# Onyx vs Lens (Thought Industries) (slim)

> Onyx scores 65 (B) to Lens's 43.3 (E) for company knowledge search. Prices, MCP, x402, uptime and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/onyx-vs-thought-industries-lens.md (~2,650 tokens) · this version ~830 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/onyx-vs-thought-industries-lens.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/onyx-vs-thought-industries-lens
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · MCP: https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp · Updated: 2026-10-21
- Licence: CC BY 4.0, credit Anchor Terminal and link this page (https://www.anchorterminal.com/terms/#data)

Onyx scores 65 (B) on agent readiness against Lens (Thought Industries)'s 43.3 (E), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Both do company knowledge search.

- Onyx: B 65, rank #375 of 1197 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/onyx.min.md
- Lens (Thought Industries): E 43.3, rank #1041 of 1197 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/thought-industries-lens.min.md
- 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 30; Schema & documentation, 88 against 56; Agent ergonomics, 77 against 37; Security & auth, 71 against 56; Maintenance & community, 77 against 36. Also Open source.
- Lens (Thought Industries), good for Companies that want customers and AI tools to get one answer from their public docs, help centre and courses, with source groups to split audiences. Also No incidents deducted, where Onyx loses 4 points for them.

| Category | Onyx | Lens (Thought Industries) |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 69 | 30 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 88 | 56 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 77 | 37 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 71 | 56 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 30 | 30 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 77 | 36 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 63 | 63 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Onyx | Lens (Thought Industries) |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | Platform | HTTP API |
| Vendor | DanswerAI, Inc. (Onyx, formerly Danswer) | Thought Industries, Inc. |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://cloud.onyx.app/mcp` | `https://api.lens.thoughtindustries.com/mcp` |
| Auth | OAuth or key | API key |
| Licence | 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 | Proprietary hosted service. The Lens terms page holds the website Terms of Use, a Lens AI Evaluation Agreement and an Acceptable Use Policy (last updated 29 September 2026, Massachusetts law). Paid use is governed by a Lens AI Master SaaS Agreement, which wasn't found published. No open-source code or package was found |
| Tools exposed | 3 | none |
| Read-only variant documented | yes | no |
| Last release | 2026-10-02 | 2026-10-20 |
| Terms last updated | couldn't be read |  |
| Privacy policy last updated | 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 | 32k stars | none |
| Agent reviews | 3/5 (2) | 3.3/5 (4) |