Best Enterprise Search Software in 2024 (Buyer’s Guide)

For enterprise organizations, having access to the right data and insights at the right time is critical for making smart business decisions and staying ahead of the curve. Unfortunately, the sheer volume of data most organizations are dealing with, including their own internal content, makes knowledge management a herculean task. Furthermore, enterprise content is frequently siloed, making it difficult to leverage firmwide intellectual property. 

According to assessments by Panopto and YOU.gov, major U.S. corporations lose over $40 million annually due to everyday operational inefficiencies, which are directly linked to inadequate knowledge sharing. And new hires frequently waste 200-plus hours on familiarizing themselves with their new roles, in the absence of efficient knowledge transfer processes.

Enter: enterprise search engines.

Enterprise search solutions increase productivity, efficiency, and cohesion across an organization by organizing the company’s entire body of knowledge—and then making it searchable, indexable, and shareable.  

Below, we dive into some of the top enterprise search solutions available today, as well as their main features, use cases, pros, and cons—so that you can choose the right solution for your organization’s needs. 

Best Enterprise Search Engines At a Glance

1. AlphaSense – Best for extracting insights and answers from both high-value internal and external market intelligence content with the power of artificial intelligence—all on a single platform.
2. Hebbia – Best for indexing any internal content, as well as publicly available external content, via portal or API
3. Algolia – Best for companies that wish to create fast and personalized search and discovery experiences for their customers
4. Elastic – Best for open-source enterprise search with data visualization capabilities
5. Guru – Best for creating a centralized library of all company processes and knowledge
6. Glean – Best for productivity and workflow optimization 
7. Unleash – Best for improved collaboration and productivity and quick onboarding
8. Coveo – Best for AI-led relevance

Best Enterprise Search Software  

AlphaSense

AlphaSense is a secure, end-to-end market intelligence platform powered by 10+ years of AI development for business and financial professionals looking to centralize their proprietary internal content alongside an out-of-the-box collection of 300M+ premium external documents—with the goal of increasing team productivity and collaboration.  

Consistently ranked as an industry leader by TrustRadius and G2, AlphaSense was also recognized by Forbes as a top 50 AI company in 2023. 

Here’s how our platform enables you to extract insights and answers from both high-value internal and external content with the power of artificial intelligence and generative AI—all on a single platform. 

Features

Extensive Out-of-the-Box Content Library

AlphaSense allows you to combine valuable internal content with 10,000+ private, public, premium, and proprietary external data sources into one platform. 

Our external content sources include trade journals, news, and SEC and global filings. AlphaSense users also have access to two premium and proprietary content offerings. These are:

• Wall Street Insights® – A collection of broker research from Wall Street’s leading firms, covering global sector themes, industries, and companies from 1,000+ sell-side and independent firms, available within the AlphaSense platform. Research professionals can even preview the contents of a broker report, saving them wasted time and money on potentially fruitless research.

• Expert Transcript Library – 40,000+ transcripts of one-on-one calls with industry experts, competitors, customers, professionals, and former and current executives, with the ability to conduct your own 1:1 expert calls for less.

In addition to these sources, you can upload and search through your own content. That includes:

• Internal research, notes, and presentations
• Meeting and conference notes
• Reports from industry and market intelligence providers
• Newsletters, web pages, and RSS feeds

AI Search & Summarization Technology

Our industry-leading suite of generative AI tools is purpose-built to deliver business-grade insights, leaning on 10+ years of AI tech development. Our proprietary AlphaSense Large Language Model (ASLLM)—trained specifically on business and financial data—matches or beats the leading third-party LLMs over 90% of the time. 

Our suite of tools currently includes:

Smart Summaries

This feature allows you to glean instant earnings insights (reducing time spent on research during earnings season), quickly capture company outlook, and generate an expert-approved SWOT analysis straight from former competitors, partners, and employees. All Summaries provide you with citations to the exact snippets of text from where the summaries are sourced—combining high accuracy with easy verification. We also apply this same technology to our collection of expert calls. 

