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Chroma

Free tier

Open-source search infrastructure for AI — vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search at scale

Free tier available·All audiences·API available·Open source
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Key strengths

Multi-modal search: vector, full-text (BM25/SPLADE), regex, and metadata in one systemBuilt on object storage (S3/GCS) — up to 10x cheaper than memory-based alternativesServerless and zero-ops — auto-scales with no manual tuning requiredApache 2.0 open-source with 27k GitHub stars and 15M+ monthly downloadsEnterprise-grade: SOC 2 Type II, BYOC, multi-region replication, customer-managed encryption keys
Free tier + paid plans
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Chroma is a serverless, multi-tenant vector database built on top of object storage (S3/GCS), enabling automatic data tiering between hot memory cache, warm SSD cache, and cold object storage. It supports sparse vector search (BM25, SPLADE), dense vector search, trigram/regex full-text search, and metadata filtering with faceted search. The query execution engine is written in Rust, and clients are available for Python, TypeScript/JavaScript, and Rust. Technical specs include p50 query latency of 20ms at 100k vectors (384 dimensions), write throughput of 30 MB/s per collection, and support for up to 1 million collections per database.