What is the best AI workspace for teams in 2026?

It depends on where your data can live and whether you want team knowledge to accumulate. For organizations that need AI on their own infrastructure and want every team conversation to become shared, attributed context, Particula Lumen ranks first: it runs on your servers with 200+ models or your own Ollama and vLLM, enforces team isolation with row-level security, and is licensed flat with unlimited users on its Business and Enterprise tiers. If you have no infrastructure team and OpenAI models are acceptable, ChatGPT Business at $20 per user per month billed annually is the simplest start. If your company runs on Microsoft 365, Microsoft 365 Copilot at $30 per user per month grounds answers in the mail, files and chats each user can already open. If you have an engineer to run it and can keep its branding, Open WebUI costs nothing to license at any size.

What happened to ChatGPT Team?

OpenAI renamed ChatGPT Team to ChatGPT Business on August 29, 2025, and said at the time that only the name changed. The Standard seat lists at $20 per user per month billed annually or $25 billed monthly, with a minimum of two seats. Since late August 2026 a Business workspace can also mix in Premium seats at $100 per user per month billed annually or $125 monthly, which carry five times the usage of Standard. A Business subscription is capped at 200 paid seats in total. SAML SSO is included, while SCIM, role-based access controls, the Compliance API and IP allowlisting are listed as Enterprise features. Older comparisons still use the Team name, so expect to see both.

Can you self-host ChatGPT for your team?

No. ChatGPT Business and ChatGPT Enterprise are hosted by OpenAI, and the data residency options on Enterprise control where OpenAI stores data and runs inference, not where the software runs. If the requirement is that prompts and conversations never leave your network, you need a self-hosted workspace in front of models you run yourself. The open-source options are Open WebUI, LibreChat and AnythingLLM, and Onyx if company search is the main job. Particula Lumen is the commercial option built around team memory, and it can run fully air-gapped by pointing it at Ollama or vLLM instead of cloud models. Plan for the inference side separately: a workspace runs on an ordinary VM, while GPU capacity for the models is the part that needs sizing and budget.

Do ChatGPT Business and Claude Team share memory across a team?

No. OpenAI's Business memory FAQ says memories are tied to each individual account and cannot be transferred to other users, even within the same workspace. Anthropic's documentation says memory on Team and Enterprise is off by default, is managed by each user once an Owner enables it, and cannot be viewed by Owners. Both products share context only through projects. A shared ChatGPT project exposes its chats, files and instructions to members at Edit or Chat access and is forced to project-only memory. A shared Claude project exposes its knowledge and instructions at Can view or Can edit, but chats inside it stay private unless someone shares them individually as a snapshot link. Neither turns a teammate's everyday conversations into context for you.

Is Open WebUI free for business use?

Yes, as long as you keep its branding. Open WebUI's licence is BSD 3-Clause text plus a branding clause, and the project's own licence FAQ says versions from v0.6.6 onward are not an OSI-approved open source licence. You may use it commercially at no cost with the Open WebUI branding intact. Removing or replacing the branding is allowed only for deployments with 50 or fewer end users in any rolling 30-day period, with prior written permission, or under an enterprise licence, and enterprise pricing is not published. Budget for the rest yourself: someone has to run it, enable features such as Channels (off by default), wire up SSO (LDAP and one OIDC provider are native, SAML needs a proxy) and turn on audit logging, which defaults to off.

How much does an AI workspace cost for a team of 100?

At list prices billed annually, 100 Standard seats of ChatGPT Business or Claude Team cost $24,000 a year, and 100 seats of Onyx Business cost the same. Microsoft 365 Copilot at $30 per user per month is $36,000 a year on top of the Microsoft 365 licences it requires, and Gemini Enterprise Standard starts at the same $30. Claude Enterprise lists a $20 seat but bills all usage separately at API rates, so its total depends on how much people use it. Glean and ChatGPT Enterprise do not publish prices. Self-hosted options swap seat fees for infrastructure: a VM runs a workspace like Lumen or Open WebUI, and GPUs are only needed if you also host the models. Lumen is a flat annual licence with unlimited users on its Business and Enterprise tiers, so its price does not move with headcount.

Which team AI tools can run fully air-gapped?

