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Our Mission

Our mission is to make Generative AI and knowledge accessible to every team worldwide. As large language models—both proprietary and open-source—become increasingly widespread, Onyx serves as the interface to their knowledge and reasoning capabilities. Onyx enriches the utility of the LLM by providing additional context (both web and team internal), built-in tools like code interpreter, and user created Actions.

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Why Open Source?

Security

We believe teams should feel safe with the AI platform that they adopt. That’s why Onyx is fully transparent. You’ll have peace of mind knowing exactly how your data is processed and stored, and all of this happening within the Onyx deployment.

Flexibility

With GenAI being such a fundamental piece of modern company strategy, we want to offer the most flexible and future proof option. We understand that every team is unique in their needs so we’re building Onyx with an emphasis on customizability, both for building on top of the platform and directly modifying it.

Control

Open source also gives control over to your team. With the GenAI space rapidly evolving, your vendor of choice may not always be aligned with your team’s direction. OSS combines the benefits of building in-house with getting product updates for free. Open source also prevents lock in so that you can leverage any LLM provider (or your own LLM).

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Commercial Viability

We are a team of builders and we want to have as many people find value from our software as possible. This is our singular goal and everything that we do derives from this. To push the boundaries of user experience and AI innovation, we’ve assembled a core team of world-class developers who share this vision. To borrow from Sid Sijbrandij (Co-Founder, GitLab):
“We need to think in the interests of the project, while tending to the realities of running a business to support it… After all, we know that to sustain the project, we need to make it commercially viable.”
We believe in radical transparency—both in how we build open software and in the commercial realities of competing in this rapidly evolving space.
Every organization, regardless of size or budget, will always have access to Onyx’s core capabilities—including RAG, deep research, custom agents, and more—completely free.
For organizations with special requirements—such as usage auditing, granular access controls, and white-labeling—we offer the Enterprise Edition, available both as a self-hosted solution and through Onyx Cloud. The Enterprise Edition sustains our mission, enabling us to keep the vast majority of Onyx’s features free and open for everyone.

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On Contributions

Onyx is a project built in collaboration with our community and we openly welcome contributions. It is a point of emphasis of our team to ensure that the Onyx project continues to be easy for teams to contribute to or maintain in house. This comes down to:
  • Intentional high level architecture.
  • Strong product direction and refusal to accept bloat for niche use cases.
  • A consistent and high quality of engineering best practices across the code base.
To that end, we ask that contributors work on smaller issues to start and get approval from the maintainers for larger feature contributions.