Chroma is a paid tool. Please visit their website for pricing details.

Chroma

Open-source AI search infrastructure with vector, text, regex, stored attributes, and multimodal retrieval.

paid

Last Updated 7/30/2026

About Chroma

Chroma is open-source search infrastructure for AI applications. It stores documents and stored attributes, works with embedding models from providers such as OpenAI, Cohere, Hugging Face, and sentence-transformers, and supports dense, sparse, and hybrid vector search. Teams can also run full-text and regex queries, filter results by stored attributes, and index text, images, audio, and other modalities. Developers may start locally with the Apache 2.0 project or use Chroma Cloud for a managed, serverless database. Cloud billing is usage-based across reads, writes, and storage, while Enterprise uses custom pricing. The managed service is a practical fit when a team wants retrieval infrastructure without operating database servers, but variable workloads require cost monitoring because service pauses when customer-set or Chroma-set usage limits are reached. Chroma Cloud runs on AWS across multiple Availability Zones, and its security program has completed a SOC 2 Type II examination.

Best for

AI application teams that need a retrieval database supporting vector, keyword, regex, and stored attributes search.

Developers who want the option to begin with Apache 2.0 open-source software and move to managed cloud operations.

Organizations that need dedicated support, single-tenant or BYOC clusters, and service-level agreements.

Best use cases

Use Chroma when a retrieval-augmented application must store documents, embeddings, and stored attributes in one database.

Use hybrid search when semantic similarity alone misses exact terms, patterns, or stored attributes-defined subsets.

Choose the managed cloud when database operations are a distraction and usage-based scaling suits the workload.

Compare before choosing

Compared with vector-only stores, Chroma also includes full-text, regex, sparse, and stored attributes-filtered retrieval.

Self-hosting provides open-source control, while Chroma Cloud removes server operations and bills measured usage.

Enterprise adds unlimited databases and team members, dedicated support, deployment choices, and service-level agreements.

Features

AI retrieval systems

Store documents, embeddings, and stored attributes for retrieval-augmented generation and agent search workflows.

Hybrid application search

Combine dense, sparse, full-text, regex, and stored attributes-filtered search within one retrieval layer.

Multimodal content retrieval

Index and search images, audio, text, and related stored attributes for applications that use mixed media.

Pros

Apache 2.0 self-hosting offers source access and a local starting path without committing to managed infrastructure.
One retrieval layer supports vector, full-text, regex, and stored attributes-filtered queries, reducing the need for separate search systems.
Managed Cloud removes server operations, while Enterprise supports single-tenant and BYOC deployment requirements.

Cons

Usage-based charges for reads, writes, and storage can make monthly cloud costs vary with traffic patterns.
Reaching a customer-set or platform-set usage limit pauses the service until that limit is changed.
Enterprise pricing requires a sales conversation, so buyers cannot calculate that plan from a public fixed price.