Only the self-hosted ones, and only when they are paired with a local model server. Particula Lumen, Open WebUI, LibreChat and AnythingLLM all run with no external network access once they point at Ollama or vLLM on your network, and Onyx's own FAQ says the whole system can be air-gapped if you run a local LLM. None of the SaaS plans can: ChatGPT, Claude, Microsoft 365 Copilot and Gemini Enterprise all run on the vendor's cloud. Glean's Customer Hosted option places the tenant in your own GCP or AWS account, but Glean still operates it and keeps support access, so it is not air-gapped either. Plan the staging for everything besides the model too: tokenizers, embedding checkpoints and parser resources that some tools fetch on first use.

Is ChatGPT Business or Claude Team better for a small team?

They cost the same, so decide on collaboration shape and model family. Both list Standard seats at $20 per user per month billed annually or $25 monthly, both require at least two seats, and both offer $100 Premium seats. ChatGPT Business shares more by default inside a project: members see and continue the project's chats, files and instructions. Claude Team shares a project's knowledge and instructions, but each member's chats in it stay private unless shared one by one. Claude Team caps at 150 seats and includes Claude Code on every Standard seat, which matters for engineering-heavy teams. ChatGPT Business caps at 200 paid seats. Neither includes SCIM or audit logs below its enterprise tier, and neither lets you use the other vendor's models.

BLOG/AI FOR BUSINESS

Best AI Workspace for Teams in 2026: 10 Platforms Compared

ChatGPT, Claude and Copilot all keep AI memory per user. The best AI workspace for teams in 2026, ranked on shared memory, self-hosting, SSO and seat price.

Sebastian MondragonSEPTEMBER 07, 2026 · 9 MIN READ

Best AI Workspace for Teams in 2026: 10 Platforms Compared

Read the memory documentation for any major team AI plan and you find the same sentence in different words. OpenAI's Business memory FAQ says memories are tied to each individual account and cannot be transferred to other users, even inside the same workspace. Glean says it "stores memory data at the individual user level and does not share memory data across users." Microsoft stores Microsoft 365 Copilot memory in a hidden folder in each user's own mailbox. That is the limit of the best AI workspace for teams you can buy off the shelf in 2026: the team shares a bill, and the knowledge stays personal.

This comparison covers team AI workspaces: shared, governed places where a whole company uses language models. It does not cover document tools with AI added, or the Microsoft Teams chat app that also shows up in searches for "AI for teams". We read every vendor's pricing page and documentation, and for the open-source tools the source code at a tagged release, in early September 2026, and ranked ten platforms on six criteria.

Best AI workspaces for teams in 2026: the ranking at a glance

#	Platform	Type	Where it runs	Shared team context	Models	List price
1	Particula Lumen	Commercial, self-hosted	Your servers, VPC or air-gapped	Team-scoped memory from every conversation, with attribution	200+ via OpenRouter, or your Ollama and vLLM	Flat annual licence, unlimited users on Business and Enterprise
2	Open WebUI	Source-available, self-hosted	Your servers	Channels and shared folders, per-user memory	Ollama plus any OpenAI-compatible endpoint	Free with branding; enterprise not public
3	ChatGPT Business and Enterprise	SaaS	OpenAI cloud	Shared projects, per-user memory	OpenAI only	$20 per user per month annual; Enterprise custom
4	Microsoft 365 Copilot	SaaS add-on	Microsoft cloud	Shared agents and Pages, per-user memory	OpenAI and Anthropic models via Microsoft	$30 per user per month annual
5	Claude Team and Enterprise	SaaS	Anthropic cloud	Shared projects, per-user memory	Anthropic only	$20 per seat annual; Enterprise adds usage at API rates
6	Onyx	Open core, self-hosted or cloud	Your servers or Onyx Cloud	Connector-indexed company knowledge, per-user memory	Most major providers plus self-hosted	CE free; Business $20 per user per month annual
7	Glean	SaaS or vendor-operated in your cloud	Glean cloud, or your GCP or AWS account	Connector-indexed company knowledge, per-user memory	Multi-vendor model hub	Not public
8	Gemini Enterprise	SaaS	Google Cloud	Shared agents, per-user memory	Gemini	From $21 (Business) or $30 (Standard/Plus)
9	LibreChat	MIT, self-hosted	Your servers	Shared agents and prompts, snapshot chat links	Most major providers plus custom endpoints	Free
10	AnythingLLM	MIT, self-hosted or cloud	Your servers	Shared workspace documents, per-user chats	Most major providers plus local	Free self-hosted

How we ranked them

Six criteria, weighted toward what a regulated buyer is actually asked to defend:

Where the data lives. Can prompts, files and conversations stay inside infrastructure you control, up to and including a network with no internet route?

