Onyx and DocsGPT are both open-source, self-hostable platforms for chat and search over company data. Onyx's strengths are connector breadth, community size and enterprise logos; DocsGPT's are agent workflows with deterministic steps, OCR for complex documents, built-in evaluation and benchmarking, and delivery references in regulated environments.
Last updated: · Facts checked on
Licence, hosting, models, price, contract and data access, side by side.
Onyx is MIT at the core with a proprietary ee/ directory. The core self-hosts free, including air-gapped; the quote-based Enterprise tier adds single sign-on and vendor-supported on-premises deployment. Model support covers cloud and local, and Onyx Cloud publishes a price of about $20 per user per month on annual billing. DocsGPT is MIT throughout (platform and CLI), runs in four postures including air-gapped from one seat, supports any provider or local engine, and publishes its Cloud price with flat pricing for self-hosted deployments.
| Onyx | DocsGPT | |
|---|---|---|
| Open-source licence | MIT core + proprietary ee/1 | MIT (platform and CLI)2 |
| Self-host and air-gap | Air-gap yes; self-host yes, free (MIT core); vendor-supported on-premises deployment is an Enterprise-tier offer1 | Yes — Self-hosted (community), On-premises and Air-gapped (zero external egress), from one seat2 |
| Model choice / BYOM | Cloud and local providers1 | Any cloud provider or local engine (Ollama, vLLM, llama.cpp and others); BYOM2 |
| Transparent pricing | Cloud ~$20/user/month on annual billing, published; Enterprise tier quote-based1 | Yes, per posture: Cloud $20/seat/month; Managed from $2,000/month, flat; On-premises and Air-gapped from $10,000, one-time or recurring2 |
| Seat minimum / contract | None: the MIT core can be self-hosted; no Cloud seat floor recorded1 | None; self-hosting has no licence fee2 |
| Vendor access to data | Yes on Onyx Cloud (Onyx operates the service); No when self-hosted1 | Yes on Cloud and Managed — Arc53 operates both, Managed as a dedicated instance in your region; No on On-premises and Air-gapped, which you operate2 |
¹ Onyx facts checked on . ·² Sources: docs.docsgpt.cloud and the public repository.
Both projects cover the same core; the differences are in what sits around it.
Onyx and DocsGPT both offer chat over company documents with citations, connectors to common sources, retrieval-augmented generation over a vector index, and free self-hosting of an MIT-licensed core. Both also sell a hosted cloud plan. Single sign-on is not part of the shared ground: in Onyx it is an Enterprise-tier add-on. Both have the same shape — ingest, index, ask, cite; the sections below list where each is the stronger fit.
DocsGPT GitHub stars
18,273
on GitHub
Contributors
226+
Licence
MIT
platform and CLI
docsgpt-cli bench evaluation suites for regression-safe model swaps.1. Document upload (trigger) → 2. Classify (small model) → 3. Extract (writes state) → 4. Decide (cel over state) → 5. Notify (template). Branch from Decide: else · confidence < 0.8 → Human approval → Notify.
24 h → 16 min
A large Central European commercial bank processes 10,000+ inbound documents a day; time-to-action fell from 24 hours to 16 minutes, with over 99.5 % classification accuracy, running fully air-gapped on the bank's existing NVIDIA T4 GPUs.
Source: EU bank, name under NDA
Government infrastructure, local inference
UK Department for Work and Pensions: an internal knowledge assistant on government infrastructure, with local inference.
Source: DWP
2.5M+ pages · 6 languages
Multilingual EU-law research over 2.5M+ pages, answers in 6 EU languages with full source citations, 100–200 ms retrieval.
Source: LexEU
List price × seats × 12, before negotiation. DocsGPT Cloud is per seat; Managed and On-premises are flat per deployment, from the published starting prices.
| Onyx Cloud | Onyx self-hosted | DocsGPT | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 100 seats, per year | $24,000/yr | Free core; ee/ features licensed separately | Cloud $24,000/yr · Managed from $24,000/yr · On-premises from $10,000, one-time or recurring |
| 1,000 seats, per year | $240,000/yr | Free core; ee/ features licensed separately | Cloud $240,000/yr · Managed from $24,000/yr · On-premises from $10,000, one-time or recurring |
| Basis | ~$20/user/month published, annual billing × seats × 12 | no licence fee for the MIT core; the ee/ licence terms are not published; not a per-seat figure | Cloud $20/seat/month × seats × 12 · Managed from $2,000/month, flat · On-premises and Air-gapped from $10,000, one-time or recurring, plus your infrastructure |
Before negotiation; add-ons excluded; checked on 2026-09-06.
At 100 seats Onyx costs $24,000 per year at the $20 per user per month list price; at 1,000 seats, $240,000. DocsGPT Cloud at $20 per seat per month costs $24,000 per year at 100 seats and $240,000 at 1,000; a Managed instance is flat from $24,000 per year at any seat count; On-premises and Air-gapped start from $10,000, one-time or recurring, plus your own infrastructure. Facts checked on 2026-09-06.
ee/ directory for enterprise features (checked 2026-09-06). DocsGPT is MIT-licensed for the whole platform and the CLI.Alex Tushynski
Co-Founder, Arc53
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