Glean alternative — Doyna for EU companies that can't ship data to the US
Glean is the gold standard for enterprise AI search — built for US-headquartered, multi-cloud SaaS companies. If you're an EU company that needs data residency, on-prem deployment, or native Romanian, Doyna is the alternative that doesn't make you trade those things away.
| Feature | Doyna | Glean |
|---|---|---|
| Data residency | EU (Frankfurt) or self-hosted on your infrastructure | US-only by default; EU pod in beta |
| Self-hosted / on-prem | Yes — air-gapped option included | No — cloud-only |
| Single-tenant | Yes, on every plan | Yes (Glean Cloud), but multi-cluster shared infra |
| Native Romanian | Yes — embeddings + voice trained on Romanian | Auto-translation only |
| Pricing (per user/month) | €23–€472 across 4 tiers | From ~$40 (annual contract, ~$1,200/yr min seat) |
| Enterprise search across email/docs/meetings | Yes | Yes — best-in-class for US SaaS stack |
| Knowledge graph | Yes — entity extraction, relationship mapping | Yes — broader connector library |
| Number of out-of-the-box connectors | ~25 (Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, common CRM/ITSM) | 100+ |
| Document generation (PPTX/PDF) | Yes — slide decks and reports from your data | No — search and chat only |
| Annual contract minimum | None — monthly billing on Starter/Pro | Yes — typically annual, often 25-seat floor |
TLDR
If you've evaluated Glean and the deal-breakers were EU data residency, on-prem deployment, or native Romanian language support, Doyna is the alternative built for those exact constraints. Same enterprise semantic search and knowledge graph; single-tenant by architecture; from €23/user/month with no annual contract floor.
Why this comparison exists
Glean has spent five years building the gold standard for enterprise AI search. For US-headquartered companies on a deep SaaS stack — Slack, Salesforce, Notion, Jira, ServiceNow — Glean is often the right tool. We don't pretend otherwise.
But there's a category of buyer Glean isn't built for. We hear from these buyers every week:
- The EU mid-market company whose legal team won't sign off on shipping employee email contents to US infrastructure, even with a DPA.
- The Romanian, German, or French team whose workforce thinks in their native language and finds Glean's auto-translation results subtly wrong on idioms, names, or domain-specific terminology.
- The 20-person consultancy that wants enterprise search but balks at Glean's annual contract and 25-seat floor.
- The regulated industry team — banking, insurance, defense — who needs to run search inside an air-gapped environment.
If you're one of those buyers, Doyna is the alternative that solves the exact constraint without making you give up everything else you'd want from Glean.
How Doyna and Glean overlap
Both products do the same primary thing: index your company's content (email, documents, meeting transcripts, CRM, ticketing) into a single vector store, build a knowledge graph of people-and-projects on top, and let your team chat with it. Both ground every answer in the actual source documents with citations, both respect existing access controls, and both ship as a daily-driver app for end users — not a developer SDK.
If you've used Glean's chat panel, Doyna's chat panel will feel familiar. The mental model is identical: ask a question, get an answer, click the citations to verify.
How they differ
Tenancy and architecture. Glean runs as a managed cloud service. Each customer gets their own logical environment, but the shared infrastructure runs in a Glean-operated AWS account. Doyna ships single-tenant: a dedicated Postgres + Qdrant + worker stack per customer, deployable to Doyna Cloud (Frankfurt) or to your own Kubernetes / VMs / bare metal. There is no shared compute path between customers in Doyna. That structural separation is what lets us guarantee zero-training contractually on every plan, not as an enterprise upsell.
Geography. Glean's primary datacenter footprint is US AWS. They've launched an EU pod, but the canonical control plane is US-side. Doyna's default deployment is Frankfurt; we don't operate a US datacenter. For an EU company under GDPR, Doyna's data path stays inside the EU end-to-end without any data-protection-by-design footnotes. For a Romanian company specifically: Doyna runs on EU infrastructure, embeddings are computed in EU, the team that operates it is in Cluj.
Language. Glean handles English natively and translates other languages through an upstream LLM layer. That works for most European languages 80% of the time and breaks down on idioms, named entities ("Petrescu" vs. "Petrache"), and Romanian-specific business terminology. Doyna's embedding model and voice synthesis were trained with Romanian as a first-class language, not an afterthought. We wrote about why this matters.
Pricing model. Glean is sold as an annual SaaS subscription with a minimum seat count and a discovery call before quotes. Doyna publishes per-seat pricing publicly: €23 / €62 / €157 / €472 per user per month across four tiers, billed monthly or annually, no minimum. Self-hosted is a fixed annual fee; we'll tell you the exact number on a 20-minute call.
Connectors. Glean has the broader catalog — last we counted, 100+ pre-built connectors. Doyna ships ~25, focused on what EU mid-market companies actually use: Microsoft 365 (Outlook, OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams), Google Workspace (Gmail, Drive, Calendar, Meet), the common CRMs (HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive), and the most-requested ITSM tools. We add 1–2 connectors per quarter based on customer demand. If your company is heavy on Notion + Linear + Slack, Glean is currently more mature; if your company is on Microsoft + Google + a CRM, the gap doesn't matter.
Document generation. Doyna can produce PowerPoint decks, PDF reports, and Word memos grounded in your indexed data — the same content the AI is searching. Glean focuses on search and chat; document generation isn't part of their product surface. For sales teams, consultants, and analysts who spend their week assembling artifacts from internal sources, this is a meaningful difference.
Where Glean is the right answer
We try to be honest with prospects about where the comparison goes the other way.
- You're a US company on US-AWS, Slack-centric, with 200+ knowledge workers. Glean's connector library, scaling, and SSO maturity here are ahead of Doyna.
- You need a 100+-connector catalog day one. Doyna will get you there over 18 months but Glean is there today.
- You want a search-only product without document generation, projects, or voice. Doyna's surface is broader; if you only want search, Glean is more focused.
Where Doyna is the right answer
- You're EU-based and a US data path is a deal-breaker.
- You need self-hosted or air-gapped deployment.
- You operate in Romanian (or another non-English language) and translation-quality artifacts matter.
- You're a sub-100-person company that doesn't want an annual minimum.
- You want document generation and project management alongside enterprise search.
How to evaluate both
The honest evaluation path is to run both in pilot for 2–3 weeks against the same five queries your team actually struggles to answer today. Let your end users compare the answers blind, and check three things:
- Citation quality. Does each answer link to the right specific document, or does it cite tangentially related material?
- Language fidelity (if you operate in Romanian or another non-English language). Are named entities, idioms, and domain terms handled correctly?
- Latency. Does each query return in under 4 seconds for your team's typical question complexity?
Doyna will give you a 14-day pilot with full data access for free. If you'd like to set one up, book a walkthrough or read more about what Doyna actually does on the capabilities page and pricing.