Onyx
An open-source enterprise-level AI search and knowledge assistant that can concurrently retrieve multiple internal data sources and retain existing permissions, supports private deployment and switching of any model, and is suitable for teams to search for information across systems, perform Q&A, and provide context for intelligent agents.
Updated: 2026-10-26
What is Onyx?
Onyx is an open-source enterprise-level AI search and assistant platform that consolidates documents, conversations, and code scattered across various company systems into a searchable knowledge layer. Maintained by the Onyx team, its code is publicly available for audit. Users can either purchase the managed service or deploy the entire suite into their enterprise's own cloud or bare-metal environment. Unlike solutions that only offer single-point integration, Onyx simultaneously performs searches across multiple indexed data sources and applies the original access permissions of the source systems when returning results. According to the official statement, it currently processes over 1 million queries per week and serves more than 1,000 teams.
Who is it for?
- Large and medium-sized teams where internal documents are scattered across multiple systems and employees rely on asking others to find information.
- Industries with high security and compliance requirements that must keep data within their own networks, such as finance, national defense, and healthcare.
- Engineering teams building custom AI agents that need a context supply layer, and who want the agent to retrieve cross-system information with a single tool call.
- Business departments that need to unify a knowledge portal for sales, customer service and R&D to reduce repeated Q&A.
- Universities and research institutions that need to provide open access to retrieval and Q&A for faculty and students in a controlled environment.
Key features
6Parallel Retrieval
A single query is sent to all indexed sources simultaneously. According to the official statement, compared with the search method that calls application program interfaces one by one, this approach can retrieve more relevant documents and save more context window.
Permission Synchronization
The connector syncs with the permissions of each source, and filters queries by individual, ensuring employees can only access content they originally had permission to view.
50+ Connectors
Common tools such as GitHub, Drive, Slack, and Confluence are continuously synchronized and indexed, covering most of the locations where teams collaborate on a daily basis.
Any Model
One-click switching of model providers, routing to different models by team, and air-gapped deployment with self-hosted models are all supported. There is no need to reconfigure access when cutting-edge models are updated.
Full Self-Hosting
Indexes, vectors, and model traffic all remain within the enterprise's own boundaries. The official states that customer data will not be used to train models, and the code is available for end-to-end audit.
Multi-Entry Access
Web workspaces, desktop clients, Slack bots, browser extensions, and MCP interfaces share the same retrieval system; human queries and agent calls follow the same pathway.
How to use Onyx
- 1First, connect two or three of the most commonly used data sources for a small-scale pilot, verify the retrieval quality, and then expand the scope.
- 2Conduct comparative tests using the official open-source retrieval benchmarks or your own question sets, and don’t just watch demo videos.
- 3For self-hosted solutions, evaluate GPU and index storage costs in advance, and the official provides infrastructure estimation tools.
- 4The open-source version can be deployed independently; the enterprise version includes dedicated engineers to assist with scenario selection and promotion, so choose according to your needs.
- 5Confirm the data retention and auditdefinitions with legal before launch, and verify the permission inheritance rules source by source.
Traffic & popularity
Data month Sep 2026
Onyx receives about 880.2K visits per month and ranks #54,264 worldwide.
Monthly visits
12 monthsTraffic sources
- Search58.2%
- Direct26.1%
- Referrals12.4%
- Social2.5%
- AI assistants0.9%
Top countries
- United States18.7%
- India7.6%
- Germany5.5%
- Spain4.4%
- Singapore4.2%
Estimated from third-party traffic data.
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