AlphaSense Assistant

Assistant is a generative AI chat experience that transforms how users can extract insights from hundreds of millions of premium content sources. Whenever you search for information, Assistant is there to summarize key company events, emerging topics, and industry-wide viewpoints. You can dig deeper into topics by asking Assistant follow-up questions or choosing a suggested query.

Smart Synonyms™

This unique feature is proprietary to AlphaSense and has the capability to understand both the keyword and search intent behind any of your queries, factoring in search results that include variations in business language. For example, a search for TAM might also bring back results on market size. 

Relevancy Algorithm

AlphaSense’s advanced algorithm also eliminates noise (i.e., content with matching keywords but ultimately irrelevant to your specific search objective) and surfaces only the most relevant results.  This algorithm saves you precious time and energy, allowing you to get straight to analysis and other high-level tasks.  

Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment Analysis, a natural language processing (NLP)-based feature, parses through content and identifies nuances in the tone and subjective meaning of text. It then uses color coding to help readers identify the document’s positive, negative, and neutral sentiments. 

This technology assigns each search term a numerical sentiment change score to help users track any slight change in market sentiments across time. Users can take advantage of it to make better-informed investment decisions and improve risk management strategies. 

Integration Capabilities

Through either an AlphaSense-managed solution in our secure cloud or a customer-managed solution in the cloud of your choice, customers can easily integrate content at enterprise scale through our Ingestion API or Enterprise-Grade Connectors—like Microsoft 365/Sharepoint, Box, S3, and more. Enterprise Intelligence supports the upload and management of tens of millions of documents.

Our integration capabilities allow for more streamlined collaboration with members across your organization and improve overall team productivity. Our proprietary AI technology allows you to search across all internal and external company content to find crucial insights, catching what other platforms miss in a secure and automated way.

Lastly, AlphaSense offers content processing and content management. Content processing allows company recognition within user documents, while content management features support custom tags and folder structures to better organize internal content.

Monitoring, Analysis, and Collaboration Tools

AlphaSense is designed to help users find insights faster. In order to do that, we offer a number of tools that extend beyond search and summarization to help users accelerate research tasks.  

• Customizable Dashboards create a centralized information hub for monitoring key companies and themes, while tailored real-time alerts provide real-time updates.
• Powerful collaboration tools like Notebook+ and commenting features help teams manage and share insights more effectively.
• Table Tools allow you to move faster with spreadsheet-style visualizations directly from company filings, so you can chain together, edit, and optimize tables for analysis. 
• Image Search allows you to discover insights buried in charts to quickly capture data without reading through pages of documents.
• Snippet Explorer allows you to effortlessly look at any topic or theme and all its historical mentions in a single view.
• Our Black-lining feature allows you to automatically identify any QoQ changes in SEC filings
• Automated Monitoring allows you to set up real-time alerts that send instant updates on any relevant market movements, news, emerging trends, and competitor activities. We also generate snapshots of companies and topics regularly that keep you ahead of the curve with actionable insights.

AlphaSense Pros

• Extensive content database that spans the four key perspectives, including broker research, expert calls, company documents, news & regulatory sites.
• Incorporates AI search technology, machine learning, and sentiment analysis
• Generative AI features, like Smart Summaries, for earnings and image search
• Automated and customizable alerts
• All-in-one research platform
• User-friendly interface
• Internal messaging and collaboration features
• Support for APIs and integrations
• Supports enterprise-level organizations and teams
• Enterprise-grade data production complying with global security standards: SOC2, ISO270001, FIPS 140-2, SAML 2.0
• Excellent customer support team, including 24/7 chat with product specialists, a live Help button on the website, and regular live AlphaSense Education webinars

AlphaSense Cons

• Visualization tools are limited at this time
• Collaboration tools are limited to users with AlphaSense licenses

Hebbia

Hebbia is a search engine and large-language model (LLM) productivity tool. It was founded in 2020 by George Sivulka, raising over $30M across three financing rounds. Powered by AI and machine learning, Hebbia generates valuable insights from public and private content through a combination of chat-style search and generative AI. Companies and professionals rely on Hebbia to streamline and automate their research and due diligence processes, without compromising on accuracy. 

