Lucidworks vs Onyx (2026): Pricing, Features & Verdict
Onyx is our pick, scoring 7.2/10 against 6.9/10 for Lucidworks on our AI Software criteria. Its biggest advantage: higher Cost score (8/10 vs 3/10). Only Onyx has a free plan.
Last updated: November 2026
Lucidworks
6.9/10
Lucidworks sells an enterprise AI search and product discovery platform built on Fusion, with generative answers, AI agents and merchandising tools for commerce and workplace search.
Onyx
7.2/10
Onyx, formerly Danswer, is an open-source AI assistant and enterprise search tool that lets staff search and chat across 50+ connected workplace apps with permissions respected.
Feature-by-Feature Comparison
| Feature | | |
|---|---|---|
| Scores | ||
| Overall Rating | 6.9/10 | 7.2/10 |
| Integration | 7/10 | 8/10 |
| Analytics | 8/10 | 5/10 |
| Customization | 9/10 | 9/10 |
| Ease of Use | 5/10 | 6/10 |
| Support | 6/10 | 5/10 |
| Cost | 3/10 | 8/10 |
| Scalability | 9/10 | 7/10 |
| Security | 9/10 | 8/10 |
| Output Quality | 8/10 | 7/10 |
| Pricing | ||
| Free plan | No | Yes |
| Cheapest paid plan | Contact for pricing | $20/user/mo Business |
| Estimated cost for 10 users | Contact for pricing | Free Community Edition (self-hosted) |
| Features | ||
| AI Agents | ||
| API Access | ||
| Chatbots | ||
| Enterprise Controls | ||
| Knowledge Base Search | ||
| Private Deployment | ||
| Text Generation | ||
| Code Generation | Not listed | |
| Custom Model Training | Not listed | |
| Image Generation | Not listed | |
| Voice and Audio | Not listed | |
Lucidworks vs Onyx cost by team size
| Team size | Lucidworks | Onyx |
|---|---|---|
| 1 user | Contact for pricing | FreeCommunity Edition (self-hosted) |
| 5 users | Contact for pricing | FreeCommunity Edition (self-hosted) |
| 10 users | Contact for pricing | FreeCommunity Edition (self-hosted) |
| 25 users | Contact for pricing | FreeCommunity Edition (self-hosted) |
| 50 users | Contact for pricing | FreeCommunity Edition (self-hosted) |
The plan that fits each team size, billed monthly, before add-ons and usage charges. Each cost opens that tool's pricing calculator for the team size.
Who Lucidworks and Onyx suit
Onyx fits small business better than Lucidworks.
| Audience | Lucidworks | Onyx |
|---|---|---|
| Small Business | 2/10There is no free or self-serve plan, and reviewers say the cost is too high for small clients. | 5/10The cloud trial lowers the barrier to entry, but the self-hosted resource needs and enterprise-oriented features add overhead for very small teams. |
| Developers | 6/10Pipelines, connectors and APIs give engineers deep control, but reviewers find setup and upgrades heavy. | 7/10It is MIT-licensed open source with a REST API, ingestion API, MCP server and LLM gateway, but agents are set up through configuration rather than a visual builder. |
| Enterprise | 9/10It is sold through enterprise contracts with hybrid deployment, SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001, and its named customers include Lenovo, Morgan Stanley and American Express. | 8/10The product is built around permission-aware search across company tools, with SSO, RBAC, air-gapped deployment and named enterprise customers including Netflix, Ramp and Thales. |
| Customer Support Teams | 6/10Agent Studio and knowledge management search can deflect repetitive questions using help content. | Not rated |
| E-commerce | 9/10Commerce Studio, part number detection, image data enrichment and product page Q&A agents are built for online retail and B2B commerce catalogs. | Not rated |
| Financial Services | 7/10Banks and card issuers such as Morgan Stanley and American Express are named customers, and self-hosted and private deployments are supported. | Not rated |
| Government | Not rated | 6/10Air-gapped and region-specific deployments are offered, but there is no evidence of government-specific certifications. |
| IT Teams | Not rated | 8/10IT teams can self-host it with Docker, Kubernetes or Helm, configure connectors and models, and keep data inside their own infrastructure. |
| Startups | Not rated | 7/10The free Community Edition and $20 per user Business plan are affordable, but small teams have to run the infrastructure or pay for the cloud plan. |
Which One Should You Choose?
Why choose Lucidworks
- Higher Analytics score (8/10 vs 5/10)
- Higher Scalability score (9/10 vs 7/10)
Why choose Onyx
- Has a free plan (Lucidworks does not)
- Higher Cost score (8/10 vs 3/10)
- Higher Integration score (8/10 vs 7/10)
- Better fit for small business (5/10 vs 2/10)
Pros & Cons
Lucidworks
Pros
- Supports self-hosted Fusion on Kubernetes, which can run on-premises, alongside hosted and SaaS options, which suits regulated buyers who need private infrastructure.
- Strong compliance record: a SOC 2 Type 2 report covering May 2025 to May 2026, plus ISO/IEC 27001:2022 and CSA STAR, all listed on a public trust center.
- Commerce-specific tooling such as merchandising rules, part number detection, image-based attribute enrichment and product page Q&A agents.
- Custom embedding model training on your own signals data, combined with neural hybrid search, gives deep relevance control.
- Ships updates often: the changelog shows new Agent Studio, MCP, UI Studio and Commerce Studio features throughout 2025 and 2026.
Cons
- No public pricing and no free tier, and third-party data puts a typical contract around 53,500 USD a year before services.
- Reviewers describe upgrades, pipelines and schema changes as cumbersome and complex to run.
- The hosted Lucidworks Search version blocks custom Docker images and custom stages, and upgrades are mandatory.
- Promotions to production on the hosted version can take up to three business days.
- Few public reviews: about 12 on G2 and 10 on TrustRadius, which makes peer validation thin.
- V1 connectors, including Salesforce, are deprecated, and a replacement was still in development.
Onyx
Pros
- The Community Edition is MIT-licensed and free to self-host, with chat, RAG, agents and actions included.
- More than 50 connectors with continuous sync and hybrid search with reranking, covering Slack, Drive, Confluence, GitHub, Jira and others.
- You can use cloud models from OpenAI, Anthropic or Gemini, or run open-weight models on your own GPUs through Ollama, vLLM or LiteLLM.
- It can be deployed in your own cloud, on bare metal or fully air-gapped, so documents and model traffic stay inside your environment.
- The published $20 per user per month Business price is easy to compare, while Glean does not publish its pricing.
- Onyx Cloud holds SOC 2 Type II and states GDPR compliance, with yearly penetration tests.
Cons
- Self-hosting is a real operations commitment: about eleven services, at least 4 vCPU and 10 GB of RAM, and you own upgrades, backups and monitoring.
- Permission inheritance from sources, SSO, SCIM group sync and query analytics need the paid Enterprise Edition.
- The first full sync of large sources can take days, and changing the embedding model triggers a full re-index.
- The search index runs on a fixed backend, so you cannot swap in a different vector store.
- There are almost no reviews on G2 or Capterra, so there is little independent user feedback to go on.
- Enterprise pricing is not published, and the Business plan comes with community support only.
Not sold on either?
Frequently Asked Questions
Onyx scores higher on our AI Software criteria: 7.2/10 against 6.9/10 for Lucidworks. The largest gap is in Cost: 3/10 for Lucidworks and 8/10 for Onyx.
Onyx has a free plan; Lucidworks does not list one.
Onyx is the better fit for small business: we rate it 5/10 for them, against 2/10 for Lucidworks.
