What is Onyx AI?
Onyx AI (formerly “Danswer”) is an open-source enterprise search and AI assistant platform designed to give organizations a natural-language interface to their internal knowledge, documents, applications, and workflows. Onyx gathers and harnesses your team's specific knowledge (including Slack chats, Google Drive documents, Salesforce logs, GitHub, Confluence, etc.) in place of general web search or AI chat only, into a system that can also answer questions, create custom agents, and conduct deep research in your company's data. Because it is open‐source, Onyx gives you the freedom to self-host it, choose your LLM provider, customise connectors, set granular access controls, and ensure data residency/privacy per your org’s requirements.
Key Features:
- Unified Knowledge Search & Chat - Onyx supports both conversational chat (natural-language questioning and answering) and in-depth enterprise-search across both internal data and the web.
- Custom AI Agents & Actions - You have the option to create agents; they will receive preset instructions, connect them to workflows (the connected agents can be called "actions"), and allow the generator to do the work for you (e.g., create tickets, escalate issues, etc.).
- 40+ Connectors & Integrations - Onyx can integrate with many common enterprise tools (Slack, Google Drive, GitHub, Salesforce, Confluence, etc) to pull in data and provide context.
- Hybrid Search + RAG + Knowledge Graphs - Rather than a simple keyword search, Onyx uses embedding models, BM25 hybrid search, reranking, and knowledge graphs to improve the accuracy and relevance of answers.
- Flexible Deployment & Open Source - You can deploy Onyx on-premises, in the cloud, or self-host; you can inspect and extend the code.
- Developer APIs & Extensibility - Onyx exposes APIs so you can build surrounding capabilities, custom connectors, and embed search/chat into your own apps.
Benefits:
- Speedier access to valuable information - Rather than wading through Slack threads, wikis, or email, or proclivity to use different tools, users can prompt Onyx to ask and receive context-aware answers.
- Less duplication of effort - Engineering, support, or sales teams are often 'reinventing' work, as prior knowledge has been siloed on their teams. Onyx can eliminate that.
- Improved productivity across teams - Sales, support, product, and engineering all benefit when knowledge is accessible, searchable, and actionable.
- Lower risk of misinformation/hallucination - Because Onyx uses retrieval from your org’s documents (RAG/hybrid search), it can ground answers in your internal data rather than generic web hallucinations.
- Customisation and control - You own the data, the models, and the deployment. This matters for compliance, data governance, and security concerns.
Practical Use Cases:
1. Customer Support
Imagine your support team receives a question about a product feature. Onyx can search internal documentation, previous tickets, release notes, Slack channels, and deliver a complete answer or suggest escalation paths.
2. Sales & Pre-Sales
A salesperson wants to understand previous customer engagements, know what product versions were used, and what obstacles occurred. Onyx integrates CRM, call logs, and product docs, and provides a coherent view quickly.
3. Engineering / DevOps
When debugging a complex incident, engineers can query Onyx for all relevant tickets, code changes, monitoring logs, knowledge-base articles, and build a timeline. This reduces the time to resolution.
4. Research & Business Intelligence
Teams can use Onyx to ingest industry reports, competitor websites, internal data, and ask high-level questions: “Which competitors have launched X in the last 6 months?”, “What are the emerging trends we should watch?”
Limitations & Considerations:
- Initial configuration & data ingestion work – Integrating all your apps, setting connectors, and indexing documents takes initial effort and discipline.
- Maintenance and governance - As time goes on and your internal knowledge increases, you'll need to develop processes for governance, cleaning outdated documentation, updating indexes, and ensuring quality.
- Dependency on quality of internal docs - Your output is only as good as your input: if you have documents that are fragmented, inconsistent, or low quality, Onyx will respond to that.
- Cost and complexity of self-hosting - When you make the choice to host on-premise or do a full self-host, there will be infrastructure and operations support to consider. You may also need to consider LLM hosting.
- Model choice & costs – While Onyx supports any LLM, picking the right model, managing API costs, latency, scaling, etc, requires planning.
Demo:
Official Demo Video: Onyx as an AI Chat Platform
Website: https://www.onyx.app/
Onyx Documentation: https://docs.onyx.app/welcome
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