Onyx
The open-source context layer for your team — chat, search, and agents over 50+ connected apps.
About
Onyx (formerly Danswer) is the knowledge and context layer for teams and their AI agents: it connects to 50+ applications, indexes the knowledge inside them, and surfaces it through chat, search, and agent skills while keeping data sovereignty in your hands via self-hosted deployment. The positioning in the README is explicit — LLMs know everything public, Onyx makes them know what's going on in your team.
Beyond search it adds web search, sandboxes, and skills so agents can act on what they find, and deployment is a single command (curl -fsSL https://onyx.app/install_onyx.sh | bash). At 32,000+ stars it is the most-adopted open-source enterprise RAG platform. The licensing is mixed and worth reading: the core outside ee/ directories is MIT, while enterprise-edition directories carry the Onyx Enterprise License. It is also a heavyweight deployment — Postgres, Vespa, and model services — so this is a platform commitment, not a weekend install.
What it can do
- Connectors for 50+ apps: Drive, Slack, Confluence, GitHub, Jira, and more
- Chat, semantic search, and agent skills over your indexed knowledge
- Web search, sandboxes, and tool use for acting on findings
- Self-hosted deployment for full data sovereignty
- One-command install script; admin panel for connectors and permissions
- MIT-licensed core with an Enterprise Edition for SSO and advanced features
Setup
- Deploy with the install script:
curl -fsSL https://onyx.app/install_onyx.sh | bash(or Docker Compose). - Open the admin panel and connect your apps (Google Drive, Slack, Confluence, GitHub, and 50+ more).
- Let Onyx index your documents; configure an LLM provider for chat and agents.
- Chat, search, and build agents over your connected knowledge.
- For SSO, advanced permissions, and analytics, evaluate the Enterprise Edition.
Prerequisites
A server with Docker (multi-container deployment: Postgres, Vespa, model services); an LLM provider key.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 8/10
Scored 8/10 (verified tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: 32,495 GitHub stars (GitHub API), pushed Oct 15 2026; the README documents the 50+ connectors, the one-command install, and the context-layer positioning; the LICENSE file was read directly — MIT core with Onyx Enterprise License for ee/ directories. Strengths: the most-adopted open enterprise RAG platform, honest licensing, real deployment story. Docked for: (1) mixed licensing — check ee/ boundaries before commercial use; (2) heavyweight multi-container deployment; (3) 570 open issues. License: MIT (core); Onyx Enterprise License (ee/).
★ 32,495 GitHub stars
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 8.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 9.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 9.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 8.0/10
- · Adoption 8: starScore from 32,495 stars on onyx-dot-app/Onyx
- · Maintenance 9: pushed 2026-10-15 (recency 10); frequent releases (10); 570 open issues on 32.5k stars (issues 7)
- · Openness 9: mixed MIT core + EE license (0.7*8) + official docs verified at docs.onyx.app (0.3*10)
- · Manual 8: README documents 50+ connectors, one-command install, and context-layer positioning; LICENSE read directly confirming MIT core/EE split; docked for ee/ boundary checks, heavyweight deployment
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.