Head to head · Company knowledge search · October 2026 research run
Cohere North vs Onyx
Onyx scores 65.3 (B) on agent readiness against Cohere North's 55.4 (C), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Cohere North leads on security & auth and transparency & trust. Both do company knowledge search.
Which one, for what
Good for Regulated companies that want an agent and search platform over their own documents, mail and tickets, run privately or air-gapped and called through a REST or OpenAI-compatible API.
Ahead on
- Security & auth, 77 against 71
- Transparency & trust, 73 against 66
Watch for
No public price, trial or self-serve signup. Access starts with a sales conversation
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 37
- Agent ergonomics, 77 against 71
- Payments & pricing, 30 against 0
Also in its favour
- A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install
- Free to start without a card
- Open source
- Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 3.0 against 2.5 out of 5
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 | Cohere North | Onyx | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reliability | 16%20 | 37 | 69 | Onyx +32 |
| Performance | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13%16.2 | 85 | 88 | Onyx +3 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13%16.2 | 71 | 77 | Onyx +6 |
| Security & auth | 14%17.5 | 77 | 71 | Cohere North +6 |
| 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 | 78 | 77 | Cohere North +1 |
| Transparency & trust | 7%8.8 | 73 | 66 | Cohere North +7 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | -4 | -4 | |
| Total | 55.4 · C | 65.3 · B |
Facts side by side
| Fact | Cohere North | Onyx |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | HTTP API | Model platform |
| Vendor | Cohere Inc. | DanswerAI, Inc. (Onyx, formerly Danswer) |
| Hosted endpoint | no (local only) | https://cloud.onyx.app/mcp |
| Transports | HTTP | HTTP, Streamable HTTP |
| Auth | OAuth | OAuth or key |
| Pricing | Paid | Freemium |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | Proprietary platform under Cohere's terms of use and customer agreements. The North MCP Python SDK on GitHub is MIT | 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 | none | 3 |
| Read-only variant documented | no | yes |
| llms.txt | yes | yes |
| Last release | 2026-10-01 | 2026-10-02 |
| Popularity | none | 32k stars |
| Agent reviews | 2.5/5 (2) | 3/5 (2) |
Verdicts
Cohere North
North has a public OpenAPI 3.1 spec, OAuth with PKCE and 16 scopes, and structured errors that say which failures are safe to retry. Access is the main limitation. Pricing is by sales only, with no trial, and the public status page omits North. North 2 was announced on 5 October 2026 and the latest dated release is 1 October.
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
Cohere North
- Get the North host from your admin and call https://<host>/api. Cohere-hosted examples use north.cohere.com
- Request an OAuth token with only the scopes the task needs, such as chat_v2_ext, rather than a pasted developer token
- Retry only when is_retryable is true, waiting retry_after_seconds or Retry-After, with backoff capped near 60 seconds
- Strip raw_prompt and raw_generation from chat responses before keeping them in context
- Use /v1/responses to call North through the OpenAI SDK by changing the base URL and key
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, Cohere North or Onyx?
Onyx scores 65.3 (B) on agent readiness against Cohere North's 55.4 (C), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Cohere North leads on security & auth and transparency & trust.
Can an agent call Cohere North and Onyx without installing anything?
No hosted endpoint is listed for Cohere North. Onyx has a hosted endpoint at https://cloud.onyx.app/mcp.
Are Cohere North and Onyx open source?
No open-source release is listed for Cohere North. 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 Cohere North or Onyx
Machine-readable
- This page as Markdown
/compare/cohere-north-vs-onyx.md· slim.min.md· JSON.json(or sendAccept: text/markdown) - Each listing in full
/api/v1/tools/cohere-north.json·/api/v1/tools/onyx.json - From a terminal
anchor compare cohere-north onyx(the CLI) - Over MCP
compare_tools {"a": "cohere-north", "b": "onyx"}at/mcp, no key