With Hebbia, users can index any documents of any type, either via portal or API, and get an encrypted search engine. Then, they can use Hebbia’s semantic search to ask complex questions spanning across thousands of documents, accessing synthesized answers instantly. 

Hebbia focuses on sourcing internal content first—including PDFs, transcripts, Powerpoint presentations, and other documents—with its ability to “index anything.” Then, it sources external content from company websites, news sources, and financial reporting data. However, Hebbia only has access to publicly available content, and the platform provides limited industry expertise.

Related Reading: AlphaSense vs Hebbia

Features

AI-Powered Neural Search

Hebbia’s advanced AI search technology understands users’ needs and helps them find accurate answers to their questions quickly and reliably. It searches through your internal data, publicly available data on the web, as well as anything you import to deliver you the most precise and relevant information. 

Integrations and API-Connectors

Hebbia connects to internal sources such as SharePoint, virtual deal rooms (VDR), etc. to help you organize and search through all your company’s internal data.

Table Extraction 

This feature helps structure any unstructured data and can be instrumental in quickly making sense of financial information.

Custom Alerts

If you would like to be alerted when specific events occur (i.e. when a new deal comes in, updated customer mix, etc.), Hebbia can accommodate those customized requests and send real-time notifications. 

Hebbia Pros

• Can index any document of any type, via portal or API
• Features intelligent semantic search
• Pre-indexes company filings and research
• Supports uploads of private company data
• Offers a full suite of collaborative tools and access controls
• Utilizes AI technology to understand the context of your query
• Features end-to-end encryption

Hebbia Cons

• Relatively new in the market; product is still developing and learning
• Only able to access public content; limited industry expertise
• Must import data from external sources
• Does not have access to proprietary content sources, such as broker research or expert calls
• May misinterpret user’s intent, leading to inaccurate search results
• Lacks sentiment analysis features
• No company insights, snapshots, or tearsheets

Algolia

Algolia is an end-to-end AI search and discovery platform, founded in 2012. It enables its customers to build fast and powerful search and discovery experiences for their in-app users and/or online visitors by surfacing the desired content instantly and at scale. 

Algolia’s main customers include B2C ecommerce, B2B ecommerce, marketplaces, media, and SaaS. Main use cases include:

• Mobile and app search
• Headless ecommerce
• Voice search
• Image search
• Enterprise search

By building and optimizing search and discovery experiences on Algolia, developers and business teams can increase online engagement, conversion rates, and revenue—helping consumers easily find and discover what they want across web, mobile, and voice channels. 

Features

Customization

Algolia offers a customizable dashboard to help you tailor your website’s search to your needs, as well as view search analytics. The dashboard enables your business and marketing teams to engage and customize the search experience to the specific benefit of your users. With the dashboard, you can do the following: 

• Promote specific products or brands
• Add personalization to your search
• Test different search configurations
• Get insights and analytics on user behavior
• Get insights and analytics on your products 

User Data

Algolia also allows you to access data that gives you a greater sense of who your end users are and how they behave with your content:

• View click and conversion metrics
• See which searches are popular and which are returning no results
• View these analytics for subsets of your users, such as geographic regions or mobile shoppers

Security and Compliance

Algolia is highly committed to compliance and security. It is compliant with BSI C5, HIPAA, GDPR, and CCPA and certified with ISO27001, ISO27017, SOC2 Type 2 and SOC3.

Algolia Pros:

• Easy set-up and integration
• Powerful indexing system, with a distributed database of networks around the world
• Utilizes proprietary NeuralSearch technology that combines vector-based natural language processing with keyword matching
• Useful tool for ecommerce companies that are interested in creating a great search experience for their customers

Algolia Cons:

• Price increases dramatically as company scales
• Limited customization is possible

Elasticsearch

The Elastic enterprise search platform enables enterprises to accelerate business outcomes by combining the power of search and AI. Some of the main features of the platform include:

Features

Integrations

Elastic allows you to stream in logs, metrics, traces, content, and more from your apps, endpoints, infrastructure, cloud, network, and every other common source in your ecosystem. Connect to all the systems that matter with ease. 

Secure and Scalable Storage

Elastic Stack protects your data and gives the right access to the right people. By paying an additional fee, you can use Elastic Stack to securely store and quickly access all your data.

