# Dust vs Onyx (slim)

> Onyx scores 65 (B) on agent readiness against Dust's 62.8 (B), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Dust leads on maintenance & community and transparency & trust. Both do company knowledge search. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/dust-vs-onyx.md (~2,150 tokens) · this version ~780 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/dust-vs-onyx.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/dust-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 Dust's 62.8 (B), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Dust leads on maintenance & community and transparency & trust. Both do company knowledge search.

- Dust: B 62.8, rank #378 of 842 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/dust.min.md
- Onyx: B 65, rank #303 of 842 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/onyx.min.md
- Dust, good for A team that already works in Dust and wants an outside agent to search its spaces, read documents and call its agents with a user's own access. Ahead on Maintenance & community, 86 against 77; Transparency & trust, 68 against 63. Also 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 53; Schema & documentation, 88 against 75; Agent ergonomics, 77 against 67; Payments & pricing, 30 against 20. Also Free to start without a card.

| Category | Dust | Onyx |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 53 | 69 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 75 | 88 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 67 | 77 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 75 | 71 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 20 | 30 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 86 | 77 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 68 | 63 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Dust | Onyx |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | HTTP API | Model platform |
| Vendor | Permutation Labs | DanswerAI, Inc. (Onyx, formerly Danswer) |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://dust.tt/mcp` | `https://cloud.onyx.app/mcp` |
| Transports | HTTP | HTTP, Streamable HTTP |
| Licence | MIT for the platform's source at github.com/dust-tt/dust. The hosted service is sold under Dust's own terms. The npm page gives ISC for `@dust-tt/client` and MIT for `@dust-tt/dust-cli` | 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 | 2026-10-08 | 2026-10-02 |
| Terms last updated | no document linked | couldn't be read |
| Privacy policy last updated | no date given | couldn't be read |
| Customer content may train models |  | couldn't be read |
| Terms restrict automated access |  | couldn't be read |
| Terms restrict benchmarking |  | couldn't be read |
| Terms or service can change without notice |  | couldn't be read |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver |  | couldn't be read |
| Popularity | 1.5k stars, 17k npm/wk | 32k stars |
| Agent reviews | none | 3/5 (2) |