Introduction
The release of ChatGPT in 2022 signaled the start of what Sam Altman has coined as ‘the intelligence age’. What followed was a rapid influx of players racing to reshape enterprise workflows with AI at the center. Although ChatGPT Enterprise is currently the frontrunner, the market remains complex and far from settled. In this article, we’ll take a look at some of ChatGPT Enterprise’s competitors, breaking down the technical and business use cases of each.
Before doing so, let’s first establish ChatGPT Enterprise’s positioning as a product.
What is ChatGPT Enterprise?
ChatGPT Enterprise is OpenAI’s flagship enterprise product. With a chat-based interface, the application can perform advanced reasoning, code generation, and document analysis.
True to its name, ChatGPT Enterprise was built as the enterprise-grade iteration of OpenAI’s ChatGPT offerings. As expected, it includes the standard capabilities organizations look for: administrative controls, user management, data privacy commitments, compliance badges (SOC 2, GDPR, etc.), and more. It also provides the most generous usage limits and priority access across ChatGPT plans. None of these features, however, explain why IT teams actually choose ChatGPT Enterprise. In reality, it is usually adopted because of a top-down prerogative or bottoms-up motion.
Why do companies choose ChatGPT Enterprise?
The Top Down Story
One reason organizations adopt ChatGPT Enterprise is its broad applicability across roles and functions. That means everybody can use it for something; it supports engineers in writing code, sales managers preparing cold outreach, marketers producing creative content, and operations teams analyzing product data. This versatility makes ChatGPT Enterprise particularly attractive to companies pursuing AI adoption as a top-down initiative embedded into everyday workflows. In these scenarios, ChatGPT Enterprise is a low-risk choice, as it is a powerful AI chatbot that functions much like a flexible, generalist employee.
The Bottom Up Story
In other cases, adoption is driven by what can be described as IT creep. ChatGPT is without a doubt one of the most widely used tools today, blurring the line between personal and professional use. Employees frequently adopt it on their own, paying out of pocket and later asking for reimbursement, or charging it to existing corporate credit cards.
Over time, this spreads across the organization as individual employees subscribe to ChatGPT Pro or ChatGPT Business to enhance their own productivity. However, this creates a patchwork of disconnected accounts and is hard to oversee. IT has to eventually step in to consolidate usage, buying an enterprise subscription to bring everything under a centralized system.
What are the limitations of ChatGPT Enterprise?
At its core, ChatGPT Enterprise is still a chat application. While it does deliver a phenomenal chat experience, its capabilities are also shaped and limited by that model. It is not designed to seamlessly orchestrate multiple external tools outside a conversational session, nor can it autonomously retrieve data from integrations without explicit user action. Ultimately, ChatGPT Enterprise expands what chat can do in an enterprise’s ecosystem, but is also confined to that chat paradigm.
This leads to two distinct classes of alternatives to ChatGPT Enterprise. There are (i) other chat-based tools that emphasize different capabilities or priorities and (ii) general-purpose AI platforms built to tackle open-ended problems without relying on a conversational interface. Today, we’ll examine both groups.
Alternative #1: Credal, Multi-Agent Intelligence
Credal functions as an AI orchestration layer, enabling teams to build multi-agent workflows for complex tasks. In a recruiting context, this could mean linking a recruiter agent with a separate email agent and Google Drive focused agent to collaboratively handle the initial round of candidate screening.
Credal tackles many of the challenges that prevent enterprises from deploying AI in production. It provides ready-to-use integrations with major data sources (Google Drive, Salesforce, etc) with mirrored permission models to satisfy compliance requirements, and also allows memory to move between agents so they can collaborate with shared context.
Unlike a standalone AI assistant, Credal is a full-fledged AI workspace. It is designed for large enterprises facing complex requirements such as strict compliance mandates, custom data sources, and internal policies that must be enforced.
Multi-agent orchestration
One of Credal’s standout capabilities is the ability to orchestrate multiple AI agents, a feature that’s largely absent in other platforms. Deploying several agents allows each to maintain task-specific context, enhancing accuracy and results. For example, an agent dedicated to sending emails could master the company’s tone, email policies, and contacts.
This means that agents are able to discover each other autonomously and work together to tackle any task.
Deep Enterprise Integrations
Credal comes with built-in integrations to other enterprise systems like Salesforce, SAP, Google Drive, Dropbox, etc. These integrations include ready-made tools for common operations (e.g. adding a record to Salesforce), making it much easier for AI to exchange data both ways with these systems.
