Onyx Community Edition review 2026: free, open-source AI enterprise search (formerly Danswer). Compare features, self-hosting, pricing and alternatives.
Onyx is an open-source AI platform for enterprise search, retrieval-augmented generation, and AI agents, founded in 2023 by Yuhong Sun and Chris Weaver in San Francisco. The project was originally launched under the name Danswer before rebranding to Onyx.
Onyx Community Edition is the free, MIT-licensed, self-hostable version of the platform, offering the complete core feature set rather than a limited trial, letting technical teams build an internal AI assistant grounded in their own company data.
Onyx connects to more than 40 knowledge sources, including Slack, Google Drive, Confluence, Salesforce, and GitHub, indexing internal content so users can ask natural-language questions and get answers grounded in that data via retrieval-augmented generation.
The platform supports custom AI agents, deep research workflows across connected sources, Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration for tool use, and works with any LLM provider, letting organizations choose between commercial APIs like OpenAI and Anthropic or self-hosted open-weight models.
Onyx Community Edition is completely free and open source under the MIT license, with no artificial feature limits on core Chat, RAG, Agents, and Actions capabilities for self-hosted deployments.
Onyx also offers a managed Cloud plan starting around $16-20 per seat per month for teams that prefer not to manage infrastructure, plus a custom-priced Enterprise Edition adding SOC 2 compliance, SSO, SCIM, and audit trails for larger organizations.
Yes. Onyx was originally launched under the name Danswer before the company rebranded to Onyx. The underlying open-source project and GitHub organization now use the Onyx name.
Yes, Onyx Community Edition is free and open source under the MIT license, and includes the full core feature set for Chat, RAG, Agents, and Actions when self-hosted.
Community Edition covers the core AI chat, search, and agent features for free. Enterprise Edition adds governance and compliance features like SOC 2 Type II, SSO via OIDC/SAML, SCIM identity provider integration, granular RBAC, and audit trails, available via custom pricing.
Yes, Onyx supports self-hosted deployment via Docker, Kubernetes, or Helm/Terraform, giving organizations full control over their data and infrastructure.
Onyx's managed Cloud plan starts at approximately $16-20 per seat per month depending on billing terms, with Enterprise pricing available on request for larger deployments.
Onyx was founded in 2023 by Yuhong Sun and Chris Weaver, and is headquartered in San Francisco. The company raised a $10 million seed round co-led by Khosla Ventures and First Round Capital.
Onyx is LLM-agnostic and works with commercial providers like OpenAI and Anthropic as well as self-hosted open-weight models, letting organizations choose based on cost, performance, or compliance needs.