and operations can use Tanka’s AI memory to connect insights, improve communication, and work together on complex projects.
Tanka stands out as the only solution that combines AI-powered messaging, long-term memory, and centralized knowledge management in a single platform, helping startups and growing teams stay organized and informed.
Key feature comparison: Perplexity, Glean, and Tanka
Let's compare the key features of all three tools and understand their differences based on their use cases, target audience, AI capabilities, and data management.
Usage and target audience
Usage and target audience comparison
AI Features
AI Features comparison
Data management and memory
Data management and memory comparison
Final thoughts: Which AI assistant is right for you?
Use Perplexity for research
Perplexity is designed for teams focused on research and analysis. It enables in-depth data extraction from various document types, supports custom prompts for AI responses, and offers tools for analyzing market trends, customer feedback, and competitive intelligence. It is ideal for teams needing to work with large datasets or conduct targeted research across different content sources.
Use Glean for knowledge management and internal databases
Glean is best for teams that need to quickly retrieve and organize internal information. Glean helps users find relevant documents, past communications, and other resources. It's useful for teams that rely on quick access to knowledge across departments.
Use Tanka for team collaborations
Tanka is an AI tool designed for teams that need to manage knowledge, centralize communication, and maintain project continuity. Its long-term memory retains context from past conversations, project updates, and client interactions, allowing the AI to learn and adapt over time. This supports consistent communication and preserves team knowledge.
Tanka enables users to search across team chats, documents, and shared knowledge, clearly showing the source of each result. By using the team’s history, it helps identify patterns, recall past decisions, and generate insights that support ongoing work.
With integration across multiple platforms, Tanka is a good choice for teams handling large volumes of communication and data, such as in HR, marketing, customer service, sales, and more.
