Onyx Community Edition — Self-Hosted, Open-Source

Chat UI that works with any LLM. It comes loaded with advanced features like agents, web search, RAG, MCP, deep research, Connectors to 40+ knowledge sources, and more.

License: MIT. Built with: Python, TypeScript, Go, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, Shell, HCL, PowerShell, Rust, Dockerfile, Jinja, Go Template, MDX, Mako. Website: https://onyx.app. Source: https://github.com/onyx-dot-app/onyx.

Features

🔍 Agentic RAG: Get best in class search and answer quality based on hybrid index + AI Agents for information retrieval
Benchmark to release soon!
🔬 Deep Research: Get in depth reports with a multi-step research flow.
Top of leaderboard as of Feb 2026.
🤖 Custom Agents: Build AI Agents with unique instructions, knowledge, and actions.
🌍 Web Search: Browse the web to get up to date information.
Supports Serper, Google PSE, Brave, SearXNG, and others.
Comes with an in house web crawler and support for Firecrawl/Exa.
📄 Artifacts: Generate documents, graphics, and other downloadable artifacts.
▶️ Actions & MCP: Let Onyx agents interact with external applications, comes with flexible Auth options.

Installation

See official install docs: https://docs.onyx.app/deployment/overview

Why self-host Onyx Community Edition

Self-hosting gives you three things SaaS can’t: data ownership (the files live on disks you control), cost predictability (a one-time setup vs. recurring per-seat fees that grow with your household or team), and longevity (open-source means the app keeps working even if the maintainers move on, since you can pin a working version). The trade-off is that you take on the operational work of running a server, applying updates, and handling backups.

Hardware notes

The Lite mode can be thought of as a lightweight Chat UI. It requires less resources (under 1GB memory) and runs a less complex stack.

Where to go from here

Last verified: 2026-04-28