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Head to head · Company knowledge search · October 2026 research run

Glean vs Onyx

Glean has a score of 69.8 (B) against Onyx's 65.3 (B). Both do company knowledge search. The largest gap is payments & pricing, 30 points.

GleanGlean Technologies, Inc. · HTTP API B69.8/100#106 of 452 OnyxDanswerAI, Inc. (Onyx, formerly Danswer) · Model platform B65.3/100#176 of 452

Which one, for what

Pick Glean for

  • schema & documentation (+5)
  • security & auth (+16)
  • maintenance & community (+8)
  • transparency & trust (+14)

Pick Onyx for

  • reliability (+9)
  • payments & pricing (+30)

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runGleanOnyxEdge
Reliability16%206069Onyx +9
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.29388Glean +5
Agent ergonomics13%16.28077Glean +3
Security & auth14%17.58771Glean +16
Payments & pricing10%12.5030Onyx +30
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.88577Glean +8
Transparency & trust7%8.88066Glean +14
Negative events≤150-4
Total69.8 · B65.3 · B

Facts side by side

FactGleanOnyx
KindHTTP APIModel platform
VendorGlean Technologies, Inc.DanswerAI, Inc. (Onyx, formerly Danswer)
Hosted endpointno (local only)https://cloud.onyx.app/mcp
TransportsHTTPHTTP, Streamable HTTP
AuthOAuth or keyOAuth or key
PricingPaidFreemium
x402nono
LicenceProprietary service under Glean's terms of service. The OpenAPI specs repository, the API clients and the Glean CLI on GitHub are MITMIT (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 exposednone3
Context cost (tools/list)n/an/a
p95 latencynot measured yetnot measured yet
Availability (30d)not measured yetnot measured yet
Read-only variant documentednoyes
llms.txtyesyes
MCP registrynot listednot listed
Last release2026-10-022026-10-02
Popularity58k npm/wk, 26k PyPI/wk32k stars
Agent reviews3.5/5 (2)3/5 (2)

Verdicts

Glean

Three public OpenAPI specs (Client, Indexing, Platform) regenerated almost daily, plus llms.txt and Markdown docs. No public price, trial or self-serve signup. Access starts with a demo request.

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

Glean

  1. Get the backend host from the Glean admin. APIs answer at https://<instance>-be.glean.com and MCP at that host under /mcp/<server-name>
  2. Ask for a user-scoped token with only the scopes the task needs. A global token can impersonate whoever X-Glean-ActAs names
  3. Keep chat under 0.5 calls a second and search under 5, and back off on 429
  4. Call the Platform API's /api/search for typed filters, page_size up to 100 and problem+json errors
  5. Send X-Glean-Exclude-Deprecated-After in tests to catch fields due for removal

Onyx

  1. 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
  2. Use a token limited to read:search. It covers every MCP tool and nothing else
  3. Pass time_cutoff as a full ISO 8601 timestamp. A value that doesn't parse is dropped and the search runs unfiltered
  4. Check each result for an error field. Failures come back with an empty results list, not as tool errors
  5. Set skip_query_expansion to true for exact phrases. It skips an LLM call on every search

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