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Decision brief
Chroma is an open-source data infrastructure for AI designed to support vector, hybrid, and full-text search capabilities with high performance.
Good fit when
- - When you require a high-performance data infrastructure that can handle complex query needs for AI applications. - If your project necessitates fast, cost-effective, and scalable serverless services
- - You need an open-source solution with easy onboarding as Chroma offers in-memory setup for rapid prototyping.
Avoid when
- - In scenarios where a more mature or enterprise-grade solution is required, as Chroma might be rapidly evolving and not yet fully stabilized.
- - If your project requires extensive customization at the lower levels that the relatively new tool might not support comprehensively yet
- Pricing:
- freemium - The open-source version is free to use and modify; the hosted service (Chroma Cloud) has a freemium model offering $5 of initial credits.
- Requirements:
- Min 1 GB RAM
Observed Jul 11, 2026 · Source: enrich:decision_facts
Verify the decision
Maintenance and security
Full trust report- Maintenance
- Very active (0d since push)
- As of 3w
- Provenance
- Not a fork · Organization account
- As of 3w
- Security (OSV)
- 8 low (8 low)
- As of 1mo
Public GitHub metadata and optional OSV scans. Signals, not a guarantee. Trust methodology.
Install
cargo add chroma crates.ioHow it fits your stack(31)
Typed graph edges - alternatives, integrations, successors, and dependencies. Ranked by relationship type, not raw GitHub stars.
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Integrates
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Optional deeper exploration of typed edges and category neighbours.
Evidence and technical details
Sourced facts, taxonomy, compatibility claims, README excerpt, and machine-readable endpoints.
Overview
Chroma is an open-source data infrastructure designed to provide high-performance vector, hybrid, and full-text search capabilities for AI applications.
Capability facts
- Deploy
- Self-host
Source: dockerfile:Dockerfile · Jul 28, 2026
- Docker
- Dockerfile present
Source: dockerfile:Dockerfile · Jul 28, 2026
- CLI
- CLI entrypoint
Source: pyproject.toml:[project.scripts] · Jul 28, 2026
- Languages
- rust, python
Source: github.language+pyproject.toml · Jul 28, 2026
Categories
Compatibility
Sourced claims from the README excerpt - not unsourced marketing copy.
Source: README excerpt (regex_v1, Jul 28, 2026)
# for javascript, npm install chromadb!Source link
Source: README excerpt (regex_v1, Jul 28, 2026)
pip install chromadb # python clientSource link
Tags
README
Chroma - the open-source data infrastructure for AI.
pip install chromadb # python client
# for javascript, npm install chromadb!
# for client-server mode, chroma run --path /chroma_db_path
Chroma Cloud
Our hosted service, Chroma Cloud, powers serverless vector, hybrid, and full-text search. It's extremely fast, cost-effective, scalable and painless. Create a DB and try it out in under 30 seconds with $5 of free credits.
API
The core API is only 4 functions (run our 💡 Google Colab):
import chromadb
# setup Chroma in-memory, for easy prototyping. Can add persistence easily!
client = chromadb.Client()
# Create collection. get_collection, get_or_create_collection, delete_collection also available!
collection = client.create_collection("all-my-documents")
# Add docs to the collection. Can also update and delete. Row-based API coming soon!
collection.add(
documents=["This is document1", "This is document2"], # we handle tokenization, embedding, and indexing automatically. You can skip that and add your own embeddings as well
metadatas=[{"source": "notion"}, {"source": "google-docs"}], # filter on these!
ids=["doc1", "doc2"], # unique for each doc
)
# Query/search 2 most similar results. You can also .get by id
results = collection.query(
query_texts=["This is a query document"],
n_results=2,
# where={"metadata_field": "is_equal_to_this"}, # optional filter
# where_document={"$contains":"search_string"} # optional filter
)
Learn about all features on our Docs
Get involved
Chroma is a rapidly developing project. We welcome PR contributors and ideas for how to improve the project.
- Join the conversation on Discord -
#contributingchannel - Review the 🛣️ Roadmap and contribute your ideas
- Grab an issue and open a PR -
Good first issue tag - Read our contributing guide
Release Cadence
We currently release new tagged versions of the pypi and npm packages on Mondays. Hotfixes go out at any time during the week.
License
Apache 2.0
For agents
This page has a .md twin and JSON over the API.