AI and Machine Learning

Surface relevant results from structured and unstructured data in real time with native support for supervised and unsupervised machine learning and more. Elasticsearch also now features generative AI search capabilities through its Elasticsearch Relevance Engine™ (ESRE). ESRE combines Elastic’s text search with AI to give users a full suite of sophisticated retrieval algorithms and the ability to integrate with large language models (LLMs).

Visualization

Elastic’s fully integrated data visualization user interface allows you to explore your data, spot trends and anomalies, find key insights, and share results with collaborators. 

Workflow Automation

In Elastic’s platform, you can configure rules and take automated actions on alerts, anomalies, and insights with multiple integrated services designed to help you streamline workflows.

Elastic Pros:

• Highly scalable solution 
• Can search and filter through millions of documents efficiently and quickly
• Provides the ability to progressively add search criteria to refine their searches and uncover trends in their data

Elastic Cons:

• No premium, proprietary content sets
• Some users have found the configuration process to be lacking 
• Steep learning curve for new users
• Security is not a feature that is enabled by default, but requires paying an additional fee
• Multiple features are hidden behind paywalls

Guru

Guru is an AI-powered enterprise search tool that integrates seamlessly into existing workflows. Customers appreciate Guru for centralizing all company knowledge in one place, helping with new hire onboarding, ensuring alignment across the organization, and facilitating better cross-functional collaboration.

Guru provides the following key features to companies that use a multi-tool stack, and particularly those who use Slack as their chat tool:

Features

Integration with Existing Sources

This allows companies to combine existing data, documents, and conversations into a single powerful search engine. Guru provides immediate answers within the current workspace by pulling information from various sources. That way, employees can get answers without having to leave their browser, Teams, Slack, or the Guru app. 

AI Capabilities

Guru’s NLP-based search interprets queries and understands your search intent, eliminating the need for keyword-based or exact-match text searches. 

Workflow Optimization

Guru’s search feature is optimized for diverse work environments, including integration with Slack. When asking questions in Slack, Guru will automatically suggest answers from reliable knowledge sources to help workers increase productivity and efficiency.

Guru Pros:

• Works well as a library for a company’s processes, knowledge, and useful information
• Integrates seamlessly with tools like Slack and Zendesk
• Integrations make it easy to find and create content

Guru Cons:

• No premium, proprietary content sets
• The trial version is limited in some access features
• The search functionality is not very intuitive and requires knowing exactly what you are looking for

Glean

Glean is an AI-powered workplace search, leveraging deep learning for vector search. With intuitive, context-aware search capabilities across all company apps, Glean delivers relevant and highly personalized results and empowers you to discover the information you need.

Customers refer to Glean as “Google for the internal workspace,” citing the powerful and customizable search functionality that helps find any topic, project, or technology at work.

Features

Deep Learning-Based Vector Search

Glean’s AI has a semantic understanding of natural language queries, and search relevance continues to improve as the AI becomes more trained on the company’s unique language and context.

Assistant and Chat Features

Glean offers a generative AI-based assistant service that provides answers, summaries, and analyses across documents, with the ability to track the source of information and ensure secure, private, and permissions-aware generative AI chats and results.

Personalization and Knowledge Graph

Glean’s platform builds a personalized knowledge graph for your company, which understands people, content, and interactions, and even suggests information before a search is initiated.This knowledge graph can also identify subject matter experts if knowledge artifacts do not exist.

Easy Setup and Integration

With over 100 connectors to various apps, Glean ensures quick setup and scalability. It enforces existing data source permissions and offers hosting options that align with the company’s data and security policies. 

Glean Pros:

• Powerful search functionality with advanced filtering capabilities
• Generative AI features that make search even easier and more precise
• Makes it easy to find the answer you are looking for across various platforms (Notion, Slack, Google Suite, etc.)

Glean Cons:

• Glean does not have proprietary or premium external content sets on its platform, as focus is only on internal content sourced

Unleash

Unleash is a cloud-based enterprise search platform that allows you to search across all of your organization’s apps and knowledge library and find all the information—emails, receipts, images, records, and anything else—in one place. Unleash uses the power of AI and semantic search to understand your search intent and any synonyms of your query, to deliver the most precise and relevant insights.

