How We Use Onyx to Power Knowledge Management at Rybbit

Building an open-source analytics platform means dealing with a massive amount of information—code documentation, user guides, technical decisions, architecture docs, and everything in between. As Rybbit has grown, managing this knowledge has become critical to maintaining our development velocity and product quality.

That's where Onyx comes in.

What Is Onyx?

Onyx is an open-source enterprise AI search and knowledge platform that helps teams discover, research, and automate work using generative AI. Think of it as your company's brain—a central hub that connects all your apps, documentation, and conversations, making everything searchable and accessible through a powerful AI interface.

Unlike traditional knowledge bases or search tools, Onyx goes beyond simple keyword matching. It uses advanced AI techniques like contextual retrieval, hybrid search, and knowledge graphs to understand what you're actually looking for, not just what you typed.

Why We Chose Onyx

When you're building a fast-moving open-source project, you need tools that match your values. Here's why Onyx was a perfect fit for Rybbit:

1. Open Source First

Just like Rybbit, Onyx is fully open source. We believe in transparency and community-driven development, so it made sense to use a tool that shares these principles. Being able to self-host Onyx means our internal knowledge stays exactly where it should be—under our control.

2. Privacy and Security

As a privacy-focused analytics platform, we take data security seriously. Onyx's self-hosting capabilities and granular access controls mean we never have to worry about sensitive product decisions or customer information leaving our infrastructure.

3. Connects Everything

Onyx integrates with 40+ applications out of the box. For us, this means our GitHub repositories, Slack conversations, Notion docs, and internal wikis are all searchable from one place. No more context switching between five different tools to find that one technical decision from three months ago.

How We Use Onyx at Rybbit

Let's get specific about how Onyx has transformed our workflows:

Instant Code Context for New Features

When building a new feature for Rybbit—say, improving our session replay functionality—our engineers can ask Onyx questions like "How did we implement session recording compression?" Instead of digging through GitHub commits or pinging teammates, Onyx surfaces relevant code snippets, past discussions, and architectural decisions instantly.

This is especially valuable for an open-source project where contributors might be jumping in without deep historical context. Onyx democratizes knowledge across the entire team.

Customer Support That Actually Helps

Our support team uses Onyx to quickly find answers to customer questions. When someone asks about GDPR compliance or self-hosting requirements, Onyx can pull from our documentation, past support tickets, and engineering notes to provide accurate, comprehensive answers in seconds.

This has dramatically reduced our response times and improved answer quality—a win-win for our users and our team.

Research and Competitive Analysis

Building the best analytics platform means staying on top of industry trends. We use Onyx's web search capabilities to research new analytics techniques, competitor features, and emerging privacy regulations. The AI can synthesize information from multiple sources, giving us quick summaries that would otherwise take hours to compile manually.

Documentation That Writes Itself (Almost)

Okay, it's not quite that automated, but Onyx has made our documentation process significantly faster. When writing docs for a new feature, we can use Onyx to quickly pull together all the relevant technical details, past examples, and user questions. This gives our technical writers a solid foundation to build from, cutting documentation time in half.

Code Reviews and Quality Checks

During code reviews, Onyx helps us maintain consistency with our codebase. Reviewers can quickly search for similar implementations, check our coding conventions, and verify that new code follows established patterns. This speeds up reviews while maintaining our high quality standards.

The Technical Edge: Why Onyx Stands Out

What makes Onyx particularly powerful for a technical team like ours isn't just what it does, but how it does it:

Advanced Retrieval Techniques

Onyx uses state-of-the-art retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to minimize AI hallucinations. When you ask a question, you're getting answers grounded in your actual company knowledge, not generic AI responses that might be confidently wrong.

Custom AI Agents

We've built custom Onyx agents for specific tasks—one for analyzing analytics implementations, another for reviewing privacy compliance, and another for helping with self-hosting questions. These agents have specialized instructions and access to specific knowledge sets, making them incredibly effective at their jobs.

Code Interpreter

The built-in code interpreter is a game-changer for quick data analysis. Need to process some usage metrics or analyze a performance issue? You can run Python code directly in Onyx's chat interface, making exploratory analysis incredibly fast.

Real Results We've Seen

Since implementing Onyx across our team, we've observed several benefits:

Faster onboarding: New contributors have quicker access to project history and context
Reduced context switching: Developers spend less time hunting for information
Better documentation: Our docs benefit from having information gathering streamlined
Improved support quality: Support can reference more comprehensive knowledge sources

Getting Started with Onyx

If you're running a technical team, especially in the open-source world, Onyx is worth checking out. The setup is straightforward:

Check out the Onyx documentation to understand the platform's capabilities
Choose your deployment: Cloud trial or self-hosted (we recommend self-hosting for full control)
Connect your apps: Start with your most-used tools like GitHub, Slack, or Notion
Create custom agents: Tailor the AI to your specific use cases and team needs

The investment in setup pays off quickly. For a growing team managing complex technical products, having all your knowledge instantly accessible is a superpower.

Open Source Tools for Open Source Teams

At Rybbit, we're big believers in using the best tools for the job—and even better when those tools share our open-source values. Onyx has become an essential part of our development workflow, helping us build better analytics software while maintaining the speed and agility that our users expect.

If you're building something ambitious and drowning in documentation, code, and conversations, give Onyx a try. Your future self (and your team) will thank you.