Onyx vs Open WebUI

Onyx connects enterprise knowledge so people and AI agents can use relevant context in answers. It searches indexed sources in parallel and presents documents while enforcing each source's permissions. More than 50 connectors sync connected tools in the background and support hybrid semantic and keyword search. The Business plan lists chat and search, major LLM access, custom agents, MCP/OpenAPI actions, web search, deep research, code interpreter, and image generation. Business costs $20 a month, billed annually at $20 per user per month, for teams of any size, with 40+ app connectors and Community Support. Onyx provides APIs for messages, agents, LLM management, actions, and user authentication. Slack integrations can provide responses and agents; Microsoft Teams and Zendesk are described as coming soon. Deployments can run in a customer's cloud or on bare metal, including on-premise and fully air-gapped environments. The site says documents and embeddings can remain in customer infrastructure, data is not used for training, and permissions are checked at query time. Native Windows, macOS, and Linux apps connect to an existing deployment.

Open WebUI is a self-hosted interface for local and cloud AI models, designed to run entirely offline. It connects to Ollama and OpenAI-compatible APIs. Installation options include Docker, pip, uv, and desktop setup; the documentation recommends Docker or Python for production deployments. Listed capabilities include voice, vision, retrieval, generation, search, Python extensions, file uploads, image generation, app integrations, and team workspaces. Its extension system supports Filters, Actions, Pipes, Tools, and Skills, and can connect through MCP, MCPO, and OpenAPI tool servers. Knowledge retrieval includes local RAG with nine vector databases, multiple content-extraction engines, hybrid search, reranking, and full-context mode. Organizations can deploy it on-premises, in a private cloud, or in an air-gapped environment. The operator configures where chats and other data are stored; data can be routed externally when external providers, tools, model endpoints, or integrations are configured. The software is free to use as-is with original branding intact. Deployments with more than 50 users must keep Open WebUI branding visible unless an exception applies.