I understand they're trying to attract enterprisy customers, but even some of those are probably going to want to try it out first. Would be nice to have an easy minimal install option that doesn't require a deep dive into the project to figure out.

It’s nice to see an attempt at an end to end stack (for all that it seems this is “obvious” … there are not that many functional options) but wow we’ve forgotten the basis of making useful products. I’m hoping it gets enough time to bake.

Something like this could have a nice future as an open source chat framework for building custom UIs if it's well made and modular, but that isn't gonna work well with a SaaS model.

https://titanium-software.fr/en/onyx.html

its interesting to see how "lock-in" is the main pitch here. all things considered, i don't think "lock-in" is relevant at all unless the activity performed with the tool is highly strategic to the company.

you could argue that some orgs may not want openai/anthropic to have their sensitive data leave the parameter, but im also here to tell you that even the most privacy sensitive companies in the world probably resolve this by having a proxy in between the users and the LLM APIs from the labs.

so where does this leave you ? cost savings from OSS? maybe, but its hard to imagine that we are in the phase of the adoption cycle where companies have become as acutely aware of costs as you think they are.

my 2c - focus on the integrations and see which one gets most traction. that will be your value capture mechanism long-term.

Just curious. Especially with both OpenAI and Anthropic really also outpacing startups in release cadence unlike previous cycles.

Guessing your selling point is any model no locking (Assuming we are happy with the privacy SOC 2 etc guarantees on enterprise contracts here)

My main concern is how well do all the extra features work compared to the native versions? Like web search, RAG on a document, or deep research, adding images, voice chats - my understanding is the models providers don't provide any API's for any of this stuff, so you have your own implementations of all the extra stuff right? Usually I find the open source versions of all these features aren't up to par with the corporate versions and they lag behind in development.

I'm nitpicking, congrats on the launch!

My main gripe with openwebui, in addition to it being slow is the fact that it mangles documents in the OCR step. tables that could have been understood great by an multi modal llm, just gets mangled by the ocr and lost instead of storing both a text and original representation.

Being able to properly searcbin the knowlege base lime the llm does, but manually would be nice (like get recommendations for docs to add).

My usecase is mostly writing, so having a integrated document refinery editor is also a nice feature list.

I'm probably rambling but these are my base use-cases for a llm ui I personally have found.

a mobile application that has parity on the same features that ChatGPT and Claude does...

The main thing I really care about is voice mode, as that's my far preferred way of interacting with LLMs for longer backs and forths (most apps I've seen disable a lot of other functionality during it, which I hate, btw).

Two other things I would like to see are canvas mode and scheduled actions (with decision making capability - e.g. "send a notification if X happens").

I assume such features are going to continue being invented, so I find extensibility to be a huge deal. So much so that one thing I could imagine going really well would be a UI on top of Langchain, which already has most of the facilities for that!

Can you call it open source if you need a subscription license to run / edit the code?

Might have to try this out. OWUI's lagging docs has made managing my own self hosted instance a pain.

PS: Your _See All Connectors_ button on the homepage is 404ing.

> but I’m going to start by connecting GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet 4, and Qwen to provide my team with a secure way to use them

I did get a little giggle out of that because I've never heard anyone say that hooking up 3rd party llms to anything was any way secure.

Curious, it's a crowded space with other enterprise search companies like Glean and Elastic, and other companies coming in like Notion and Slack.

Why should a prospect choose Onyx over the others?

However it doesn't seem to have MinerU as a supported backend, which is hands-down the best PDF extraction tool I've ever used (and is self-hostable on a machine with a modest GPU). Could it be added?

https://github.com/opendatalab/MinerU

Can you clarify the license and if this actually meets the definition of Open Source as outlined by the OSI [1] or if this is actually just source available similar to OpenWebUI?

Specifically can / does this run without the /onyx/backend/ee and web/src/app/ee directories which are licensed under a proprietary license?

1 - https://opensource.org/licenses

How do you plan to make money? I'm very serious about this question.

I'm in an adjacent (but highly non-LLM field) and I'm grappling with this myself.

Selling compute or being a middle man and paying for API use seems like a low-margin game. It'd have to be with giving convenient search access to org data or something along those lines? Perhaps expanding into some kind of agent product?

My creativity on making money with LLMs is pretty sparse as I'm in the graphics world. But I'm certainly interested in "making money on aggregation" ideas.

Also, are you worried about competitors forking your code?

We are building a competing open source tool[0] with a very similar focus (strongly relying on interoperable standards like MCP; built for enterprise needs, etc.), though bootstrapping with customers rather than being VC funded. It's nice to see a competitor in the field following similar "OSS Friends" principles, while many of the other ones seem to have strong proprietary tendencies.

(Small heads up: The "view all integrations" button goes to a 404)

[0] https://erato.chat/

- can't fold/unfold code

- lack syntax highlight for some languages (Zig, Odin, D)

Why do we have to yet again poorly copy an oversimplified UI?

The value of local models comes from their huge amount of settings/control that they offer. Why must we throw that all away?

Yet again, the world waits for good UI/UX for pro/prosumers with AI systems. No one is learning from ComfyUI, Automatic1111, or SillyTavern. No, LM-Studio is not actually prosumer

As long as you have Pricing on your website your product is not open source in the true spirit of open sourceness. It is open code for sure but it is a business and so incentive is to run it like a business which will conflate with how the project is used by the community.

Btw, there is nothing wrong with that but let's be honest here if you get this funded (perhaps it already is) who are you going to align your mission with - the open source community or shareholders? I don't think you can do both. Especially if a strong competitor comes along that simply deploys the same version of the product. We have seen this story many times before.

Now, this is completely different from let's say Onyx being an enterprise search product where you create a community-driven version. You might say that fundamentally it is the same code but the way it is presented is different. Nobody will think this is open-source but more of "the source is available" if you want to check.

I thought perhaps it will benefit to share this prospective here if it helps at all.

Btw, I hear good things about Onyx and I have heard that some enterprises are already using it - the open-source version.

And no one bothered to say anything to them?