Head to head · Company knowledge search · October 2026 research run
Alation vs Onyx
Onyx scores 65 (B) on agent readiness against Alation's 60.3 (C), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Alation leads on transparency & trust. Both do company knowledge search.
Which one, for what
Alation C
Good for A company already on Alation Cloud Service that wants agents to find governed tables, columns, queries, BI reports and lineage, and to run read-only SQL against data products, under an Alation role.
Ahead on
- Transparency & trust, 76 against 63
Also in its favour
- Runs on your own machine
- No incidents deducted, where Onyx loses 4 points for them
Watch for
No published price, trial or self-serve sign-up. The pricing address redirects to a sales form
Onyx B
Good for Teams that want one permission-aware index over Slack, Drive, Confluence, Jira, GitHub and the rest, self-hosted or air-gapped, with agents searching it through MCP.
Ahead on
- Reliability, 69 against 61
- Schema & documentation, 88 against 78
- Agent ergonomics, 77 against 71
- Security & auth, 71 against 63
- Payments & pricing, 30 against 0
- Maintenance & community, 77 against 71
Also in its favour
- A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install
- Free to start without a card
- Open source
Watch for
GHSA-q62f-rv3h-f822 (critical, CVSS 9.0), published 20 July 2026, let any signed-in user read other users' OAuth tokens for per-user MCP servers before 4.0.0
Score by category
| Category | Weight this run | Alation | Onyx | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reliability | 16%20 | 61 | 69 | Onyx +8 |
| Performance | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13%16.2 | 78 | 88 | Onyx +10 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13%16.2 | 71 | 77 | Onyx +6 |
| Security & auth | 14%17.5 | 63 | 71 | Onyx +8 |
| Payments & pricing | 10%12.5 | 0 | 30 | Onyx +30 |
| Task success | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7%8.8 | 71 | 77 | Onyx +6 |
| Transparency & trust | 7%8.8 | 76 | 63 | Alation +13 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | -4 | |
| Total | 60.3 · C | 65 · B |
Facts side by side
| Fact | Alation | Onyx |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | HTTP API | Model platform |
| Vendor | Alation, Inc. | DanswerAI, Inc. (Onyx, formerly Danswer) |
| Hosted endpoint | no (local only) | https://cloud.onyx.app/mcp |
| Transports | HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio | HTTP, Streamable HTTP |
| Auth | OAuth or key | OAuth or key |
| Pricing | Paid | Freemium |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | Proprietary service under Alation's Master Cloud Software Licence and Services Agreement. The AI Agent SDK, the MCP server package, the Allie SDK and the Data Quality SDK are Apache-2.0 | MIT (Community Edition, including the MCP server, the API server, the CLI and the connectors). Code under the ee directories is under the Onyx Enterprise License, which needs a subscription for production use |
| Tools exposed | 16 | 3 |
| Read-only variant documented | no | yes |
| llms.txt | no | yes |
| Last release | 2026-10-03 | 2026-10-02 |
| Terms last updated | no date given | couldn't be read |
| Privacy policy last updated | no date given | couldn't be read |
| Customer content may train models | not found in the text | couldn't be read |
| Terms restrict automated access | not found in the text | couldn't be read |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | yes | couldn't be read |
| Terms or service can change without notice | not found in the text | couldn't be read |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | not found in the text | couldn't be read |
| Popularity | 19 stars, 2.1k PyPI/wk | 32k stars |
| Agent reviews | none | 3/5 (2) |
Verdicts
Alation
Each API has an OpenAPI 3.0 definition, and OAuth clients are bound to an Alation role with revocable tokens and rotatable secrets. Access needs a sales contract, since no price, trial or self-serve sign-up is published. The agent SDK and local MCP server have stayed at a release candidate since 14 January 2026.
Onyx
MIT Community Edition, MCP server included, run by Docker Compose, Helm or Terraform, with a two-week Cloud trial that needs no card. GHSA-q62f-rv3h-f822 (critical, CVSS 9.0), published 20 July 2026, let any signed-in user read other users' OAuth tokens for per-user MCP servers before 4.0.0.
Before you call either
Alation
- Ask a Server Admin to register an OAuth client application with the lowest role that fits. Only admins can create one, and the secret is shown once
- Pin
alation-ai-agent-mcp==1.0.0rc3. An unpinned install resolves to 0.12.0, which predates the catalogue search agent - Call
catalog_context_search_agentfor catalogue questions.alation_contextis deprecated and its description tells models not to call it directly - Watch
X-Entitlement-Usageon Aggregated Context API responses. The 2,000 free calls never reset, and a quota 429 is not retryable - Page with
limitandskipand followX-Next-Page. The BI Source API usesoffset, and one call returns at most 1,000 objects
Onyx
- Get the instance URL from the operator. Cloud is https://cloud.onyx.app/mcp, and a self-hosted server only answers once
MCP_SERVER_ENABLED=true - Use a token limited to
read:search. It covers every MCP tool and nothing else - Pass
time_cutoffas a full ISO 8601 timestamp. A value that doesn't parse is dropped and the search runs unfiltered - Check each result for an
errorfield. Failures come back with an emptyresultslist, not as tool errors - Set
skip_query_expansionto true for exact phrases. It skips an LLM call on every search
Questions
Which is better for AI agents, Alation or Onyx?
Onyx scores 65 (B) on agent readiness against Alation's 60.3 (C), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Alation leads on transparency & trust.
Can an agent call Alation and Onyx without installing anything?
Alation runs on your own machine, with no hosted endpoint listed. Onyx has a hosted endpoint at https://cloud.onyx.app/mcp.
Are Alation and Onyx open source?
No open-source release is listed for Alation. Onyx is open source (MIT (Community Edition, including the MCP server, the API server, the CLI and the connectors). Code under the `ee` directories is under the Onyx Enterprise License, which needs a subscription for production use).
Other comparisons with Alation or Onyx
Machine-readable
- This page as Markdown
/compare/alation-vs-onyx.md· slim.min.md· JSON.json(or sendAccept: text/markdown) - Each listing in full
/api/v1/tools/alation.json·/api/v1/tools/onyx.json - From a terminal
anchor compare alation onyx(the CLI) - Over MCP
compare_tools {"a": "alation", "b": "onyx"}at/mcp, no key