An Onyx alternative you don't have to host yourself

Onyx is open-source enterprise search you deploy on your own infrastructure: Docker, Vespa, PostgreSQL, Redis, and your own LLM keys. Context Link is fully managed: one place for AI to talk to your business. Connect your sources, ask source-backed questions from inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or any MCP-aware agent, and save settled decisions as Memories. Sources sync every 24 hours, and every answer comes back with citations. No servers, no DevOps, no infrastructure to babysit.

Try Context Link Free See the comparison →

Comparing

vs

01/ At a glance

Key differences

1. Onyx is self-hosted enterprise search that needs Docker, 12+ CPU cores, 24 GB RAM, and ongoing DevOps to maintain.

2. Context Link is a fully managed knowledge base for AI: Connect, Ask, Remember. No servers, no containers, no infrastructure to break at 2 a.m.

3. Onyx stops at search inside its own chat UI. Context Link answers with citations inside the AI tools your team already uses, and lets AI save knowledge back as Memories.

4. Every answer is source-backed with citations, and sources sync every 24 hours.

5. Reach Context Link from inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and any MCP-aware agent. Onyx asks your team to log into its own chat UI.

6. Onyx requires you to bring your own LLM API keys. Context Link bundles retrieval and answer composition into the service.

02/ No new tools

Use your existing AI

· ChatGPT

· Claude

Your sources

With your existing knowledge sources

Sources:

Basecamp

03/ Decision time

Which Should You Choose?

Onyx and Context Link both give AI access to your company knowledge. They take fundamentally different approaches to getting there.

Choose Onyx If...

• You have a developer or DevOps engineer who can deploy and maintain a multi-container Docker stack.
• Data sovereignty is non-negotiable: you need everything on your own servers, no exceptions.
• You want to customize the search pipeline, fork the code, or build on top of the platform.
• You need enterprise connectors like Salesforce, Jira, Confluence, or ServiceNow.
• You're comfortable managing LLM API keys, model servers, and infrastructure costs separately.

Choose Context Link If...

• You're a founder or owner-operator running a small business of 3-200 that uses AI every day and doesn't have DevOps capacity.
• You want source-backed answers with citations, from across Notion, Docs, email, and your website at once.
• You want to save settled decisions as Memories that every connected AI reads the latest version of.
• You want AI to reach Context Link from inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or any MCP-aware agent, with no new chat surface to adopt.
• You need to connect Notion, Google Docs, Google Drive, email (Gmail, Outlook, Zoho, Fastmail, IMAP), Basecamp, Monday.com, websites, or uploaded files.
• You want to be set up today, not after a week of Docker troubleshooting.

04/ Side by side

Feature comparison

05/ Two approaches

The Real Differentiation

Onyx

Onyx is a genuine open-source RAG platform with serious engineering behind it. It connects to 48 enterprise tools, supports any LLM, and gives you full control over your data. But 'full control' comes with real costs: you need Docker, PostgreSQL, Vespa, Redis, model servers, and someone to keep it all running. The baseline deployment needs 12 CPU cores and 24 GB of RAM. Users have reported Vespa consuming 42 GB on a 64 GB machine. And once you've stood it up, the product is still essentially a search box: it indexes your sources and lets you query them, inside its own chat UI. There's no way for AI to save knowledge back.

Context Link

Context Link is one place for AI to talk to your business, fully managed. Connect the places work happens (Notion, Google Docs, Google Drive, email, Basecamp, Monday.com, websites, uploaded files) and Context Link keeps them in sync as one connected knowledge base. Ask source-backed questions from inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or any MCP-aware agent, and every answer comes back with citations. Save settled decisions as Memories, and every connected AI reads the latest version. Under the hood it works like an AI knowledge base and managed RAG workspace, with sources synced every 24 hours, and you don't have to run any of it.

Onyx gives you a search box and infrastructure to run. Context Link gives AI one place to talk to your business, fully managed.

06/ No new tools

Meet your team where they already work

Your team stays on the best AI tools for them — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot. Context Link upgrades every conversation with your company's actual knowledge. Easy adoption, zero workflow disruption.

07/ Their strengths

What Onyx Does Well

Onyx is a real product built by a strong team (YC W24, backed by Khosla Ventures and First Round Capital, used by Netflix and Ramp). If you have the infrastructure capacity, these strengths genuinely matter.

1. Genuinely open source

   The Community Edition is MIT-licensed. You can read every line of code, fork it, modify it, and run it entirely on your own servers. For teams with strict open-source requirements or regulatory constraints, this transparency is valuable.

2. Full data sovereignty

   Self-hosted means your data never leaves your infrastructure. For defense contractors, financial services, healthcare, or anyone with strict data residency requirements, this is a real differentiator.

3. Model agnostic

   Onyx works with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or self-hosted models via Ollama and vLLM. No vendor lock-in on the AI model layer: you pick what works for your use case and budget.

