A governed coworker you run on your own infrastructure.
Coveo is a mature enterprise AI search platform with strong commerce, service, and workplace relevance. ZenSearch is a governed AI coworker: it answers with citations, takes approval-gated action, and runs on-premise or air-gapped with your own choice of LLM.
The Short Version
Choose ZenSearch if you need:
- True on-premise or air-gapped deployment with full infrastructure control
- Agents that take governed action — risk tiers T0–T5 with cross-surface approvals
- Automations on cron, email, event, and meeting triggers
- Natural-language queries against your enterprise databases
- Bring-your-own-LLM, including fully local models
Choose Coveo if you need:
- An established enterprise vendor with proven scale (15+ years)
- Deep Salesforce and SAP Commerce integrations
- E-commerce and customer-facing search and personalization
- 40+ pre-built connectors and ML-powered relevance tuning
Feature by Feature
ZenSearch vs Coveo, in detail.
Agents & AI Capabilities
| Capability | ZenSearch | Coveo |
|---|---|---|
Hybrid search (dense + sparse) | ||
Cross-encoder reranking | ||
Vector search | ||
Faceted search & filtering | ||
Retrieval augmented generation Coveo Relevance Generative Answering (RGA) | ||
Cited answers with sources | ||
AI agents with tool calling Coveo offers AI-powered recommendations but not autonomous agents with multi-agent delegation or self-improving memory | Limited | |
Custom agent builder | ||
Approval-gated write actions Every consequential write pauses on a per-team policy and routes to the right human | Risk tiers T0–T5 | Not available |
Cross-surface approvals | Slack, Teams, web | Not available |
Automations (cron / email / event / meeting) | Cron + event triggers | Not available |
Multi-agent delegation Agents hand subtasks to specialist agents on the same team, depth-limited and budget-clamped | ||
Self-improving procedural memory Successful multi-tool sessions distill into reusable playbooks future runs reuse | ||
Observational memory (long-conversation compression) 80%+ token compression on long agent sessions via cacheable LLM-extracted summaries | ||
NL-to-SQL database queries Query PostgreSQL, MySQL, ClickHouse, and SQL Server in natural language | ||
Answer confidence scoring | ||
Guardrails (hallucination, PII, injection) | Partial | |
Conversational chat | Limited | |
Slack / Teams / Chrome surfaces | Slack, Teams, Chrome | Not available |
Deployment & Models
| Capability | ZenSearch | Coveo |
|---|---|---|
Cloud (SaaS) | ||
On-premise deployment Coveo is cloud-only since deprecating on-premise in 2020 | ||
Air-gapped deployment | ||
Docker & Kubernetes | ||
Bring your own LLM Coveo uses its own managed models |
Data Connectors
| Capability | ZenSearch | Coveo |
|---|---|---|
Confluence | ||
Slack | ||
GitHub | Limited | |
Google Drive | ||
SharePoint | ||
Jira | ||
Notion | Community | |
Salesforce Coveo has deep Salesforce integration (Coveo for Salesforce) | ||
SAP Coveo has dedicated SAP Commerce integration | ||
HubSpot | Limited | |
PostgreSQL / MySQL / SQL Server Coveo can crawl databases but doesn't support NL-to-SQL | Database crawler | |
S3 / Azure Blob | ||
Web Crawler | ||
Total connectors | 18 | 40+ |
Where ZenSearch Stands Apart
Where a governed coworker pulls ahead.
Coveo is a strong, mature search platform. These are the places where ZenSearch is built differently — and where the difference shows up in procurement, security review, and the way your team actually works.
On-premise & air-gapped deployment
ZenSearchDeploy with Docker or Kubernetes on your own hardware, in your VPC, or fully air-gapped. Your data never leaves your network, and there's no vendor management plane.
On-premise & air-gapped deployment
CoveoCoveo deprecated its on-premise offering in 2020. All deployments are cloud-only on Coveo's infrastructure, with no air-gapped or on-premise option.
Agents that take governed action
ZenSearchZenSearch agents combine LLM reasoning with tool calling for multi-step work — searching, querying databases, and writing back. Each tool carries a risk tier (T0–T5), and consequential writes pause for a human approval in Slack, Teams, or the web.
Agents that take governed action
CoveoCoveo provides AI-powered relevance, recommendations, and generative answering, but does not offer autonomous AI agents that take approval-gated action across surfaces.
NL-to-SQL over your databases
ZenSearchAsk questions in plain English against PostgreSQL, MySQL, ClickHouse, and SQL Server. Schema discovery, read-only execution, and query validation are built in.
NL-to-SQL over your databases
CoveoCoveo can crawl and index database content through its database connector, but does not support natural-language SQL query generation or execution.
Comprehensive AI guardrails
ZenSearchInput and output guardrails — prompt injection detection, PII filtering, hallucination detection (lexical, semantic, hybrid), and toxicity filtering — all configurable per tenant.
Comprehensive AI guardrails
CoveoCoveo provides content moderation for its Relevance Generative Answering feature, but configurable guardrails for prompt injection and PII detection are limited.
A Closer Look
What "on-premise" actually means
Coveo is delivered as a managed SaaS platform. Here's what that involves, side by side with ZenSearch's true on-premise install.
ZenSearch On-Premise
- Deploy with Docker and Kubernetes on any infrastructure
- Full control over compute, storage, and networking
- Air-gapped deployment — no internet connection required
- Bring your own LLM (Ollama, LM Studio, or any OpenAI-compatible API)
- You manage updates on your own schedule
- No vendor operational access to your infrastructure
- Data never leaves your network
Coveo Cloud (SaaS)
- Delivered as a managed cloud platform on Coveo's infrastructure
- No on-premise option since Coveo deprecated it in 2020
- No air-gapped deployment available
- Uses Coveo's own managed AI models
- Updates managed by Coveo on their schedule
- Coveo operates and maintains the platform
- Indexed content is hosted in the Coveo Cloud
Get Started
See the
difference.
Try ZenSearch in the live demo, or talk to our team about a deployment shaped to your environment.