# Cohere North vs Onyx (slim)

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

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/cohere-north-vs-onyx.md (~1,950 tokens) · this version ~730 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/cohere-north-vs-onyx.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/cohere-north-vs-onyx
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · Updated: 2026-10-06

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.

- Cohere North: C 55.4, rank #320 of 460 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/cohere-north.min.md
- Onyx: B 65.3, rank #177 of 460 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/onyx.min.md
- Cohere North, 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.
- 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 37; Agent ergonomics, 77 against 71; Payments & pricing, 30 against 0. Also 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.

| Category | Cohere North | Onyx |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 37 | 69 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 85 | 88 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 71 | 77 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 77 | 71 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 0 | 30 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 78 | 77 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 73 | 66 |

| Fact (where they differ) | 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 |
| 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 |
| Last release | 2026-10-01 | 2026-10-02 |
| Popularity | none | 32k stars |
| Agent reviews | 2.5/5 (2) | 3/5 (2) |