Unleash works on various platforms:

• Embedded in the company portal
• Through a fully kitted web and desktop app
• As a browser extension
• Via a slackbot

Features

Search Inside Documents

You don’t need to remember the file name to find the file you need. Unleash brings up the most relevant results to your search query using its semantic search capabilities. 

Advanced Filters

Unleash learns user behavior and frequently accessed information, delivering you more personalized, precise, and intelligent results.

All-Around Calculator

Whether you are looking for currency conversions, time zone differences, computations, temperatures, or distances, Unleash performs the calculations and delivers instant answers.

Web Search

With Unleash, your search isn’t limited to cloud-based applications and on-premise data—you can search Google, Bing, Wikipedia, and DuckDuckGo directly from Unleash.

Unleash Pros:

• Uses AI and semantic search to understand related keywords and synonyms 
• Seamlessly integrates with company portals
• Easy to install, configure, and use

Unleash Cons:

• No premium, proprietary content sets
• Requires a subscription
• Some limitations when using company’s infrastructure instead of their cloud

Coveo

Coveo is a cloud-based intelligent enterprise search engine that uses AI recommendations and personalizations to increase the relevance of every user’s experience. Coveo uses connectors and APIs to find results, regardless of format, and content can be accessed no matter where it’s located thanks to the easy indexing and unified search experience. Additionally, Coveo integrates seamlessly with your company’s tech stack, simplifying and streamlining the search experience. 

Features

Smart Snippets

With Smart Snippets, Coveo extracts the most relevant answer to your search query, so that you don’t have to manually sift through pages of results. This AI-based feature saves time and makes the research process much more streamlined.

Personalized Recommendations

Coveo’s AI anticipates what the user needs based on in-session actions and product associations. Thus, Coveo can recommend the precise products and content that you need, even when you are not sure what you are looking for. 

Integrations Designed for Scale

Coveo integrates with multiple applications—including Salesforce, SAP, Adobe, and Zendesk—allowing you to search across your entire content universe at once. 

Coveo Pros:

• Continually improving products to stay ahead of tech trends
• Customizable to your organization’s unique needs
• Most connectors/plugins/crawlers are available out-of-the-box
• Strong integration capabilities, particularly with Salesforce

Coveo Cons:

• No semantic search which means search results are less precise and relevant
• Sorting and filtering capabilities are weaker than competitors’

How to Choose an Enterprise Search Engine

When choosing an enterprise search engine for your organization, here are some key considerations to keep in mind:

Breadth of Content

Consider what kind of content is important for you to have access to. The amount and quality of content aggregated in an enterprise search solution can vary significantly. Most providers only supply publicly available web content, though some do offer the ability to add connectors to 3rd party subscription providers. 

In contrast, AlphaSense allows you to pair your internal content with over 300 million premium, public, private, and proprietary documents—including company documents, news, analyst reports, and expert calls—and we’re adding more than 2 million new documents per week. This eliminates the need to rely on multiple intelligence platforms, while driving up the efficiency and effectiveness of your organization’s knowledge management and sharing process.

Artificial Intelligence and Generative AI

Many enterprise solutions are now incorporating AI and genAI into their platforms because this technology is so powerful at improving discoverability of internal research, delivering more relevant and precise search results, and adapting to evolving organizational needs. Some of the solutions in the above list are developing their own in-house generative AI capabilities, while others are utilizing more generic base models. Beyond generative AI, some of the above solutions offer intelligent search, while others do not.

AlphaSense is different from the other solutions on this list, as our suite of generative AI tools is purpose-built to deliver business-grade insights, leaning on 10+ years of AI tech development. Our proprietary AlphaSense Large Language Model (ASLLM)—trained specifically on business and financial data—matches or beats the leading third-party LLMs over 90% of the time. And past generative AI, our AI-based search capabilities are industry-leading and designed to enhance, speed up, and deepen your research.

