Is SmartMemory a Glean alternative?

Not directly. Glean is enterprise search over what your company wrote. SmartMemory is memory for what your AI agents decide. Many teams will use both.

Can agents built outside Glean store memories in Glean?

Glean's published open agent platform gives outside agents read access to indexed company content. SmartMemory is built for agents to write memories and decisions.

Does SmartMemory replace enterprise search?

No. SmartMemory does not connect to hundreds of workplace apps. It stores and recalls the knowledge and decisions your agents and apps write to it, and it can ingest documents you give it.

How does SmartMemory answer "why did the agent do that"?

Each decision keeps its rationale, rejected alternatives, and evidence. Replaced decisions stay on record with the reason they changed, and search can be asked what the system believed on any past date.

How do I try SmartMemory?

Run pip install smartmemory then smartmemory setup. It runs locally with no Docker and connects to Claude Code, Cursor, and any MCP client.

SmartMemory vs Glean

Name: SmartMemory
Author: SmartMemory

Glean knows what your company wrote. SmartMemory knows what your agents decided, why, and what they believed at the time.

They solve different problems, and many teams will want both. Glean is enterprise search and an assistant over the documents and conversations in your workplace apps. SmartMemory is the memory layer your agents write to: decisions with their reasons, what replaced them, and where every fact came from.

Short answer

Glean is an enterprise search and AI assistant platform that indexes content across a company's workplace apps, with permission-aware retrieval. SmartMemory is a memory layer for AI agents. Agents write facts and decisions into it, each decision keeps its rationale and rejected alternatives, replaced decisions are kept and marked superseded, and any answer can be traced to its source or asked "as of" a past date. Use Glean to find what people wrote. Use SmartMemory to remember what agents decided.

Comparison table

	Glean	SmartMemory
What it is	Enterprise search, assistant, and agent builder over workplace apps	Memory layer for AI agents and AI apps
Main job	Find and answer from what people wrote	Remember what agents decided, and why
Data sources	275+ connectors to workplace apps	Whatever your agents and apps write, plus ingested documents and conversations
Can outside agents write to it	Read access for outside agents (search, chat, read document)	Yes. Agents add memories and decisions through MCP, SDKs, or REST
Decisions with rationale and rejected alternatives	Not published	Yes
Superseded beliefs kept and marked, not overwritten	Not published	Yes
"What did we believe as of a past date"	Not published	Yes, search takes an as-of date
Source trail for an answer	Permission-aware citations to indexed content	A provenance chain from each decision back to its evidence
Learns from agent runs	Yes. Learns successful tool sequences from agent traces	Procedure matching and trajectories from recorded runs
MCP	MCP server for outside agents, and MCP host for 20+ servers	MCP server with read and write tools
Model choice	40+ models supported	Model-neutral. Memory lives outside the model
How you start	Enterprise sales	pip install smartmemory, free local runtime, no Docker
Where it runs	Glean cloud	Locally, hosted, or self-hosted in your own cloud
Compliance posture published	SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, ISO 42001, HIPAA, GDPR	Workspace, user, and tenant isolation with an audit trail on every write

Where Glean is strong

Breadth. Hundreds of connectors to the apps a company already uses, with each user's permissions respected.
A finished product for employees. Search, an assistant, and a no-code agent builder, sold and deployed company-wide.
A graph of people, content, and activity across the company, and a per-user graph for personal context.

Where SmartMemory is different

Agents write, not just read. An agent records what it learned and what it decided, in the same place every other agent can recall it.
Decisions are first-class. Each one keeps its rationale, the options that were rejected, and its constraints.
Nothing is silently overwritten. When a decision changes, the old one is kept, marked superseded, and linked to the reason.
Time travel for audits. Ask what the system believed on any past date, not just what it believes now.
Provenance on every answer. Follow a decision back through the decisions and documents it rests on.
Developer-first. Free local runtime from pip, an MCP server, and SDKs. No sales call to try it.

Using them together

Glean is a strong source of what people wrote. SmartMemory can ingest those documents as evidence, and every agent decision can cite them. When an auditor asks why an agent did something, the answer walks from the decision, to the decision it replaced, to the original document your team wrote.

Frequently asked

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