Self-Hosted Enterprise Search, Deployed in Your Tenant
We deploy Onyx (formerly Danswer) and the open-source enterprise-search stack inside your VPC, on-prem, or air-gapped environment. 40+ connectors out of the box, permission-aware retrieval that respects your existing ACLs, and flat licensing economics that don't break as you scale headcount.
What You Get from an Onyx Deployment
Six outcomes companies see when they move enterprise search off Glean and onto a self-hosted Onyx deployment.
Unified Enterprise Search
Search across Slack, Drive, Confluence, Notion, Jira, GitHub, Salesforce, SharePoint, and 30+ other workplace apps. One assistant, one query, all of your corporate knowledge.
Permission-Aware Retrieval
Connectors sync incrementally and respect each source's ACLs. Users only see results from documents they already have permission to view in the source app.
Document Q&A with Citations
Chat over your corporate knowledge with grounded answers that link back to the source paragraphs. No hallucinated facts, no orphan responses.
Self-Hosted in Your Tenant
Onyx runs in your VPC, on-prem, or air-gapped. Your documents, embeddings, and chat history never leave the environment your security team already owns.
Bring Your Own LLM
OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini via your enterprise contract — or self-hosted Llama, Mistral, Qwen via vLLM / Ollama. Switch models without rebuilding.
Flat Licensing Economics
One-time deployment plus an optional managed retainer. No per-seat surprises as headcount grows. At scale, 5–10× cheaper than Glean's per-seat list.
Why Multi-Tenant Search SaaS Misses
Glean, Guru, and other multi-tenant enterprise-search SaaS were built around a single assumption: it's fine for your documents, embeddings, and chat traffic to sit in the vendor's cloud. That works at small scale — but it leaves three problems on autopilot the moment the business gets serious:
Onyx is the open-source Glean alternative.
Same connector breadth, same permission-aware retrieval, same chat-with-citations UX — except it runs in your tenant on infrastructure you already own, and it gets smarter from your usage, not the next vendor customer's.
The 8 Capabilities We Deploy
Together they cover every job you'd hire Glean for — plus the things Glean structurally can't do because it's multi-tenant SaaS.
Unified search across 40+ workplace apps
One search bar, one chat assistant, every app your teams already live in — Slack, Drive, Confluence, Notion, Jira, GitHub, Salesforce, SharePoint, Linear, Zendesk, and 30+ more. Custom connectors for industry-specific systems where needed.
Permission-aware retrieval that respects your ACLs
Connectors sync incrementally and respect each source’s native permissions. An intern asking about M&A files gets the same “no results” they’d get in Drive. No share-everything default.
Document Q&A with grounded citations
Chat answers come back with inline citations linked to the source paragraphs. Every claim is traceable to a sentence in a real doc your employees can open and verify.
Custom assistants per team
Dedicated assistants for sales, support, legal, and engineering — each scoped to the sources, system prompts, and tools that team actually needs.
Bring-your-own-LLM gateway
Route to OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, or Bedrock via your enterprise contract — or self-host Llama, Mistral, Qwen on vLLM, SGLang, or Ollama. Swap models without rebuilding the stack.
Native Slack and Teams integration
Use the assistant from Slack DMs, channel mentions, or Teams threads — with the same permission-aware retrieval. Adoption is dramatically higher than “yet another tab” deployments.
Air-gapped and on-prem deployment
Runs in your VPC, on bare-metal, or fully air-gapped. The full stack deploys in one Kubernetes namespace or Docker Compose stack. No data leaves your perimeter.
Enterprise audit, SSO, and RBAC
SAML SSO and OIDC for Okta, Azure AD, JumpCloud, and Google Workspace. Full audit trails of who searched what — the pack your CISO and regulator both expect.
Talk to an Onyx & Open-Source Search Expert
Bring us your connector list, your seat count, and your data-residency profile. We'll come prepared with the right Onyx deployment shape — cloud, on-prem, or air-gapped — and a directional read on what you can stand up in your tenant next sprint.
Book a Strategy Session →When You Need a Custom Open-Source Glean Alternative, Not SaaS
Multi-tenant search SaaS covers the median knowledge worker well. But teams winning on enterprise AI search need things SaaS structurally can't deliver:
Onyx is the open-source path. Deploy it once on your infrastructure, configure it for your stack, and your enterprise search is a capability you own — not a vendor subscription that scales linearly with seat count.
Frequently Asked Questions
It's a direct alternative for the core Glean job: unified enterprise search and chat across your workplace apps with permission-aware retrieval. Onyx ships 40+ connectors, supports the same chat-with-citations UX, integrates with Slack and Teams natively, and has a custom-assistants framework comparable to Glean Apps. What you give up: a vendor handling upgrades and a slick onboarding experience. What you gain: data sovereignty, flat economics past ~100 seats, and the ability to fine-tune ranking on your usage patterns instead of the vendor's median customer.
Depends on seat count and deployment shape. A back-of-envelope: 100 seats on Glean at ~$60/seat/month is $72K/year just in software. A standard Onyx deployment plus a year of managed service runs roughly the same — except you own the stack from year two on. At 500 seats, Glean is $360K/year and climbing; the Onyx deployment + managed retainer is a fraction of that, with the gap widening every year you scale.
40+ at last count, covering most of what enterprise teams need: Slack, Google Drive, Confluence, Notion, Jira, GitHub, GitLab, Salesforce, SharePoint, OneDrive, Dropbox, Box, Linear, Asana, Zendesk, Intercom, Gmail, Outlook, Teams, Word/Excel, web (with auth), and many more. For industry-specific systems (iManage, NetDocuments, Epic, Workday, ServiceNow), we build custom connectors as part of the engagement.
No. Every connector syncs document ACLs alongside the content. When a user queries, Onyx filters results to documents that user has access to in the source app. Asking about M&A files surfaces nothing for an intern who can't open them in Drive; the same query from a partner returns the matching files. This is the part Glean charges extra for in some tiers — Onyx ships it by default.
Yes. Onyx ships as a Kubernetes deployment or Docker Compose stack — the full system (connectors, embeddings, vector store, LLM serving) runs in one namespace. For air-gapped environments we pair Onyx with vLLM or Ollama serving a self-hosted Llama / Mistral / Qwen model, and the entire stack runs without an outbound internet connection.
Every engagement includes deployment, connector configuration, SSO/RBAC setup, branding, and a launch playbook. After that, an optional managed retainer covers monitoring, version upgrades (Onyx ships every few weeks), connector additions, and quarterly reviews. Or you can take it in-house — we hand off a complete runbook and our internal IaC either way.
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Learn more →AI Transformation Workshop
Half-day strategy workshop to map your connector landscape and identify the right Onyx deployment shape for your environment.
Book a workshop →AI Strategy Session
30-minute scoping call. We'll talk through your current search stack, seat economics, and data-residency profile, then sketch the right Onyx deployment.
Book a session →AI Consultant vs In-House Team
Honest tradeoffs on bringing the Onyx deployment in-house versus engaging a partner for build + managed.
Read the comparison →Ready to Deploy Self-Hosted Enterprise Search?
A 30-minute strategy call. We'll walk through your current search stack, seat economics, and data-residency profile — then come back with a concrete deployment shape, connector list, and rollout sequence.