# Chroma

> Open-source AI search infrastructure supporting vector, full-text, sparse, regex, and metadata search, available as a self-hosted database or serverless cloud service.

Chroma is an open-source search infrastructure project built specifically for AI applications, licensed under Apache 2.0. The core database is written primarily in Rust and available on GitHub, while Chroma Cloud provides a hosted, serverless version of the same engine. The project reports over 15 million monthly downloads and more than 27,000 GitHub stars, according to the Chroma website.

## What It Is

Chroma is a multi-modal search database designed to power retrieval in AI and agent applications. It supports vector (semantic similarity), sparse vector (BM25/SPLADE), full-text (trigram and regex), and metadata (filtering and faceted) search within a single system. Developers can run it locally in-memory for prototyping, self-host it on their own infrastructure, or use Chroma Cloud for a fully managed, serverless deployment. The core API is intentionally minimal — the GitHub README describes it as "only 4 functions" — making it fast to integrate into Python or JavaScript/TypeScript projects.

## Architecture and Storage Model

Chroma's cloud infrastructure is built on object storage (S3/GCS) rather than traditional memory-heavy architectures. The system uses automatic query-aware data tiering and caching across hot (memory), warm (SSD), and cold (object storage) layers. The homepage notes that vectors are large — roughly 15 GB of vectors per 1 GB of text — and that object storage at ~$0.02/GB/month is far cheaper than memory at ~$5/GB/month. The engineering blog describes a custom write-ahead log (wal3) built on object storage and a push-based, morsel-driven query execution engine written in Rust. Published latency benchmarks at 100k vectors (384 dimensions) show p50 warm query latency of 20ms and p99 of 57ms.

## Search Capabilities

- **Vector search**: Semantic similarity using dense embeddings
- **Sparse vector search**: Lexical search via BM25 and SPLADE (added October 2025)
- **Full-text search**: Trigram and regex operators
- **Metadata search**: Filtering and faceted search
- **Collection forking**: Copy-on-write dataset versioning for A/B testing and rollouts
- **GroupBy**: Aggregate search results by metadata keys

## Open-Source Deployment Model

The core Chroma database is Apache 2.0 licensed and can be run locally or self-hosted on any infrastructure. The GitHub repository (chroma-core/chroma) is the primary distribution point, with packages available via `pip install chromadb` and `npm install chromadb`. The project publishes new tagged versions of the PyPI and npm packages on a weekly cadence (Mondays), with hotfixes released as needed. The website states Chroma is used in over 90,000 other open-source codebases on GitHub, per vendor-published claims.

## Update: Chroma Cloud GA and Recent Releases

Chroma Cloud became generally available in August 2025. Since then, the changelog shows a rapid release cadence:

- **Chroma Cloud Sync (March 2026)**: Serverless data ingestion from S3, GitHub, and the web
- **Metadata Arrays (February 2026)**: Store arrays of strings, numbers, and booleans in metadata
- **Private Networking (January 2026)**: AWS PrivateLink support
- **Customer-Managed Encryption Keys (December 2025)**: BYOK encryption
- **Sparse Vector Search (October 2025)**: First-class BM25 and SPLADE support
- **JavaScript Client V3 (June 2025)**: Complete rewrite with reduced bundle size

The latest GitHub release is version 1.5.9, published May 5, 2026. The project's direction signals continued investment in both the open-source database and the managed cloud product, with research published on context engineering, chunking strategies, and embedding adapters.

## Enterprise Deployment Options

Chroma Enterprise offers deployment flexibility beyond the standard cloud: single-tenant nodes and clusters, BYOC (bring your own cloud) within a customer VPC, on-premises, multi-region, and multi-cloud configurations. Compliance certifications listed on the enterprise page include SOC II Type 2, HIPAA, FedRAMP, SSO/SAML/SCIM, PrivateLink, and CMEK. The enterprise page lists logos for organizations including Capital One, UnitedHealthcare, Weights & Biases, Cisco, Intel, Sony, and others, though these are logo displays and not confirmed case studies unless linked.

## Features
- Vector search (semantic similarity)
- Sparse vector search (BM25, SPLADE)
- Full-text search (trigram and regex)
- Metadata filtering and faceted search
- Collection forking with copy-on-write
- GroupBy aggregation on metadata keys
- Serverless cloud deployment
- Self-hosted / local deployment
- Python and JavaScript/TypeScript SDKs
- Automatic data tiering (hot/warm/cold)
- AWS PrivateLink support
- Customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK)
- SOC II Type 2 compliance
- HIPAA compliance
- BYOC (bring your own cloud) deployment
- Multi-region and multi-cloud replication
- Chroma Sync (S3, GitHub, web ingestion)
- CLI tools for development
- MCP Package Search integration
- Real-time indexing status monitoring

## Integrations
Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Rust, AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage (GCS), AWS PrivateLink, LangChain, DSPy, GitHub

## Platforms
API, CLI, DEVELOPER_SDK, WEB

## Pricing
Open Source, Free tier available

## Links
- Website: https://www.trychroma.com
- Documentation: https://docs.trychroma.com/
- Repository: https://github.com/chroma-core/chroma
- EveryDev.ai: https://www.everydev.ai/tools/chroma