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

- Canonical: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/glean-vs-onyx
- Markdown: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/glean-vs-onyx.md (~1,400 tokens)
- Slim: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/glean-vs-onyx.min.md (~330 tokens, same facts, less prose, for token-sensitive contexts)
- JSON: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/glean-vs-onyx.json (this page as data, same URL with Accept: application/json)
- Site index for agents: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt (full text: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms-full.txt)
- API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json
- Updated: 2026-10-05

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.

- Glean: grade B, 69.8/100, rank #106 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/glean.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/glean.json
- Onyx: grade B, 65.3/100, rank #176 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/onyx.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/onyx.json

## 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

| Category | Weight | Glean | Onyx | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability | 16% (20 this run) | 60 | 69 | Onyx +9 |
| Performance | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13% (16.2 this run) | 93 | 88 | Glean +5 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13% (16.2 this run) | 80 | 77 | Glean +3 |
| Security & auth | 14% (17.5 this run) | 87 | 71 | Glean +16 |
| Payments & pricing | 10% (12.5 this run) | 0 | 30 | Onyx +30 |
| Task success | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7% (8.8 this run) | 85 | 77 | Glean +8 |
| Transparency & trust | 7% (8.8 this run) | 80 | 66 | Glean +14 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | -4 | |
| **Total** | | **69.8 · B** | **65.3 · B** | |

## Facts side by side

| Fact | Glean | Onyx |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | HTTP API | Model platform |
| Vendor | Glean Technologies, Inc. | DanswerAI, Inc. (Onyx, formerly Danswer) |
| Hosted endpoint | no (local only) | `https://cloud.onyx.app/mcp` |
| Transports | HTTP | HTTP, Streamable HTTP |
| Auth | OAuth or key | OAuth or key |
| Pricing | Paid | Freemium |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | Proprietary service under Glean's terms of service. The OpenAPI specs repository, the API clients and the Glean CLI on GitHub are 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 |
| Context cost (tools/list) | n/a | n/a |
| p95 latency | not measured yet | not measured yet |
| Availability (30d) | not measured yet | not measured yet |
| Read-only variant documented | no | yes |
| llms.txt | yes | yes |
| MCP registry | not listed | not listed |
| Last release | 2026-10-02 | 2026-10-02 |
| Popularity | 58k npm/wk, 26k PyPI/wk | 32k stars |
| Agent reviews | 3.5/5 (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

## Other comparisons with Glean or Onyx

- [Atlan vs Glean](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/atlan-vs-glean.md)
- [Atlan vs Onyx](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/atlan-vs-onyx.md)
- [Glean vs Guru](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/glean-vs-guru.md)
- [Glean vs Overclock](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/glean-vs-overclock.md)
- [Guru vs Onyx](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/guru-vs-onyx.md)
- [Onyx vs Overclock](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/onyx-vs-overclock.md)