# Alation vs Onyx (slim)

> 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. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/alation-vs-onyx.md (~2,300 tokens) · this version ~880 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/alation-vs-onyx.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/alation-vs-onyx
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · Updated: 2026-10-09

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.

- Alation: C 60.3, rank #472 of 842 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/alation.min.md
- Onyx: B 65, rank #303 of 842 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/onyx.min.md
- Alation, 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 Runs on your own machine; No incidents deducted, where Onyx loses 4 points for them.
- Onyx, 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 A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install; Free to start without a card; Open source.

| Category | Alation | Onyx |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 61 | 69 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 78 | 88 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 71 | 77 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 63 | 71 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 0 | 30 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 71 | 77 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 76 | 63 |

| Fact (where they differ) | 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 |
| Pricing | Paid | Freemium |
| 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) |