The decision
Should you choose Onyx?
Onyx earns a shortlist for technically owned, permission-sensitive knowledge search. Pilot one bounded department first and make ACL fidelity, evidence quality, and recovery—not demo fluency—the acceptance gates.
Best for
Organizations with fragmented internal knowledge; Teams requiring permission-aware search.
Choose something else if
Teams without a connector and security owner; High-stakes answers without source review
Evidence
Editorial research pending · 8.0/10
Pricing checked
See current vendor pricing · 2026-09-01
Free access is available, with limits.
Yes. The open-source edition can be self-hosted, subject to its current license and the buyer's infrastructure and model costs.
In this guide
Short answer
Onyx is worth evaluating for organizations that need cited search across Slack, Google Drive, Confluence, Jira, SharePoint, and other internal systems without forcing employees to hunt repository by repository. Its strongest promise is permission-aware retrieval. The deciding evidence is whether source ACLs remain correct during adds, removals, group changes, and connector failures.
Best for
- Organizations with fragmented internal knowledge
- Teams requiring permission-aware search
- Technical buyers wanting a self-hosted option
Look elsewhere if
- Teams without a connector and security owner
- High-stakes answers without source review
- Buyers expecting zero-configuration governance
What Onyx verifiably does
Official materials describe enterprise search, cited chat, deep research, agents, more than 30 connectors, document-level permission syncing, SAML or OIDC identity, SCIM provisioning, role controls, self-hosting, and managed deployment. Teams can connect approved models and knowledge sources while keeping a shared employee interface.
Important limitations
Enterprise search can retrieve stale, duplicated, or permission-inappropriate content. Connector outages and delayed ACL updates create real exposure risk. Self-hosting transfers patching, backups, encryption, model routing, observability, and incident response to the buyer. Generated answers still require source inspection, especially for policy or customer decisions.
Pricing snapshot
Onyx publishes its core enterprise-search project for self-hosting, while managed and enterprise packaging is sales-led rather than represented by a stable public dollar table. Self-hosters still pay for infrastructure, models, storage, connectors, monitoring, upgrades, and support. Confirm current commercial terms before purchase. Reviewed September 1, 2026.
A fair buyer test
Create a synthetic corpus across three repositories with conflicting versions, revoked users, nested groups, sensitive decoys, and known answers. Run 100 queries and record recall, citation accuracy, stale-source selection, forbidden retrieval, ACL update latency, connector failure behavior, deletion, model data paths, and operator hours.
Final verdict
Onyx earns a shortlist for technically owned, permission-sensitive knowledge search. Pilot one bounded department first and make ACL fidelity, evidence quality, and recovery—not demo fluency—the acceptance gates.
This is a research-based assessment, not a claim of hands-on product testing. Product, pricing, privacy, security, licensing, and usage claims were checked against the first-party sources below on September 1, 2026. Verify current terms and run the proposed test with approved data before adoption.
Transparency
How this guide was checked
Editorial accountability
Who checked this guide
- Evaluation type
- Hands-on evaluation
- Last materially checked
- Evidence
- 4 listed sources
Hands-on testing is identified explicitly. Research-based coverage uses cited product documentation and other named sources; it does not imply every paid plan was used. Read the full methodology.
Editorial freshness
Pricing and material product claims were checked September 1, 2026.
Review evidence
What this guidance is based on
- Editorial basis
- Current first-party product, pricing, documentation, privacy, security, and license material
- Review type
- Research-based product assessment
- Material review date
- September 1, 2026
- Buyer test
- Controlled workflow test with evidence, correction, cost, permission, privacy, and ownership checks
Important limits
- • DiscoverAI did not complete the proposed long-term paid deployment for this research-based review.
- • Features, prices, limits, security controls, privacy terms, licensing, and provider data paths can change; verify the linked first-party pages before purchase.
Standardized benchmark coverage
How this review maps to the research benchmark
Citation accuracy
Eligible · not yet runThis review describes source-grounded research, retrieval, or document work. A controlled product run is required before scoring.
