Onyx is an open-source AI platform for workplace search and chat, founded in San Francisco in 2023 by Yuhong Sun and Chris Weaver under the name Danswer before rebranding to Onyx in late 2024. The MIT-licensed core lets any organization self-host the software inside its own cloud environment rather than sending internal data to a third party.
The platform indexes 40+ workplace applications, including Slack, Google Drive, Confluence, GitHub, and Salesforce, then layers hybrid search and retrieval-augmented generation on top so employees can ask natural-language questions and get cited answers pulled from that indexed knowledge instead of a generic model response. Deployments run self-hosted inside a company's VPC or through a managed cloud version, and the platform supports MCP connections, a code interpreter, and web search alongside custom AI assistants.
Onyx suits engineering-minded organizations that want an internal knowledge assistant without proprietary lock-in, since the self-hosted edition is free and open source under an MIT license. The managed Business plan starts at $20 per user per month billed annually, and Enterprise pricing (with SSO, on-premise deployment, and white-labeling) is quote-based.
