Why Middle East Enterprises Are Choosing ZeroForget Over Glean

Let us start with what is true: Glean is a strong enterprise search product. They have raised significant funding, built solid connectors, and their AI-powered search works well — if you are a US or European company with English-speaking teams and no data residency requirements.

But if you are an enterprise operating in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, or anywhere in the GCC, Glean has a problem it cannot solve with another funding round.

The Data Residency Problem

This is the dealbreaker that no amount of product excellence can fix.

Glean processes and stores your data in US-based data centers. There is no Middle East region. No Bahrain. No Riyadh. No Dubai. Your organizational knowledge — every Slack message, every Confluence page, every Google Drive document — leaves the region and lands on servers in the United States.

For many Middle East enterprises, this is not a preference issue. It is a legal one.

Saudi Arabia's Personal Data Protection Law (PDPL) requires that personal data of Saudi residents be stored within the Kingdom unless explicit approval is obtained from SDAIA for cross-border transfers. The UAE has Federal Decree-Law No. 45 of 2021 on data protection. Bahrain has its Personal Data Protection Law (PDPL). Qatar has the Data Privacy Protection Law.

Every GCC country is tightening data sovereignty requirements. And every one of these regulations creates friction — or outright prohibition — for sending enterprise data to US servers.

ZeroForget runs entirely on AWS Bahrain. Every byte of your data — documents, embeddings, AI inference, search indexes, audit logs — stays within the region. Not because we added a Middle East option. Because we built for the Middle East from day one.

Arabic Is Not a Translation Layer

Glean's AI was built for English. Arabic support, where it exists, runs through translation — your Arabic query gets translated to English, searched in English, and the results get translated back. This creates three problems:

Search quality collapses. Arabic morphology is fundamentally different from English. A single root like "كتب" generates dozens of valid forms — books, writers, offices, he wrote. Translation-based search misses these relationships entirely. When your compliance team searches for a regulatory concept in Arabic, they get results that went through two rounds of translation, losing nuance at every step.

Technical terminology breaks. In Saudi enterprises, professionals naturally mix Arabic and English in communication. An engineer might discuss "الـ deployment pipeline" or "مشكلة في الـ API." Translation-based systems do not handle this code-switching. They either translate everything (breaking the technical terms) or nothing (missing the Arabic context).

Response quality suffers. When Glean generates an AI answer, it thinks in English. For Arabic-speaking users, this means responses in stilted, overly formal Modern Standard Arabic that no professional actually uses in workplace communication. It reads like a UN document, not a colleague's answer.

ZeroForget was built with native Arabic understanding. Our text processing pipeline handles Arabic morphology, normalization, and diacritics from the ground up. Our search understands that a query in Arabic should find relevant documents in both Arabic and English. Our AI generates responses in natural, professional Arabic — the kind your team actually speaks.

The Connectors Your Region Actually Uses

Glean has excellent connectors for the US enterprise stack. But Middle East enterprises have a different reality:

Government and semi-government organizations often use custom document management systems, local ERP platforms, and communication tools that Glean does not connect to.

Saudi banks and financial institutions under SAMA regulation have specific requirements for how connectors authenticate, what data they can access, and how sync operations are logged. Generic OAuth flows do not always work within the compliance frameworks these institutions operate under.

Mixed-language document environments where the same Confluence space or SharePoint site contains documents in Arabic, English, and sometimes both within the same document. Connectors need to handle this gracefully, not treat it as an edge case.

ZeroForget builds connectors with Middle East enterprise environments in mind. We support the standard platforms — Slack, Notion, GitHub, Confluence, Google Drive, SharePoint, Jira, Freshdesk — but we also understand the compliance wrappers, authentication patterns, and mixed-language content that are standard in the region.

PDPL Compliance Is Not a Checkbox

When a Saudi enterprise asks Glean about PDPL compliance, the conversation gets complicated fast. Where is the data stored? US servers. Who processes it? US-based AI services. Can we get a data processing agreement that satisfies SDAIA? That depends on the specific transfer mechanism, the legal basis, the type of data involved...

