Rovo Search explained: An honest look at features, pricing & alternatives (2025)

You know the feeling. The answer to your question is somewhere, but it’s buried in one of a dozen different apps. So you start the great digital scavenger hunt, clicking through old Slack threads, Jira tickets, Confluence spaces, and forgotten Google Docs, hoping to get lucky. Just like that, half your morning is gone.

This constant search for information is a massive time sink. A Gartner survey found that almost half of us struggle to find the info we need to just do our jobs.

Atlassian’s answer to this mess is Rovo Search, a new AI tool designed to pull all that scattered knowledge into one place. But is it the right solution for every team? Let’s take a practical look at what Rovo Search is, what it does, how much it costs, and what other options you have.

What is Atlassian Rovo Search?

Atlassian Rovo Search is an AI search engine that works across the entire Atlassian suite (Jira, Confluence, Trello, etc.) and a growing list of other apps you might use.

The big idea behind it is something Atlassian calls the "Teamwork Graph." Basically, this is Rovo's brain. It doesn't just look for keywords; it tries to understand the hidden connections between people, projects, and documents at your company. It figures out who works with whom, which project connects to which goal, and what conversations are related to a specific support ticket. The point is to give you smart, personalized answers, not just a long list of links to sort through.

Rovo Search is just one part of the bigger Atlassian Rovo platform, which also includes Rovo Chat (for asking questions) and Rovo Agents (for automating tasks). For now, we’re just focusing on the search part that promises to end the digital scavenger hunt.

Key features of Rovo Search in action

Rovo Search is more than a simple search bar. It has a few tricks up its sleeve to bring you the right information when you need it.

Get straight answers, not just links

Instead of just pointing you to a document, Rovo tries to answer your questions directly. Ask something like, "What's our VPN setup process?" and you should get a summarized answer right at the top, with links to the original documents in Confluence or Jira. This lets you get the gist quickly and still check the source if you need to.

For bigger questions, its "Deep research" feature can pull info from multiple places and stitch it together into a single report, saving you the headache of doing it yourself.

Quick info with knowledge cards

Knowledge Cards are like little pop-up summaries for important people, teams, and projects. If you search for a coworker, for instance, a card might pop up showing their photo, role, team, and what they’ve been working on recently. It’s a small touch, but it saves you from having to dig through the company directory.

Search everything, not just Atlassian tools

Rovo’s real promise is its ability to search outside of Atlassian’s world. It can connect to and search across popular apps like Google Drive, Slack, and Microsoft Teams, bringing all your company knowledge into one searchable spot. Atlassian has over 50 connectors available, with the goal of making Rovo your one-stop shop for finding anything.

Search without switching tabs

To make things even easier, Atlassian has a Chrome extension for Rovo. It puts the search and chat features right into your browser, so you can look up company info from any website or app. No more having to jump back to Confluence or Jira just to find a quick answer.

How Rovo Search works (and its hidden strings)

On the technical side, Rovo Search uses AI models and fancy algorithms to understand what you’re asking for. It looks at your query, tries to figure out your intent, and then sorts the results based on relevance and how new the information is. But its success depends less on the tech and more on how your company is already set up.

• It needs a clean house to work. Rovo can't magically fix a messy knowledge base. As many Atlassian partners have pointed out, it works best when your Confluence pages have clear titles and your Jira projects are neatly organized. If your information is a chaotic mess, Rovo’s results will be a chaotic mess. It simply amplifies the quality of what you feed it.

• It works best if you're all-in on Atlassian. Rovo’s biggest strength can also be a weakness. It delivers the most bang for your buck if your company lives and breathes inside the Atlassian Cloud ecosystem. If your team uses a mix of different tools and doesn't center its work around Jira and Confluence, you might not see the same benefits.

• Getting it running is a big project. Rolling out Rovo isn't just about flipping a switch. The real work is often changing how people work and getting them to adopt new processes. This means you’ll need buy-in from leadership, time for training, and a company-wide willingness to change old habits, which is never a quick or easy process.

Atlassian Rovo Search pricing: It gets complicated (and expensive)

This is where the dream might hit a snag for a lot of teams. Atlassian says Rovo will be included in its high-end Cloud plans (Premium and Enterprise). For everyone else, it’s a separate purchase that starts at roughly $20 to $24 per user, per month.

While that price might drop for huge companies, the per-user model causes a few problems:

• The costs add up, fast. A per-user fee can get expensive in a hurry. For a 500-person company, you could be looking at an extra $12,000 every month just for a search tool. That makes it tough to give it to everyone.

• It's a hard sell for the whole company. Proving that every single employee needs a search tool this expensive is difficult. A developer or support agent might use it all day, but it’s harder to justify the cost for someone who only needs to look things up occasionally.

• It locks you in. By bundling Rovo into its top plans, Atlassian gives you a very strong reason to upgrade your other products and stay within their ecosystem. This makes it harder and more expensive to switch to other tools later on.

Aspect	Details	What this means for you
Model	Per-user, per-month	Can get very expensive as your team grows; hard to budget for.
Starting Price	~$24/user/month	A high starting point that may be too much for smaller teams or entire companies.
Bundling	Included in some top-tier Atlassian plans	Pushes you to stay locked into the Atlassian ecosystem and upgrade other products.
Value Proposition	Best for teams already deep in Atlassian's world	You'll see less of a return if your company uses a variety of non-Atlassian tools.

A more flexible alternative to Rovo Search

For teams that need powerful enterprise search but want to skip the high costs, vendor lock-in, and setup headaches, there's another way. You can use a separate AI platform that plugs into the tools you’re already using.

This approach is great for businesses that want to get answers from their existing knowledge without having to change how everyone works. A tool like eesel AI, for example, offers a more straightforward path.

• You can get it running in minutes. Instead of a multi-month project focused on changing habits, eesel AI is designed to go live fast. Connect your help desk, wiki, and other sources with a few clicks and start getting value right away, without having to sit through a mandatory sales demo.

• It learns from your actual, messy work. While Rovo needs well-structured wikis to shine, eesel AI is built to learn from the real-world places your company knowledge lives. It can train directly on years of support tickets and unstructured docs, finding answers in the same conversations your team already relies on.

This infographic shows how a flexible alternative to Rovo Search like eesel AI can integrate with various knowledge sources.

• Simple, predictable pricing. You shouldn't be penalized for growing your team. Instead of a confusing per-user model, eesel AI uses a clear, interaction-based price. You only pay for what the AI actually does, which keeps costs predictable and tied directly to the value you're getting.

A screenshot of the eesel AI pricing page, which highlights a simple, interaction-based model as an alternative to the complex per-user pricing of Rovo Search.

• Test it out with zero risk. Committing to a new platform is a big deal. eesel AI has a simulation mode that lets you safely test it on thousands of your past tickets before you ever show it to customers. This gives you a data-backed forecast of how well it will perform, so you can roll it out with confidence.

The simulation mode in eesel AI allows teams to test its effectiveness on past data before full implementation, a key difference from the Rovo Search rollout process.

Choosing the right enterprise search tool

Atlassian Rovo Search is a powerful tool for companies that are fully committed to the Atlassian ecosystem. If you’re prepared for the per-user price tag and the internal work needed to organize your data, it could be a great fit.

But for many teams, that path is too restrictive and expensive. If you’re looking for a more nimble, cost-effective solution that works with the tools you have now, an alternative like eesel AI is worth a look. It lets you tap into your company's knowledge quickly and affordably, without all the enterprise-level complexity.