Read protocol v2026.10-v1 →Thematic analysis
Not applicableThe reviewed workflow is not qualitative evidence analysis, so a thematic-analysis score would be misleading.
Read protocol v2026.10-v1 →Eligibility is not a product score. DiscoverAI publishes results only after output collection, blinded adjudication, reproducibility checks, and severe-error review.
Open the optional evaluation worksheet
Reusable trial worksheet
Test Onyx before you commit
Turn this review’s buyer test into evidence. Your entries autosave only in this browser and are never added to shared shortlist links.
Confirm the tool meets every must-have workflow and stakeholder requirement.
Review starting point: Organizations with fragmented internal knowledge; Teams requiring permission-aware search; Technical buyers wanting a self-hosted option
Run the same representative work you would use in production; do not score a polished demo.
Review starting point: Create a synthetic corpus across three repositories with conflicting versions, revoked users, nested groups, sensitive decoys, and known answers. Run 100 queries and record recall, citation accuracy, stale-source selection, forbidden retrieval, ACL update latency, connector failure behavior, deletion, model data paths, and operator hours.
Calculate the effective cost per accepted result, including usage, review, corrections, and required add-ons.
Review starting point: Onyx publishes its core enterprise-search project for self-hosting, while managed and enterprise packaging is sales-led rather than represented by a stable public dollar table. Self-hosters still pay for infrastructure, models, storage, connectors, monitoring, upgrades, and support. Confirm current commercial terms before purchase. Reviewed September 1,…
Define an acceptance threshold, test known answers and edge cases, and record every correction.
Review starting point: Editorial quality signals: features 4.2/5; AI quality 4.0/5. Validate these signals in your own work.
Verify what data enters the product, who can access it, how long it is retained, and whether it trains models.
Review starting point: Use approved low-risk data first. Check roles, consent, deletion, subprocessors, model-training settings, and the contract—not only the marketing page.
Test the real handoffs, permissions, failure states, and export path your team depends on.
Review starting point: Slack, Google Drive, Confluence, Jira, SharePoint, GitHub
Record training, governance, reliability, accessibility, ownership, and change-management risks before rollout.
Review starting point: Commercial pricing is sales-led; Self-hosting creates substantial operations work; Retrieval quality depends on each corpus
Loading saved worksheet… · private to this device or your optional account
Community evidence
How verified users put Onyx to work
Structured, editor-moderated experience—not star ratings. This complements our independent review and never changes its score.
No approved community evidence yet. Be the first verified user to contribute.
Community choice
Recommend Onyx
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Sources and verification
Product details and claims were checked against the following primary sources.
Frequently asked questions
Is Onyx AI open source?
Yes. Onyx publishes a self-hosted open-source edition; commercial managed and enterprise services are separate.
Does Onyx preserve document permissions?
Onyx says it syncs source ACLs and document permissions. Buyers should test revocation and group-change latency against their own connectors.
How much does Onyx cost?
A stable public managed-service price table was not available in the reviewed official material. Self-hosting has infrastructure and model costs; enterprise terms require confirmation.
Can Onyx run with private models?
Its self-hosted and enterprise materials support buyer-controlled deployment and model choices, but every configured provider must be mapped.
Recommended tool
Use Onyx if this workflow fits your team
Open-source deployment path
Tools mentioned in this article
Onyx
Open-source enterprise search and AI assistants across workplace knowledge
Onyx connects workplace repositories to cited search, chat, and agents with source permissions, but connector coverage, ACL fidelity, retrieval quality, and deployment ownership need a controlled pilot.
Dust
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Open WebUI
A self-hosted multi-user AI interface for local, private, and third-party models
Open WebUI gives teams one customizable interface for local and hosted models, knowledge, tools, permissions, and enterprise deployment, but security, licensing, operator access, and model data paths remain the deployer's responsibility.
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