4. 48 enterprise connectors

   Confluence, Jira, Salesforce, Slack, Google Drive, SharePoint, Zendesk, HubSpot, and many more. If your knowledge lives in enterprise tools, Onyx probably has a connector for it.

5. Permission-aware search

   Onyx inherits access controls from your source systems. Users only see documents they're authorized to see, important for organisations where not everyone should access everything.

08/ Our strengths

What Context Link Does Differently

1. One connected knowledge base, not just a search box

   Onyx indexes and retrieves inside its own chat UI. Context Link connects your sources, keeps them in sync every 24 hours, and answers with citations inside the AI tools your team already uses.

2. Memories, save the latest truth

   AI and humans can save settled decisions as Memories: named, canonical documents like a positioning statement or a pricing rationale. Update a Memory and every connected AI reads the latest version, with history kept. Onyx is read-only search; Memories let AI write knowledge back.

3. Always in sync

   Sources sync every 24 hours, so AI reads what your business says today, not a snapshot from the month you set it up. No manual refresh, no stale index.

4. Returned with citations

   Every answer cites the exact sources it came from, past lookups are reviewable in the responses log, and anything you don't want indexed can be excluded with a click.

5. No infrastructure to manage

   Context Link is fully managed. No Docker, no Vespa, no PostgreSQL, no Redis, no model servers. Indexing, chunking, embeddings, and retrieval are all handled for you.

6. Reach Context Link from inside the AI you already use

   Ask from inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or any MCP-aware agent. Onyx asks your team to log into its own chat UI. Context Link plugs into the tools they're already in.

7. Connect the sources small businesses actually use

   Notion, Google Docs, Google Drive, email (Gmail, Outlook, Zoho, Fastmail, custom domains via IMAP), Basecamp, Monday.com, any website via sitemap, uploaded files (PDFs, Word docs, Markdown). Onyx's connectors skew enterprise (Confluence, Jira, Salesforce). Context Link connects to the tools small businesses run on.

8. Minutes to value

   Connect your sources and start retrieving context the same day. No Docker troubleshooting, no OAuth configuration debugging, no waiting for Vespa to finish indexing. One person can set this up on a Tuesday afternoon.

9. SMB-friendly pricing

   Built for founders and small businesses of 3-200. No infrastructure costs to estimate, no LLM API bills to track separately, no 'free but actually $150/month in cloud compute' surprises.

09/ FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Is Context Link a direct replacement for Onyx? They overlap on the retrieval side: both let AI search your connected sources. The shapes diverge from there. Onyx is a self-hosted enterprise search platform you deploy on your own infrastructure. Context Link is a fully managed knowledge base for AI: sources synced every 24 hours, source-backed answers with citations from inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or any MCP-aware agent, and Memories for saving settled decisions. If you're a small business without DevOps capacity, Context Link gives you the retrieval benefit without the infrastructure overhead.

Onyx is free and open source. Why would I pay for Context Link? Onyx's Community Edition is free to download, but not free to run. You need cloud infrastructure (budget ~$150+/month for a basic VM), plus your own LLM API keys (another variable cost), plus someone with Docker and DevOps skills to deploy, maintain, and troubleshoot it. And once it's running, it's still a search box. Context Link bundles managed retrieval, 24-hour source sync, citations on every answer, and Memories into one service with predictable per-seat pricing.

What about Onyx's cloud plan at $20/user/month? Onyx launched a managed cloud tier, but you still work inside Onyx's own chat interface, you still need to bring your own LLM API keys, and the product itself is still scoped to enterprise search. Context Link is reachable from inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and any MCP-aware agent, and it ships with citations on every answer and Memories out of the box.

What are Memories? A Memory is a named, canonical document that holds the latest version of something your business wants AI to reuse: a positioning statement, an ICP definition, a pricing rationale, a decision and its reasoning. AI or a human saves it once, then any AI tool connected to Context Link can retrieve it later. Updating a Memory replaces the old truth while keeping version history, so AI always reads the latest version. Onyx has no equivalent; it's read-only search.

How does Context Link stay current? Sources sync every 24 hours, so the index reflects what your business says today. Update a Notion page or Google Doc and the change flows through on the next sync. For knowledge that lives outside any doc, save it as a Memory and update it as things change: every connected AI reads the latest version.

How do I know where an answer came from? Every answer cites the exact snippets it was built from, with links back to the source. Past lookups are reviewable in the responses log, so you can audit what AI retrieved and when, and anything you don't want indexed can be excluded with a click.

Can I use Context Link with ChatGPT AND Claude? Yes. Context Link is model-agnostic on the asking side. The same connected sources and Memories are reachable from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and any MCP-aware agent. Different team members can use different AI tools and still pull from the same knowledge base.