Governance
Credal delivers robust security and governance. With permissions mirroring, integrated data from external sources adheres to the same access control permissions of the original user. Agents can also be configured with human-in-the-loop checkpoints, requiring manual approval for critical actions. Finally, configurable data residency and comprehensive audit trails give IT departments the full visibility needed for risk management.
Model Support & Capabilities
- Multi-modal support: Text, image, document processing
- LLM options: GPT-4, Claude, Gemini, Llama, custom models
- Specialized models: Industry-specific fine-tuned options
- Processing capabilities: Real-time and batch processing
Alternative #2: Microsoft Copilot for M365
Microsoft Copilot for M365 is an AI assistant built directly into the Microsoft ecosystem, aimed at reshaping how users engage with Microsoft applications. Instead of functioning as a separate chat application, Copilot is integrated into familiar tools like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, and Outlook.
By operating within Microsoft applications, Copilot removes many barriers to seamless AI adoption in enterprises. It provides direct access to organizational data within Microsoft platforms, leveraging Microsoft’s established security and compliance frameworks, and maintains contextual awareness of existing workflows and documentation.
For companies that rely heavily on Microsoft tools, Copilot is an ideal choice that improves productivity without disrupting existing workflows or forcing users to adopt unfamiliar interfaces.
Deep Microsoft Integration
A key advantage of Copilot is its native integration with Microsoft applications. Users don’t need to leave Word, Excel, or other tools to access AI capabilities. In Word, it can create documents aligned with company templates, and in Excel, it can perform data analysis, generate formulas, and build charts right in the spreadsheet.
By tapping into Microsoft’s knowledge graph, Copilot can understand how people, files, and projects are connected across the organization.
Business Process Enhancement
Copilot elevates everyday Microsoft applications into AI-powered workflow tools. In Outlook, it can summarize emails, draft responses, and flag action items. In Teams, it can create meeting notes, highlight decisions, and automatically generate follow-up tasks.
For project management, Copilot can help by scheduling meetings in Outlook Calendar, manage documents in SharePoint, and track tasks in Microsoft Planner for a cohesive, unified AI layer across workflows.
Governance and Security
Microsoft designed Copilot with enterprise security in mind. It leverages existing Microsoft 365 security protections, such as tenant isolation, data residency options, and compliance with major frameworks (e.g. GDPR, HIPAA, and SOC 2).
Copilot enforces established permission structures, so users can only interact with content they were already authorized to access before. Administrators can also selectively enable or disable Copilot features, allowing deployments to follow corporate policies.
Model Support & Capabilities
- Foundation model: Based on GPT-4 with Microsoft-specific optimizations
- Multi-modal support: Text, image, and document processing capabilities
- Contextual understanding: Access to organizational context through Microsoft Graph
- Domain adaptation: Customization based on organizational data and patterns
- Processing scope: Real-time assistance within Microsoft applications
Alternative #3: Glean
Glean delivers AI-powered enterprise search and knowledge management, allowing organizations to uncover, access, and utilize internal information more effectively. It goes beyond traditional search tools by linking all parts of the tech stack, consolidating scattered knowledge repositories.
The platform prioritizes integrations, offering 100+ enterprise application connectors to support highly personalized search experiences. Results can be tailored according to each user’s role, access rights, and work behavior.
Universal Enterprise Search
Glean differentiates itself by being able to connect to nearly every internal information source. It captures content from cloud applications, document systems, wikis, tickets, code repositories, and more. Coupled with semantic understanding, Glean can interpret the intent behind queries, delivering relevant results without exact keyword matches.
AI-Powered Knowledge Discovery
Glean makes search much smarter—it’s more like having a knowledge assistant instead of just a simple search bar. It can summarize long documents, pick out important points from meetings, and suggest other content you might find useful.
Governance and Security
To meet compliance requirements, Glean offers audit logging, configurable data residency, and adherence to major frameworks such as SOC 2, GDPR, and HIPAA. Administrators retain fine-grained control over which sources are indexed and how data is shared, ensuring deployments follow organizational security policies.