Whether team knowledge accumulates. When one person works something out with a model, can the next person's model use it?

Access control and identity. SAML or OIDC single sign-on, SCIM provisioning, roles, and where permissions are enforced.

Model choice. One vendor's models, several, or your own.

Admin visibility. Usage, cost and an audit trail that covers the conversations themselves.

Price shape. How the bill moves when headcount doubles.

No product wins all six. The SaaS plans win on zero operations. Onyx and Glean win on connector breadth. Open WebUI wins on price. Lumen ranks first because it is the only one of the ten that meets criteria one, two and three together without asking you to build the missing layer yourself.

Why per-user memory is the gap in team AI plans

Here is what each platform documents about memory and about what one teammate can reuse from another.

Shared projects and channels are real collaboration features, but they only capture what someone decided in advance to put there. Picture an engineer who spends forty minutes in a private chat working out why an integration needs a retry, then closes the tab. The next engineer who asks gets a fresh answer from zero, because the reasoning never left one person's history. Team-scoped memory changes the default: the work is captured because it happened, not because someone wrote it up afterwards.

Lumen enforces team boundaries with row-level security in the database, attributes every recalled passage, and takes membership from your identity provider through SCIM. If your engineers want the mechanics behind the third question, we cover them in keeping one team's vectors out of another team's retrieval.

What to ask a vendor about team memory

Team memory is only as trustworthy as its boundaries. Four questions separate a real implementation from a search box bolted onto chat history:

Shared memory changes what a private chat is

Team memory has a policy cost that per-user tools never force you to face: a conversation inside a team is team knowledge. Decide before rollout which work belongs in a separate team scope (HR cases, legal matters, M&A) and tell people plainly. Offboarding deserves the same care: when someone changes teams, what they can see should change straight away, not after an overnight refresh, a lag we unpack in why revoked access can still return documents in AI search.

Platform	Memory scope	What teammates can reuse
Particula Lumen	Team	Every conversation is searchable by meaning and recalled for teammates, with who said it, when and where
Open WebUI	Per user	Channel messages (keyword search, only channels you belong to) and chats in folders shared with you
ChatGPT Business and Enterprise	Per user	Chats, files and instructions inside a shared project
Microsoft 365 Copilot	Per user, stored in the user's mailbox	Shared agents and Copilot Pages
Claude Team and Enterprise	Per user, off by default	A shared project's knowledge and instructions; chats only as individual snapshot links
Onyx	Per user, capped at 10 saved memories	Indexed connector content and shared agents
Glean	Per user	Indexed connector content and shared agents
Gemini Enterprise	Per user ("personal Memory")	Shared agents and read-only conversation links
LibreChat	Per user, a short list of saved facts, off by default	Shared agents, prompts and read-only chat links
AnythingLLM	Per user, off by default	Documents in a shared workspace; chat history stays per user

Ask	Why it matters	A good answer
Where are team boundaries enforced?	A bug in the application should never be able to show one team another team's conversations	In the database itself (row-level security), not only in the application code
Does every recalled answer say who said it and when?	People need to know whose conclusion they are reusing, and how old it is	Every recalled passage names the person, the date and the conversation
Does recall still work for a five-person team inside a 500-person company?	Some search setups quietly return little or nothing for small groups inside a large shared index	The vendor demonstrates recall for a small team, not only a company-wide demo
What happens when someone changes teams or leaves?	Access that lingers is how confidential work leaks	Membership comes from your identity provider through SCIM, and removal takes effect without waiting for a re-index

The 10 best AI workspaces for teams, reviewed

1. Particula Lumen

Lumen is a self-hosted AI workspace for a whole organization. Every message is indexed for search by meaning, and when someone starts a new conversation, relevant context from their team's past conversations is added automatically with attribution: who said it, when, and in which thread. Each team sees only its own knowledge, and access is enforced at the database layer with row-level security across organizations, teams and four role levels. Models are your choice per team: 200+ through OpenRouter where cloud models are acceptable, or your own Ollama and vLLM servers where they are not. Admins get usage and cost per model, team and user, a conversation browser, an audit log, and per-team model restrictions, which is how a legal team gets confined to self-hosted models while engineering keeps a frontier model. Identity is SAML or OIDC with SCIM provisioning. It ships as one Docker image and a Helm chart, emits Prometheus metrics and OpenTelemetry traces, and has a Cmd+K semantic search plus native macOS and Windows apps.

