Chroma

What is Chroma?

Chroma is an open source vector database for AI applications that stores embeddings and documents for search and retrieval. Chroma Cloud is its hosted service with usage-based pricing: Starter is $0 per month plus usage, and Team is $250 per month plus usage.

Key features of Chroma

• Vector search: store and query embeddings for retrieval.
• Open source: free to self-host.
• Chroma Cloud: hosted databases, with 10 on Starter and 100 on Team.
• Usage pricing: $2.50 per GiB written, $0.33 per GiB per month stored, $0.0075 per TiB queried and $0.09 per GiB returned.
• Enterprise options: single-tenant clusters, SLAs and unlimited databases.
• SOC II: included on Team, per the vendor.

How Chroma works

Developers add documents and embeddings to collections and query by similarity. Chroma Cloud bills usage for writes, storage, queries and network returns.

Who uses Chroma?

Chroma suits developers building retrieval-augmented generation and search applications, from prototypes on the open source version to teams on Chroma Cloud.

Chroma pricing

Starter is $0 per month plus usage with $5 in free credits, 10 databases and 10 team members. Team is $250 per month plus usage with $100 in credits, 100 databases, 30 members and SOC II. Enterprise is custom. Usage is $2.50 per GiB written, $0.33 per GiB per month, $0.0075 per TiB queried and $0.09 per GiB returned. The vendor's example estimates $79 per month for a mid-sized workload.

Chroma integrations

The pricing page names no integrations beyond Slack support tiers.

Chroma alternatives

Weaviate and Qdrant are open source vector databases with managed clouds. Milvus is a scalable open source option with a large community, and Marqo focuses on end-to-end vector search with built-in embedding.