When a Saudi enterprise asks ZeroForget about PDPL compliance, the answer is simple: your data never leaves Saudi Arabia. All compute, storage, AI inference, and search operations run in AWS Bahrain. There is no cross-border transfer to evaluate because there is no cross-border transfer.

This is not just about avoiding legal risk. It is about speed of procurement. Middle East enterprises — especially government entities, banks, and healthcare organizations — have procurement processes that can take months when cross-border data transfer is involved. Legal teams need to evaluate transfer mechanisms. Data protection officers need to assess risk. SDAIA approvals may be required.

With ZeroForget, the data residency question is answered before it is asked. Procurement teams can move directly to evaluating the product instead of spending months on data transfer assessments.

Enterprise-Grade Security Built for the Region

Both Glean and ZeroForget take security seriously. But our security architecture was designed specifically for Middle East enterprise requirements:

• Strict tenant isolation enforces complete workspace separation at the infrastructure level
• Dedicated encryption keys for Enterprise customers — revoke access and data becomes cryptographically inaccessible
• Full audit logging of every query, access, and modification — supporting PDPL Article 20 deletion requirements
• Staged key revocation with recovery window before permanent cryptographic erasure
• Team-level source access control — search results respect your organization's permission boundaries

Pricing That Makes Sense for the Region

Glean's pricing is built for large US enterprises. Published reports suggest pricing starts around $15-20 per user per month, with significant minimums and annual commitments that assume US-scale budgets.

ZeroForget offers a free tier for up to 5 users — enough for a team to evaluate the product with real data, not a sandbox demo. Paid plans start at $12 per user per month (Starter) and $22 per user per month (Business), with annual discounts that bring Business to $17 per user per month.

For growing Saudi startups, mid-size enterprises, and teams within larger organizations that want to start small, this pricing makes the difference between "let us try it" and "let us schedule a budget meeting for next quarter."

Deploy Anywhere Your Organization Requires

ZeroForget was designed from day one to be cloud portable. While we run on AWS Bahrain for Middle East customers today, the platform deploys on any major cloud provider — AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, or Oracle Cloud — wherever your organization operates.

This is not a future roadmap item. It is a core design principle. Every component of ZeroForget — compute, storage, AI inference, search — is built with clean abstraction boundaries that make cloud provider a deployment decision, not an engineering constraint.

For multinational organizations with operations across different regions, this means a single platform that adapts to your infrastructure requirements. Need AWS in Bahrain for Saudi operations and Azure in the UAE? That is a deployment configuration, not a migration project.

Glean's architecture is tightly coupled to their specific cloud infrastructure. You get what they offer, where they offer it. ZeroForget gives you the freedom to deploy on the cloud your organization already trusts.

When Glean Is the Right Choice

We are not claiming Glean is a bad product. If you are a US-based enterprise with English-speaking teams, no data residency requirements, and budget for enterprise sales cycles, Glean is a legitimate option worth evaluating.

But if your data needs to stay in the Middle East, if your teams work in Arabic, if PDPL compliance matters to your procurement process, or if you want to start with a free tier instead of an enterprise sales cycle — Glean was not built for you.

ZeroForget was.

The Bottom Line

The enterprise knowledge intelligence market is growing fast. Glean has proven the category. But proving a category in the US does not mean owning it everywhere.

The Middle East has specific requirements — data residency, Arabic language support, regional compliance frameworks, mixed-language workplaces — that cannot be solved by adding a translation layer to a US-centric product.

ZeroForget was built from the ground up for enterprises in Saudi Arabia and the GCC. Not adapted. Not localized. Built.

Your knowledge stays in your region. Your language is a first-class citizen. Your compliance requirements are met by architecture, not by lawyers.

That is why Middle East enterprises are choosing ZeroForget.