Best for: regulated or confidentiality-bound organizations that want team knowledge to compound on their own infrastructure.
Look elsewhere if: your knowledge lives in dozens of SaaS apps nobody discusses (Onyx or Glean index those), or you want zero infrastructure of any kind.
Price: flat annual licence, unlimited users on Business and Enterprise; a monthly Starter plan for teams under 20. Pilots run two weeks in your VPC.

2. Open WebUI

The most-starred self-hosted tool in this comparison, with roughly 150,000 GitHub stars and v0.11.3 released on August 31, 2026. Channels are persistent Slack-style spaces where people and several models share a timeline, and with the right model settings a model can search messages across the channels the asking user belongs to. Two details matter: that search matches exact keywords rather than meaning, and Channels stay off until an admin enables them, with standard channels creatable only by admins. Memory is scoped to each user account. Folders of chats can be shared with users or groups at read or write level, also off by default. SCIM 2.0 (added in v0.6.19) is configured only through environment variables, with no admin UI.

Best for: teams with an engineer to run it, no licence budget, and no need to rebrand (removing the branding is free only up to 50 end users).
Look elsewhere if: you need native SAML (it takes a proxy), your own branding above 50 end users, or semantic team memory. The analytics dashboard counts tokens, leaving cost for you to calculate.
Price: free with branding intact; enterprise licence pricing is not published. Licence, identity and audit details are in Open WebUI vs LibreChat vs AnythingLLM.

3. ChatGPT Business and Enterprise

The zero-operations default. ChatGPT Team became ChatGPT Business on August 29, 2025. Shared projects are the team feature: members get Edit or Chat access to a project's chats, files and instructions, and shared projects are locked to project-only memory. Company knowledge connectors reach Slack, SharePoint, Google Drive, GitHub and others while respecting each user's own permissions. OpenAI does not train on business data by default.

Best for: organizations without an infrastructure team that are comfortable with OpenAI models only.
Look elsewhere if: data must stay on your infrastructure, you want other vendors' models, or you need SCIM, role-based access or a compliance API without an enterprise contract. Business data residency is still rolling out and covers storage, not inference.
Price: Business Standard $20 per user per month billed annually ($25 monthly), minimum two seats, capped at 200 paid seats; Premium seats $100. Enterprise is custom, with storage residency in ten regions and in-region inference in the US or Europe.

4. Microsoft 365 Copilot

Microsoft has begun renaming it Microsoft Copilot, while the licence is still sold as Microsoft 365 Copilot. If your mail, files and meetings are in Microsoft 365, its advantage is grounding: it answers from what each user can already open through Microsoft Graph, and synced connectors respect source permissions. Purview Audit logs Copilot interactions automatically. Agents built in Agent Builder can be shared with Can edit or Can chat access.

Best for: organizations standardized on Microsoft 365 and governed through Entra and Purview.
Look elsewhere if: you need data to leave no cloud at all, or bring-your-own models. Memory is per user and in preview, Purview retention does not apply to it, and memory actions generate no audit entries. Anthropic models are on by default in most commercial regions but sit outside the EU Data Boundary.
Price: $30 per user per month billed annually, on top of a qualifying Microsoft 365 licence. Smaller organizations can use the Copilot Business add-on at $21 list ($18 promotional through December 2026).

5. Claude Team and Enterprise

Claude's projects can be public to the whole organization or private, with Can view and Can edit permissions, and Team includes connectors for Google Drive, Gmail, GitHub, Microsoft 365 and Slack plus an organization search project. Claude Code has been included on every Team Standard seat since January 16, 2026, which can decide it for engineering-heavy teams.

