Onyx Freemium

Onyx is open-source enterprise search. It connects the tools your company already uses — Slack, Google Drive, Confluence, Jira — and lets staff ask questions in plain English, with links back to the source.

What is Onyx?

Onyx was known as Danswer before its rebrand. It crawls and indexes 40-plus connectors, then layers an AI assistant on top of that index. You can self-host it, which is the main reason security-conscious teams pick it over closed alternatives like Glean.

Onyx features that matter

• 40+ connectors: Slack, Drive, Notion, Confluence, GitHub, SharePoint and more.
• Hybrid search: keyword plus semantic retrieval over the same index.
• Custom assistants: build a bot scoped to a team or document set.
• Permissions sync: a user only sees files they can already access.
• Self-host or cloud: Docker deployment, or their managed version.

Product highlights

The permission model is the selling point. Enterprise search that ignores access control is a security incident waiting to happen, and Onyx keeps source-app permissions intact. Citations reduce hallucination worries because users can click through.

Self-hosting means you need someone to run it — Postgres, a vector store, and a couple of containers. Setup is a real project, not a five-minute signup.

Who should use Onyx

Right for mid-size companies with data-residency or privacy constraints, and for teams that already run Docker. Not for a three-person startup that just needs one Slack bot.

Common use cases

• Answering “where is the Q3 pricing doc?” across departments.
• Onboarding bots that know internal how-tos.
• Engineering assistants over code and tickets.
• Support teams searching past resolutions.
• Replacing fragile FAQ wikis.

Pricing and limits

The open-source version is free (MIT). Onyx sells a cloud and enterprise plan for managed hosting and support. You supply your own LLM keys, so inference cost is on you.

Quick Summary

• Onyx (formerly Danswer) is open-source enterprise search and assistants.
• Indexes 40+ workplace apps with permission-aware results.
• Free self-hosted version; paid cloud/enterprise available.
• Self-hosting needs real infrastructure work.
• Best for privacy-conscious mid-size companies.