Pinchy vs Onyx
Onyx (formerly Danswer) is a permission-aware search and RAG platform: chat over your documents, answers that respect source permissions. Pinchy is an agent platform where the agent takes actions in your tools, with per-agent permissions and a signed audit trail. Both are self-hosted and chat-first. The job they do is different.
The Core Difference
Connect 50+ sources, then ask. Onyx retrieves across your documents and apps and answers in chat, respecting the permissions of the underlying systems. The center of gravity is finding and answering.
Pinchy agents do more than answer: they create the sales order in Odoo, draft and send the email, post to Telegram. The center of gravity is bounded action, with a human approval step where it matters.
Onyx's signature is document-level permission sync: answers inherit who-can-see-what from the source. Pinchy's signature is action governance: which tools each agent may use, and a signed record of every call it made.
Side by Side
Figures as of June 2026. Check each project's pricing and docs for current details.
| Onyx | Pinchy | |
|---|---|---|
| Center of gravity | Knowledge search & RAG | Agents that take actions |
| License (core) | MIT (enterprise dirs separately licensed) | AGPL-3.0 |
| Connectors / integrations | 50+ source connectors | Odoo, Gmail, Telegram, web, docs |
| Retrieval / RAG depth | Hybrid search, knowledge graph | File-based knowledge base |
| Document permission sync | Yes (self-hosted EE) | Not offered |
| Per-agent tool permissions | Not the core model | Allow-list per agent |
| RBAC & groups (self-hosted) | Enterprise Edition | Roles free, groups in Pro |
| Audit of agent actions | Query history / analytics | HMAC-signed per row, CSV export |
| Local models | Yes (Ollama, vLLM, LiteLLM) | Yes (Ollama), fully offline |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes (first-class, GHCR images) |
Being Honest
50+ source connectors (Google Drive, Slack, Confluence, Salesforce, SharePoint and more) with strong hybrid retrieval. For company-wide search, Onyx covers far more ground than Pinchy's integration list.
Onyx inherits access-control lists from source systems, so answers only surface documents a user may already see. For knowledge access, that is deeper than Pinchy's tool allow-lists. Pinchy does not mirror source ACLs.
Around 30k GitHub stars (June 2026), a $10M seed round, and SOC 2 Type II per the company's own statements. Onyx is further along the maturity and trust curve than early-stage Pinchy.
If the primary job is "ask the company's knowledge anything", Onyx's retrieval and research agents are built for exactly that. Pinchy's knowledge base is file-based and simpler.
Where Pinchy Wins
Reading and answering is the start. Pinchy agents create records in Odoo, draft and send email, post to Telegram. The job is doing, not only finding.
Each agent starts with zero tools; admins enable each one explicitly, per agent. Every tool call is recorded in an individually signed audit trail. To our knowledge, Onyx does not document cryptographic signing of its logs.
Pinchy's roles and signed audit are AGPL and free. For self-hosted Onyx, RBAC, SSO, and permission-sync sit in the Enterprise Edition.
Pinchy ships a deep Odoo integration: query stock, create orders, book a receipt from a photo, all from chat or Telegram. Acting inside an ERP is a first-class use case.
Before an agent sends an email or writes to a business system, it can draft and ask for confirmation. The human stays in the loop by design, not by bolt-on.
The license key is validated offline and Pinchy sends no telemetry. What runs on your infrastructure stays on your infrastructure, air-gapped if you want.
Decision Guide
The job is secure question-answering across many documents and apps. Connector breadth matters. Answers must respect who can see what in the source systems.
The job is agents that take actions in business systems, especially Odoo. You need per-agent tool permissions, human approval, and a signed record of every action.
Onyx covers company-wide knowledge search, and Pinchy handles the agents that act on what those answers imply. They address adjacent halves of the same workflow.
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