Best for: teams standardizing on Claude, especially where developers want chat and Claude Code under one seat.
Look elsewhere if: you need memory shared across a team (it is per user and off by default), non-Anthropic models, or storage outside the US. Team has no SCIM, audit logs or Compliance API.
Price: Team Standard $20 per seat per month billed annually, 2 to 150 seats; Premium $100. Enterprise lists a $20 seat and bills all usage at API rates on top, with a 20-seat self-serve minimum, and adds SCIM, audit logs, customer-managed keys and US-only inference.

6. Onyx

Onyx, formerly Danswer, is company search with a chat interface. Its documentation lists 44 official connectors (the pricing page says 40+), from Confluence and Google Drive to Jira, Slack and Salesforce, and it runs self-hosted, including air-gapped with a local model. The licence is split: an MIT core, and enterprise directories under a commercial licence.

Best for: organizations whose knowledge already lives in SaaS tools and need permission-aware search they can host.
Look elsewhere if: you need permission-aware search on the free edition, or SSO without an enterprise contract. Permission sync covers 10 connectors and starts on the paid Business plan (Community Edition connectors are only public or private), while OIDC and SAML SSO and SCIM are Enterprise-only. Memory is per user, and a standard deployment is a heavy stack: a search index, model servers, background workers, a cache and object storage.
Price: Community Edition free; Business $20 per user per month billed annually ($25 monthly); Enterprise not public.

7. Glean

Glean is built around enterprise search: 275+ out-of-the-box connectors with inherited source permissions, and a model hub spanning OpenAI, Gemini, Anthropic, Amazon Nova and open models, which admins can restrict by department. Agents can be shared with Viewer, Editor or Owner permissions.

Best for: large organizations with hundreds of SaaS sources and a budget for enterprise search.
Look elsewhere if: "self-hosted" is a hard requirement. Customer Hosted places the tenant in your GCP or AWS account, but Glean's documentation calls it "not a traditional self-hosted model": Glean patches it and keeps support access. Memory is per user and limited to GCP deployments using Glean's own model key.
Price: not public; seats plus usage-based model spend.

8. Gemini Enterprise

Google's agent platform for business, with permission-aware search across Drive, Gmail, SharePoint, OneDrive, Jira, Confluence and ServiceNow. Admins can share agents with users, groups or everyone, and users can share conversations as read-only links once an admin enables it. Standard and Plus add data residency, VPC Service Controls and customer-managed encryption keys.

Best for: Google Cloud organizations that want Google-built agents over their company data.
Look elsewhere if: you need model choice beyond Gemini or team memory; memory is personal and on by default. The Business edition lacks residency and encryption-key controls.
Price: from $21 per seat per month (Business) or $30 (Standard and Plus).

9. LibreChat

LibreChat is the only open-source option here with native SAML in its free edition, alongside LDAP, OIDC, Entra ID group sync, custom roles, and Viewer, Editor and Owner sharing for agents, prompts, MCP servers and skills. It is MIT licensed, and ClickHouse announced its acquisition of the project on November 4, 2025.

Best for: teams whose identity or security team requires native SAML and a permissive licence. SAML switches off automatically when OpenID is enabled, so pick one.
Look elsewhere if: you want a shared workspace. Projects are personal, conversations are shared only as read-only snapshot links, and memory is a short per-user list of saved facts that its documentation says "does not index, embed, or search past conversations." We found no SCIM support in its documentation, and the bundled admin panel is AGPL-3.0.
Price: free to self-host.

10. AnythingLLM

AnythingLLM makes the workspace the unit of both search and permission: each workspace has its own document index, and default users can only chat in workspaces they were added to. The collector ingests Confluence, code repositories and websites.

Best for: document-centric teams that want a simple permission model under an MIT licence.
Look elsewhere if: you need collaboration beyond shared documents. Chat history stays per user even inside a shared workspace, memory is per user and off by default, roles are fixed at three, and there is no native SAML or OIDC. Multi-user mode is Docker-only and cannot be reverted.
Price: free to self-host; a hosted cloud version is sold per instance.

Self-hosted vs SaaS: what changes for regulated teams

Five of the ten can run with nothing leaving your network, each paired with a local model server: Lumen, Open WebUI, LibreChat, AnythingLLM and Onyx. For a hospital, a law firm or a defence supplier, that takes the workspace itself off the list of third-party processors and cross-border transfers to document.

