Self-hosted / open sourceEnterprise SearchHeadquarters: US

Onyx: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Onyx is an open-source platform for enterprise search and AI chat over company knowledge. It connects to a range of internal sources, enforces source permissions at query time, and offers chat for people as well as for AI agents. The Community Edition is published under the MIT licence on GitHub. It can be self-hosted in one's own cloud, on Kubernetes, on bare metal or in an air-gapped environment, and the website also links to a hosted cloud option.

The company behind the product, DanswerAI, Inc., trading as Onyx, is based in San Francisco, United States. The website itself does not state a legal entity or headquarters. Because the software can run on infrastructure chosen by the customer, documents and embeddings can stay in a European environment. The website does not state where the hosted cloud stores data, nor does it make a GDPR or data processing commitment, so European organisations using that option should check these points directly.

See the 8 European alternatives ↓Assess your stack with Onyx pre-selected

Mastodon LinkedIn Bluesky X Email

Sovereignty score

69 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign

Jurisdiction SOV-210
Headquartered in the US: CLOUD Act and FISA 702
Data residency SOV-3100
No hosting in Europe (US)
Cryptographic key sovereignty SOV-390
Self-hostable: encryption keys under your own control
Freedom from lock-in SOV-680
Open source: low switching costs
Source & runtime sovereignty SOV-4 · SOV-665
Source code auditable, forkable and self-hostable

SOV codes: the matching objective in the European Commission's Cloud Sovereignty Framework. Official source

How the score is calculated

Facts and evidence

Last checked October 11, 2026

Headquarters	US (US)Verified by hand
EU adequacy decision	Only for companies individually certified under the EU-US Data Privacy FrameworkVerified by hand
Sovereignty model	Open-source, distributedVerified by hand
Data hosting	USVerified by hand
Open-source	YesVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant	NoVendor-stated
Category	Enterprise Search
Type	Product
Website	onyx.app ↗

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to Onyx

The European alternatives to Onyx come from our knowledge base of over 6,800 vendors. We only list vendors headquartered in the EU or the EEA; fully European-owned vendors rank before vendors with a foreign owner. For each alternative you see the country, the open-source status and a short description.

Score per alternative: 0 = high exposure, 100 = sovereign

21 European Enterprise Search vendors are in the catalogue. View the whole category · Submit an alternative · View category on the map

Is Onyx one of many dependencies?

Score your whole stack in about three minutes. Free, no account needed.

Assess your stack →View a sample report (opens in a new tab)

Why digital sovereignty matters with Onyx

Onyx is headquartered in the United States. US vendors fall under the CLOUD Act and FISA 702: US authorities can compel access to data, even when that data sits in a European data centre. That is the core of the jurisdictional exposure in our model.

Onyx hosts data outside the EU (US). Personal data therefore leaves the EU, which requires a transfer mechanism under the GDPR and pulls the data residency score down.

Onyx is open source. You can audit the source code, self-host the software and keep the encryption keys under your own control. Switching is easier because data and software are not tied to a single party.

What this means for your organisation depends on your whole stack and context. The free assessment weighs Onyx together with your other vendors and gives a total score, a heatmap and the main risk drivers.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best European alternative to Onyx?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Onyx include AddSearch, Cludo and Datafari. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Onyx?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to Onyx include Datafari and Elasticsearch. These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.

Is Onyx GDPR-compliant and where is the data hosted?

Onyx is headquartered in US and hosts data in US. Its GDPR compliance is limited or unclear. For full EU data residency the EU alternatives on this page usually offer more certainty.

Details and sources

Verified by handHeadquarters, owner, hosting locations and licence have been checked by us against public sources. Free of charge and for every vendor, not a paid label. Nothing in this knowledge base is taken over automatically. Last checked on October 11, 2026.

Sources

Public sources used in the latest check of this record.

Compliance evidence

The links below point to the vendor's own public documents. We only record what we found: a missing link means "not found publicly", not "not compliant".

No public compliance evidence has been recorded for this vendor yet. Do you know its DPA or subprocessor list? Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Digital sovereignty in Enterprise Search

Enterprise Search: Internal knowledge and document search across company tools, wikis and file stores. In this category the choice of vendor determines who has legal access to your data, where that data lives and how easily you can switch later.

Also in this category

See all →

Open in the alternatives dashboard Missing a vendor? Submit it Are you this vendor? You can also become a sponsor on the Enterprise Search page — with no effect on your score