Onyx has 48 connectors. Does Context Link have enough? Different connectors for different teams. Onyx connects to enterprise tools like Confluence, Jira, Salesforce, and ServiceNow. Context Link connects to the tools small businesses actually use: Notion, Google Docs, Google Drive, email (including Zoho, Fastmail, and any IMAP provider, not just Gmail), Basecamp, Monday.com, any website via sitemap, and uploaded files. For tools not in the catalogue, the custom-connections skill lets your AI (Claude, Codex) fetch data from any service it can reach and push it into Context Link. If Claude can read it, you can push it to Context Link. If your critical knowledge lives in Confluence or Salesforce and you need Onyx's permission-aware real-time access, Onyx may still be a better fit.

How long does it take to set up? Most teams are up and running in under an hour. Connect your sources (Notion, Google Docs, email, websites, etc.) and you're retrieving context from your next AI conversation. No Docker deployment, no infrastructure provisioning, no OAuth debugging.

What about data sovereignty? Onyx lets me keep data on my own servers. That's a genuine advantage of self-hosting. If regulatory requirements mandate that your data never leaves your infrastructure, Onyx (or a similar self-hosted solution) may be necessary. For most small business teams, the operational cost of self-hosting outweighs the data sovereignty benefit. Context Link handles your data securely in the cloud, and you control exactly which sources are connected and what gets indexed.

I am looking at Onyx to build retrieval into my own product. Is Context Link an option for that? Yes, through a different plan. Generating content or answering questions for your users, and want it to pull from the full context of their business? Forking Onyx, or any open-source RAG stack, to serve your own customers leaves you the whole pipeline to keep good: scraping that is slow and brittle, chunking judgement calls, embeddings to re-run when content changes, weeks of tuning the scoring even with AI coding agents, and a vector database to host and keep isolated per tenant. The RAG White-Label plan does that part for you: one private vector index per end customer, built from their website (crawled, and chunked into searchable markdown) and/or the data you feed it from your own API calls, none of which you store or index yourself. Provision it with POST /api/v1/api_accounts at signup, delete it at churn, and read it with GET /api/v1/context (Get context) or GET /api/v1/question (Ask questions) under your brand, server-to-server. $50/month per bundle of 10 customer accounts, no token or usage fees on top, no vector database or scoring algorithm to host. You still build the UI. Overview at context-link.ai/for/white-label-rag-api, docs at context-link.ai/docs/white-label.

Does Context Link have an 'Ask' feature like Onyx? Yes. Alongside the primary "get context on [topic]" workflow, Context Link has an Ask Question skill invoked as /ask-question [question] or natural language ("ask Context Link what …"). It runs the same semantic retrieval across your connected sources, then a small fast LLM composes one grounded paragraph with numbered citations back to the exact snippets used. The difference: instead of logging into another app to ask, you invoke it from inside the AI you already use: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or any MCP-aware agent. Ask Question is a Pro feature and counts toward the monthly LLM allowance (2,000 requests/month on Pro, shared across LLM-powered features).

10/ Summary

The bottom line

Onyx is a serious open-source RAG platform backed by YC, Khosla Ventures, and First Round Capital. If you have a developer who can manage Docker deployments, need full data sovereignty, or want to customize the search pipeline at the code level, Onyx gives you that control.

Context Link is one place for AI to talk to your business, fully managed. Connect your sources once, ask source-backed questions from inside ChatGPT, Claude, or any MCP-aware agent, and save settled decisions as Memories. Sources sync every 24 hours and every answer comes back with citations. No servers, no API keys, no infrastructure to babysit.

Quick decision guide

Your pain I need full data sovereignty and the ability to customize the RAG pipeline at the code level
Solution
Onyx is the right choice

Your pain I want AI grounded in my business, with citations on every answer, without running infrastructure
Solution
Context Link is the right choice

Your pain I want a managed knowledge base that stays in sync and lets AI save knowledge back, not just enterprise search
Solution
Context Link is the right choice

Your pain I don't have a developer to maintain Docker containers, Vespa, and model servers
Solution
Context Link is the right choice

Get started

Give AI a Way to Talk to Your Business

Connect your Notion, Google Docs, or website (5 minutes)

Connect your email inbox or upload key files (5 minutes)

Save your first Memory (positioning, ICP, or pricing rationale)

Open ChatGPT or Claude and ask: 'Get context on [topic]'

Get a source-backed answer with citations

Pricing

Context for business

7-day free trial
$19 per seat / month

Developer API

7-day free trial
$50/month per 10 API user accounts

Does Context Link have enough? Different connectors for different teams. Onyx connects to enterprise tools like Confluence, Jira, Salesforce, and ServiceNow. Context Link connects to the tools small businesses actually use: Notion, Google Docs, Google Drive, email (including Zoho, Fastmail, and any IMAP provider, not just Gmail), Basecamp, Monday.com, any website via sitemap, and uploaded files.

For tools not in the catalogue, the custom-connections skill lets your AI (Claude, Codex) fetch data from any service it can reach and push it into Context Link. If Claude can read it, you can push it to Context Link. If your critical knowledge lives in Confluence or Salesforce and you need Onyx's permission-aware real-time access, Onyx may still be a better fit.