Ease of Integration

Ease of integration is crucial in an enterprise search engine because organizations rely on a myriad of applications, databases, and content repositories. Choosing one that is not set up for easy integration can lead to inefficiencies and knowledge gaps. 

To choose the right enterprise search engine, you must assess its compatibility with existing systems, ease of implementation, and support for common integration protocols. Look for solutions with robust APIs, connectors, and plugins that facilitate smooth connectivity with diverse data sources. Ultimately, the chosen search engine should seamlessly blend into the existing technological landscape, promoting a cohesive and efficient information retrieval ecosystem for the enterprise.

AlphaSense allows you to easily upload and manage tens of millions of documents by uploading directly through our API, various 3rd party connectors, or customer-managed solutions in the cloud of your choice. With our various customizable solutions, we make it easy for your firm to securely sync internal content for your teams. 

Scalability

Scalability features including user management, broad system connectors, infrastructure compatibility, and collaboration or workflow tools are integral for enterprise-level organizations. Yet not all enterprise solutions are scalable. 

AlphaSense’s Enterprise Intelligence offers a robust suite of APIs–allowing customers to integrate their content, manage users and entitlements, and embed AlphaSense insights into other third party products at scale.

Personalization and Collaboration

In a business environment with diverse roles and responsibilities, personalization enhances efficiency by delivering search results that are specific to each user’s preferences, work patterns, and historical interactions. When selecting the right enterprise search engine, consider its capability to incorporate user profiles, preferences, and behavior analytics. Look for features that allow users to customize their search experience, such as saved searches, personalized dashboards, and adaptive algorithms that continuously improve result relevance based on individual usage patterns. 

Collaboration features facilitate knowledge sharing and team-based projects by allowing users to collaboratively search, annotate, and share insights. When choosing the right enterprise search engine, consider its ability to provide personalized user experiences through features like user profiles and adaptive learning algorithms. Look for collaboration tools such as shared workspaces, document commenting, and real-time editing capabilities. An effective enterprise search engine should foster a sense of user-centricity and collaborative knowledge sharing, ultimately contributing to a more efficient and connected work environment.

AlphaSense Enterprise Intelligence helps your organization create a consistent market view with customizable dashboards & alerts, advanced highlighting & annotation capabilities & a robust, collaborative notebook, enabled via enterprise-ready sharing & permission management.

Enterprise-Grade Data Protection

As you explore layering technology on top of your valuable internal content and IP, security must be front and center. This is because an enterprise search engine gains access to confidential, sensitive data. If proper security measures are not taken or if the solution does not comply with global security standards, your organization could be at risk.

AlphaSense is committed to the security and privacy of your data. AlphaSense Enterprise Intelligence’s cloud environment complies with global security standards—SOC  FIPS 140-2 standard encryption on all content and supports SAML 2.0 integration. That’s why over 4,000 clients in heavily regulated industries trust us with their data. 

Build or Buy

The last consideration is whether you would like to buy an enterprise search solution, or build one in-house. While both have their pros and cons, the most important thing to note is that building LLMs takes significant time, resources, and capital in order to effectively generate output. 

You would be responsible for everything from acquiring, cleaning, and curating large data sets for training, to computational resources (hardware, software, cloud services), ramping/hiring personnel, as well as maintenance and updates. For most enterprise organizations, this is a challenging endeavor—and one that won’t necessarily result in a product that matches the caliber of your needs.

Building an LLM means you have full control over customization and scalability, which is not always the case when you buy. However, when you buy AlphaSense’s Enterprise Intelligence solution, we ensure that you get the best of both worlds—the expertise and caliber of AI training you need, as well as the ability to personalize and scale your experience as you choose. 

For more help with deciding whether to build or buy an enterprise search solution, be sure to check out our whitepaper: Enterprise GenAI: To Build or Buy a GenAI LLM?

Raise Your Organizational IQ

In today’s age of information overload and fast-paced market movements, an enterprise search solution is integral for organizations to stay efficient, organized, and secure.

Discover how AlphaSense’s centralized, AI-driven platform can transform your enterprise knowledge with enhanced access to internal and premium external perspectives that deliver fast, relevant insights.

Start your free trial today of Enterprise Intelligence today.