Model Support & Capabilities
- Search models: Custom-trained enterprise search models optimized for organizational content
- Multi-modal support: Text, document, image, and video content indexing and search
- Contextual understanding: Awareness of organizational structure, relationships, and relevance
- Processing capabilities: Real-time indexing and near-instant search across enterprise content
- Language support: Multi-language indexing and search capabilities
Alternative #4: Perplexity for Enterprise
Perplexity is an AI research assistant that merges live web search with sophisticated information synthesis. Like ChatGPT Enterprise, it functions as an application users can actually call on directly. But it differs from conventional search engines and chatbots by delivering thorough answers with explicit source references, providing value to knowledge workers who rely on accurate, up-to-date information.
Real-Time Information Synthesis
What sets Perplexity apart is its ability to search the live web to pull together information from multiple sources and provide a concrete answer with clear citations. By maintaining real-time awareness rather than relying solely on pre-trained knowledge, Perplexity offers significant value to sectors where current information is a strategic asset such as market research, competitive intelligence, and investment analysis.
Enterprise Knowledge Integration
For enterprise clients, Perplexity integrates both public data and proprietary information sources, delivering a unified research experience. Users can query content spanning internal knowledge bases and external resources, while permission handling ensures sensitive information remains protected and available only to authorized personnel.
Governance and Compliance
Perplexity’s enterprise edition provides extensive administrative controls, usage analytics, and content filtering options. Admins can implement usage policies, track query activity, and enforce governance frameworks in line with company standards.
Model Support & Capabilities
- Research models: Specialized models optimized for information retrieval and synthesis
- Multi-modal support: Ability to process text queries and analyze web content including images
- Source evaluation: Algorithms that assess source credibility and relevance
- Processing capabilities: Real-time web search integration with AI-powered analysis
- Integration options: API access for embedding research capabilities into workflows
Alternative #5: Anthropic's Claude for Enterprise
Claude for Enterprise by Anthropic leverages Constitutional AI principles to deliver a safe, reliable, and ethically aligned assistant. Unlike conventional AI models that emphasize capability, Claude was built to minimize hallucinations and harmful outputs, providing predictable behavior for organizations dealing with sensitive or regulated information (it’s part of why we support Claude at Credal).
Claude is particularly suited for organizations that need advanced reasoning combined with enterprise-level safety, including sectors like financial services, legal, healthcare, and other highly regulated industries.
Constitutional AI Framework
Claude’s Constitutional AI design fundamentally guides its behavior and responses. By embedding ethical principles directly into the model’s training, Claude can reject harmful requests while still supporting valid business use cases, making it well-suited for handling sensitive topics responsibly.
Superior Analytical Capabilities
Claude is particularly strong in tasks requiring complex reasoning and analytical thinking. It can accurately process and interpret lengthy documents, such as legal contracts, financial reports, or technical documentation with remarkable accuracy. This is helpful for knowledge workers who need to efficiently extract insights from lengthy text.
Claude is also a top-tier coding assistant for technical teams. It can interpret complex codebases, generate accurate code snippets, and provide in-depth explanations of programming principles, making it invaluable for development, data analysis, and system architecture design.
Governance and Risk Management
Designed for enterprise risk management, Claude offers robust administrative controls, usage monitoring, and content filtering. Organizations can track activity and access detailed logs and reports that provide transparency into how Claude is used across teams.
Model Support & Capabilities
- Foundation models: Suite of Claude models optimized for different use cases and performance needs
- Multi-modal support: Text processing with image understanding capabilities
- Context window: Industry-leading context window for processing lengthy documents
- Processing capabilities: Real-time conversation with sophisticated reasoning
- Specialized strengths: Document analysis, coding, ethical reasoning, and nuanced explanations
Choosing the Right Alternative
In short, these are the best alternatives for each company:
- Complex workflows that require intelligence: Credal's multi-agent approach
- Microsoft ecosystem: Copilot for Microsoft 365
- Knowledge discovery: Glean's search and synthesis
- Research and analysis: Perplexity's real-time capabilities
- High-stakes reasoning: Anthropic's safety-focused approach
Why you should consider Credal
Credal shines in AI orchestration because it lets multiple agents work together on enterprise workflows. Rather than relying on a single-assistant model like ChatGPT Enterprise, Credal allows organizations to build specialized agents that work together autonomously to address complex business challenges. This approach improves results significantly as each agent retains domain-specific context for its assigned tasks.
With built-in enterprise integrations like Salesforce and Google Drive, advanced governance features such as permissions mirroring and human-in-the-loop approvals, and compatibility with major AI models GPT-4, Claude, Gemini, Credal provides the all-in-one AI workspace that large enterprises are looking for.
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