The SaaS residency options are narrower than they read. ChatGPT Enterprise offers storage residency in ten regions but in-region inference in only two, the US and Europe. Anthropic's privacy center states that Claude customer data is stored in the US. Microsoft 365 Copilot is an EU Data Boundary service, but its Anthropic models are excluded from that boundary. Gemini Enterprise offers residency only on Standard and Plus.

Self-hosting moves the work rather than removing it. The model server becomes yours to size: Ollama is comfortable for a handful of users, and a shared workspace needs something built for concurrency, which we compare in Ollama versus vLLM for self-hosted inference. Disconnected networks also need every artifact staged, not just the weights, as covered in running vLLM in an air-gapped deployment. If you mix cloud and local models in one workspace, restrict sensitive teams to the local ones in the admin console rather than relying on people to pick correctly, the same principle behind preventing data leakage in AI applications.

What 50, 150 and 400 seats cost per year

Annual list prices for the seat or licence alone, before usage credits, Premium seats, infrastructure or the Microsoft 365 licences Copilot requires:

Per-seat pricing turns every new hire into a line item and invites licensing only some teams, while everyone left out still has a personal account and a browser. A flat licence removes that decision. It does not remove infrastructure: if you host the models too, the GPU bill is the larger number, and the self-hosted LLM vs API break-even math is worth running before you commit. For the wider trade-off between seat, usage and outcome pricing, see per-seat versus usage-based AI pricing.

Platform	50 seats	150 seats	400 seats
ChatGPT Business Standard ($20)	$12,000	$36,000	Above the 200-seat Business cap: Enterprise, custom
Claude Team Standard ($20)	$12,000	$36,000 (the Team cap)	Enterprise: $96,000 plus usage at API rates
Microsoft 365 Copilot ($30)	$18,000	$54,000	$144,000
Gemini Enterprise Standard (from $30)	from $18,000	from $54,000	from $144,000
Onyx Business ($20)	$12,000	$36,000	$96,000 (SAML needs Enterprise)
Open WebUI	$0 with branding	$0 with branding	$0 with branding
Particula Lumen (Business or Enterprise tier)	Flat licence	Same flat licence	Same flat licence

Which AI workspace should your team pick?

Whichever you choose, map identity before rollout: SSO attributes to roles, SCIM for deprovisioning, and a named owner for admin access, as laid out in role-based access control for AI applications. More decision guides for leaders are collected in the AI for business pillar.

Your situation	Pick	Why
Regulated data, and you want team knowledge to accumulate without building it	Particula Lumen	Team-scoped memory, row-level security, SSO with SCIM, runs on your servers
An engineer to run it, no licence budget, branding can stay	Open WebUI	Free with branding, most-starred project here, Channels
No infrastructure team, OpenAI models are fine	ChatGPT Business	Shared projects, zero operations; Enterprise for SCIM and residency
The company runs on Microsoft 365	Microsoft 365 Copilot	Graph grounding and Purview audit you already govern
Developers want chat and a coding agent in one seat	Claude Team	Claude Code on every Standard seat
Knowledge lives in Confluence, Drive and Jira, and search must be self-hosted	Onyx	40+ connectors; permission sync from Business, SSO and SCIM on Enterprise
Hundreds of SaaS sources and an enterprise search budget	Glean	275+ connectors, multi-vendor models
A Google Cloud organization	Gemini Enterprise	Google agents with Cloud-grade controls on Standard and Plus
Security requires native SAML and a permissive licence	LibreChat	LDAP, OIDC and SAML in a free MIT project
Document workspaces with simple roles	AnythingLLM	One workspace sets both what you can search and who can see it

What to do this week

Write down three questions your team answered last month that someone has since asked again. If the list comes easily, team memory has a measurable payoff for you; if it does not, a per-user plan may be enough.

Count who already uses consumer AI tools for work. A week of proxy or DNS logs for the major assistant domains gives you the size of the shadow usage a sanctioned workspace has to absorb.

Decide the memory boundary before choosing the tool. List the teams that should share context and the work that needs its own scope.

Pilot with one team for two weeks. Track weekly active users and how often an answer cites a teammate's earlier conversation, then plan the rollout with the adoption patterns that get employees to actually use AI tools.

If the pilot should run on your own infrastructure, Lumen's two-week pilot installs in your VPC, and if it does not fit, you keep the runbook.

FAQ

Quick answers to the questions this post tends to raise.