amaiko vs Onyx: Self-Hosted Control or Sovereignty Without the Infrastructure? (2026)

Nothing to run: amaiko is managed, Onyx is a stack you operate

amaiko is a managed service. It is hosted in Germany on amaiko’s own infrastructure, and amaiko handles updates, security and scaling. Your IT team’s part ends when amaiko is installed in Microsoft Teams.

Onyx, formerly Danswer, is open source and self-hostable: its Community Edition is MIT-licensed. What self-hosting means is in Onyx’s own docs. The full Standard deployment runs a vector and keyword search index, background workers that sync your connectors, AI model servers for indexing and queries, plus Redis and MinIO. The sizing guide asks for at least 4 vCPU and 10 GB of RAM, about 12 CPU and 24 GB once each container gets its own resources on Kubernetes, and disk of 32 GB plus about 2.5 times your indexed data. It also warns that the search index blocks all writes when the disk reaches 95%, and tells you to “monitor disk usage and plan capacity accordingly”.

For your team that means a server to provision, upgrades to schedule, a disk to watch, and someone to call when indexing stops, for as long as the company uses it. With amaiko, none of that lands on your team.

Your team works in Teams, not in another tab

amaiko lives in the Microsoft Teams chat your team already has open. It reads and drafts across the Microsoft 365 workday: email, calendar, files, Word, Excel and PowerPoint, SharePoint and OneNote. Each person signs in with their own account.

Onyx’s README lists where you can use it: a web and desktop app, a Slack and Discord bot, an MCP server, a Chrome extension and an embeddable widget. Its integrations page offers answers in Slack and says: “Coming soon to Microsoft Teams”. What Onyx has for Teams today is a connector that indexes Teams messages and files into Onyx. Setting it up takes an Azure app registration, a client secret the docs set to expire after 24 months, and application permissions to read channel messages across your organization, granted by admin consent.

For your team that means every question starts with switching to Onyx, while a copy of your Teams conversations sits in Onyx’s index and someone has to renew that secret.

Answers before you ask, and a memory that stays

amaiko acts first. Your morning briefing is ready when you open Teams, Active Inbox sorts your email before you read it, and reminders you set up arrive on time. Behind that sits a persistent corporate memory: amaiko learns how each person works, and conversations are consolidated into lasting company knowledge overnight. When someone leaves, their context stays.

For your team that means 35% less time spent searching and onboarding up to 57% faster, because a new hire starts with what the company already knows. amaiko connects to the systems your business runs on through its marketplace, including HubSpot, Dynamics 365 Business Central, Personio, Jira, Confluence and DATEV.

Price: what you pay, and what it includes

amaiko costs €41.58 per user per month billed annually (€499 per user per year), or €49.90 billed monthly, from five seats. Hosting in Germany, updates, operation and unlimited tokens are included. If every token must be processed in the EU by Mistral models, amaiko liberté costs the same.

Onyx’s price has three routes, all on its pricing page:

• Community Edition, self-hosted: free MIT licence. You pay for the servers and the staff time to run them.
• Onyx Cloud Business: $20 per user per month billed annually, $25 monthly. Onyx hosts it.
• Enterprise: “Contact us”. The pricing page lists on-premise deployments, region-specific deployments and the enterprise SLA here, and Onyx’s deployment overview names role-based access control and automatic permission syncing as premium features of the self-hosted Enterprise Edition.

Two companies at list price, net, amaiko billed annually. Onyx publishes its prices in US dollars; we show them as published.

Per seat, Onyx Cloud Business costs less than amaiko. That plan puts your data in Onyx’s cloud, and choosing the region is an Enterprise feature. If you shortlisted Onyx to keep your data under your control, your real price is either an Enterprise quote you only get from sales, or the free edition plus the servers and people to run it. amaiko’s price already includes hosting in Germany and a team that runs it for you.

Questions to ask Onyx before you sign

Get the answers in writing. Ours is under each one.

1. Who on our team deploys, patches, upgrades and monitors Onyx, and how many hours a month will that take? amaiko: Nobody on your team. amaiko runs the service.
2. Which features we need are Enterprise-only (role-based access, permission syncing, on-premise, region choice), and what does Enterprise cost at our headcount? amaiko: One plan, €41.58 per user per month billed annually, hosting in Germany included.
3. On Onyx Cloud Business, in which country is our data stored, and which sub-processors can see it? amaiko: Germany, on amaiko’s own infrastructure, with AI processing in the EU.
4. When will the Microsoft Teams app ship, and what will it do on day one? amaiko: It works inside Teams today.
5. The Teams connector reads channel messages across our tenant. Who approves that consent, and who renews the client secret? amaiko: Each person signs in with their own account.
6. Which model costs come on top of the licence, in the cloud and when self-hosted? amaiko: None. Tokens are unlimited in the plan.

See it for yourself

Book a demo and ask amaiko the questions your team asks every day, in your own Teams. How amaiko hosts and protects your data is on the security page. And if you are still weighing the field: the top Onyx alternatives.