onyx

Onyx is the self-hosted answer to enterprise ChatGPT, and its value is in where it plugs in. It indexes Slack, Google Drive, Confluence, GitHub, and 50-odd other sources, then answers questions about your own material with citations pointing back at the source document. The Community Edition is MIT licensed and covers chat, agentic RAG, custom agents, web search, code execution, and artifacts.

Self-hosting comes in two shapes and the gap between them matters. Lite runs in under 1GB of memory on a simplified stack. Standard is the full system: vector and keyword indexing, background workers, ML inference servers, Redis, and MinIO blob storage, deployed through Docker, Kubernetes, or Helm. Standard is a real deployment with real operational weight, not a weekend project.

The Enterprise Edition is where the money sits, and the split is defensible: SSO and SAML, role-based access control, analytics, query auditing, and whitelabeling. Solo and small teams get everything meaningful for free. Onyx Cloud has a free tier if you would rather not run it at all.

The catch is that RBAC line. Permission-aware search, where the assistant only surfaces documents a given person is allowed to see, is exactly what a company with sensitive material needs, and it sits on the paid side. That is fair monetization, but price it before you roll this out company-wide.