Comparison · AI assistants
Curiosity and Onyx
Chat over documents, or a graph of records
Curiosity models industrial records into a graph; Onyx is an open source assistant over your documents.
Your data · your environment
Who each tool is for
Different problems, honestly stated
Curiosity
For industrial and regulated teams whose knowledge sits in engineering systems and structured records, where the answer depends on how those records connect, and where the deployment has to run on their own infrastructure.
Onyx
An open source AI assistant and enterprise search, formerly Danswer, that you can host yourself or use as a cloud service, with a choice of models and connectors to common workplace tools. It suits engineering teams that want chat over company documents on their own servers and are happy to run it.
How Curiosity compares
Where the boundary falls
Onyx and Curiosity both run on your infrastructure with the model you choose, and both can be tried for free. The difference is underneath: Onyx retrieves passages from your documents, Curiosity models the entities and relationships across your records and builds tools on them.
Built for the industrial estate
General assistants are tuned for cloud collaboration tools. Curiosity connects engineering systems, data lakes, network drives and proprietary sources.
Structured context, not a chat layer
The graph models entities and relationships, so answers reason over how records connect rather than over retrieved passages.
On your infrastructure
On premises or private cloud, with data residency you control and the model of your choice.
Side by side
Feature comparison
The same five questions, answered for both.
Deployment
Cloud or self-hosted, ready to use
Self-hosted or vendor cloud
Data model
Managed context layer and knowledge graph
Search and chat over documents
Industrial fit
Built for industrial and enterprise teams
Teams that run their own tools
Data reach
70+ systems connected, and yours through a connector you write
Workplace tool connectors
Residency
EU hosted, or entirely your own infrastructure
Your choice
Customization
What your team can change
Your own code, interface, data model and configuration. Onyx as its own documentation described it in October 2026. Where it says Not available, the vendor documents no such capability.
Your own code
C# endpoints, AI tools and tasks, compiled in Studio
Open source code, HTTP hook extensions in Enterprise
Your own interface
Your own front end in C#, deployed from git
Open source front end, website widget, white labeling
Data model
Typed node and edge schemas you define
Not available
Configuration as code
Every change committed to git, pushed to your remote
Deployment as Helm, Terraform and env files
APIs and SDKs
REST API, C# and Python library, connector SDK
REST API, ingestion API, CLI
AI integration
What AI can build and reach
Whether AI can build on it, who reviews the result, and which models it runs. Onyx as its own documentation described it in October 2026.
AI that builds
Sudo drafts endpoints, tools, schemas and screens
Craft builds web apps and dashboards from a prompt
Review before it applies
Every change a diff a person approves, in a sandbox
Craft runs in a sandbox, actions ask by policy
Model choice
Any major provider, or an OpenAI compatible endpoint
OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure, any OpenAI compatible endpoint
Models on your servers
Open weights on your servers, or air gapped
Self hosted, local models via Ollama
Assistant permissions
Built in tools search as the user, per record
Permission sync from sources, Enterprise Edition
Agent protocols
MCP server and an OpenAI compatible API
MCP client and server, OpenAI compatible gateway
At Airbus, we developed the next generation of customer support AI assistance tools with Curiosity, enhancing our technical support’s ability to access and navigate vast data from multiple sources, including millions of documents.
Services Innovation Team
Airline Services at Airbus
AI assistants
Other comparisons in this group
Glean
Curiosity connects complex industrial data; Glean focuses on cloud applications.
CompareMicrosoft 365 Copilot
Curiosity reaches the whole industrial estate; Microsoft 365 Copilot works across Microsoft’s own suite.
CompareGemini Enterprise
Curiosity connects complex industrial data; Gemini Enterprise is Google’s assistant for cloud work.
CompareYour data. Your infrastructure.