Onyx vs Visual Studio Code (2026): Pricing, Features & Verdict
Visual Studio Code is our pick, scoring 7.7/10 against 7.2/10 for Onyx on our AI Software criteria. Its biggest advantage: higher Ease of Use score (8/10 vs 6/10). For 10 users, Onyx and Visual Studio Code are both free; both Onyx and Visual Studio Code have a free plan.
Last updated: November 2026
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.
Visual Studio Code
7.7/10
Microsoft's free code editor with built-in GitHub Copilot chat, inline suggestions and multi-agent coding sessions, aimed at developers and engineering teams.
Feature-by-Feature Comparison
| Feature | | |
|---|---|---|
| Scores | ||
| Overall Rating | 7.2/10 | 7.7/10 |
| Integration | 8/10 | 9/10 |
| Analytics | 5/10 | 4/10 |
| Customization | 9/10 | 9/10 |
| Ease of Use | 6/10 | 8/10 |
| Support | 5/10 | 6/10 |
| Cost | 8/10 | 9/10 |
| Scalability | 7/10 | 7/10 |
| Security | 8/10 | 7/10 |
| Output Quality | 7/10 | 7/10 |
| Pricing | ||
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Cheapest paid plan | $20/user/mo Business | Contact for pricing |
| Estimated cost for 10 users | Free Community Edition (self-hosted) | Free VS Code with Copilot Free |
| Features | ||
| Image Generation | ||
| AI Agents | ||
| API Access | ||
| Code Generation | ||
| Enterprise Controls | ||
| Text Generation | ||
| Chatbots | Not listed | |
| Custom Model Training | Not listed | |
| Knowledge Base Search | Not listed | |
| Private Deployment | Not listed | |
| Video Generation | Not listed | |
| Voice and Audio | Not listed | |
Onyx vs Visual Studio Code cost by team size
Onyx and Visual Studio Code cost the same at every team size we checked.
| Team size | Onyx | Visual Studio Code |
|---|---|---|
| 1 user | FreeCommunity Edition (self-hosted) | FreeVS Code with Copilot Free |
| 5 users | FreeCommunity Edition (self-hosted) | FreeVS Code with Copilot Free |
| 10 users | FreeCommunity Edition (self-hosted) | FreeVS Code with Copilot Free |
| 25 users | FreeCommunity Edition (self-hosted) | FreeVS Code with Copilot Free |
| 50 users | FreeCommunity Edition (self-hosted) | FreeVS Code with Copilot Free |
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 Onyx and Visual Studio Code suit
Visual Studio Code fits developers better than Onyx.
| Audience | Onyx | Visual Studio Code |
|---|---|---|
| Developers | 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. | 10/10It is a code editor built for developers, and its AI features cover writing, editing and testing code. |
| Enterprise | 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. | 7/10Enterprise AI policies and GitHub Enterprise sign-in support governed rollouts, but advanced controls depend on Copilot Business or Enterprise. |
| Startups | 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. | 8/10The editor is free and Copilot Free gives small teams AI help without upfront cost. |
| Freelancers | Not rated | 8/10Free editor with bring-your-own-key and local model options keeps costs low for solo developers. |
| Government | 6/10Air-gapped and region-specific deployments are offered, but there is no evidence of government-specific certifications. | Not rated |
| IT Teams | 8/10IT teams can self-host it with Docker, Kubernetes or Helm, configure connectors and models, and keep data inside their own infrastructure. | Not rated |
| SaaS Companies | Not rated | 8/10Tight GitHub integration with issues, pull requests and Actions fits product engineering teams. |
| Small Business | 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. | Not rated |
Which One Should You Choose?
Why choose Onyx
- Higher Analytics score (5/10 vs 4/10)
- Higher Security score (8/10 vs 7/10)
- Includes Image Generation, which Visual Studio Code lacks
Why choose Visual Studio Code
- Higher Ease of Use score (8/10 vs 6/10)
- Higher Integration score (9/10 vs 8/10)
- Better fit for developers (10/10 vs 7/10)
Pros & Cons
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.
Visual Studio Code
Pros
- The editor is free, and signing in with GitHub automatically enrolls you in Copilot Free, so you can try AI coding at no cost.
- You can choose the agent harness (Copilot, Claude or Codex), bring your own API key or use a local model.
- MCP servers, custom agents, skills, hooks and prompt files let teams shape how the agents behave.
- An independent test found strong GitHub integration: the agent read an issue and fixed a race condition on the first attempt.
- Administrators can restrict agents, models and tools on managed devices through enterprise AI policies.
Cons
- Agents run commands in the local terminal, so they could run destructive commands if a user approves carelessly.
- A tester found the agent missed cross-package dependencies in repositories with 200 or more files and produced shallow happy-path tests.
- The companion app and parallel worktree sessions were Insiders-only as of May 2026.
- Copilot billing has moved to AI credits and reviewers report conflicting price information, which makes costs hard to predict.
- Bring-your-own-key does not cover inline suggestions, semantic search or embeddings, so a Copilot plan is still needed for those.
Not sold on either?
Frequently Asked Questions
Visual Studio Code scores higher on our AI Software criteria: 7.7/10 against 7.2/10 for Onyx. The largest gap is in Ease of Use: 6/10 for Onyx and 8/10 for Visual Studio Code.
Both are free for 10 users.
Yes, both Onyx and Visual Studio Code have a free plan.
Visual Studio Code is the better fit for developers: we rate it 10/10 for them, against 7/10 for Onyx.
Onyx has Image Generation, which Visual Studio Code lacks.
