Build AI applications that know, learn, and search — intelligently.
Fast, serverless, and scalable search platform supporting vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Built on object storage and trusted by millions of developers. Open-source Apache 2.0.
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AI App
Chroma
knowledge_base - 1,277,467 records
awaiting query input
5M+ monthly downloads
Apache 2.0
24k Github stars
24k Github stars
Low latency search
Fast queries over billions of multi-tenant indexes.
Up to 10x cheaper
Built on object storage with automatic data tiering.
No engineering ops
Scales with your data and traffic. SOC 2 Type II.
Features
◆
Vector search
Semantic similarity search
◇
Sparse vector search
Lexical search (BM25, SPLADE)
●
Full-text Search
Trigram and regex search
◐
Metadata Search
Filtering and faceted search
◊
Forking
Dataset versioning, A/B testing, and roll-outs
▣
CLI
Command-line tools for development
import { ChromaClient } from 'chromadb'
const client = new ChromaClient()
const collection = await client.getOrCreateCollection({
name: "my_collection"
})
// Add documents with embeddings
await collection.add({
ids: ["id1", "id2"],
documents: ["This is a document", "Another doc"],
embeddings: [[1.2, 2.3, ...], [3.4, 4.5, ...]]
})
// Query by vector similarity
const results = await collection.query({
queryEmbeddings: [[1.1, 2.2, ...]],
nResults: 10
})Terminal Output
Run the code above to see the output ^
Performance
Fast search over billions of multi-tenant indexes
Chroma's indexes are built and optimized for object-storage offering unparalleled cost and performance. State-of-the-art vector, full-text, and regex search.
Latency
Query Latency
@384 dim at 100k vectors
Warm
Cold
p50
20ms
650ms
p90
27ms
1.2s
p99
57ms
1.5s
Contact us to run a POC for your specific workload.
Dedicated clusters can be scaled to your specific requirements.
Dedicated clusters can be scaled to your specific requirements.
Technical specs
Write throughput (per collection)30 MB/s (2000+ QPS)
Concurrent reads (per collection)5 (100+ QPS)
Collections per database1M
Records per collection5M
Recall90-100%
Zero-ops infra
┌───────────────────────────────┐ │ Query Layer │ │ Fast memory cache (hot) │ │ SSD cache (warm) │ └───────────────────────────────┘ ↕ Intelligent tiering ┌───────────────────────────────┐ │ Storage Layer │ │ S3 / GCS (cold) │ │ • All vectors │ │ • All metadata │ │ • All indexes │ └───────────────────────────────┘
Unlike legacy search systems, Chroma is a database you'll want to be on-call for.
✓Auto-scales with usage
✓No manual tuning
✓Serverless pricing
Chroma takes full advantage of object storage with automatic query-aware data tiering and caching.
✓Vectors are large: 1GB text → 15GB of vectors
✓Memory is expensive: $5/GB/mo
✓Object storage is not: $0.02/GB/mo
Enterprise
Chroma brings the security, compliance, education and operational model enterprises need with our Apache 2.0 architecture.
BYOC in your VPC, multi-cloud/multi-region replication, point-in-time-recovery ensure a resilient and scalable search system with the same 0-ops story as Cloud.
▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓ ▓░ ░▓ ▓░ ┌──────────── YOUR VPC ─────────────┐ ░▓ ▓░ │ │ ░▓ ▓░ │ █ DATA PLANE █ │ ░▓ ▓░ │ │ ░▓ ▓░ │ Your data, your cloud │ ░▓ ▓░ │ │ ░▓ ▓░ │ │ ░▓ ▓░ └───────────────────────────────────┘ ░▓ ▓░ │ ░▓ ▓░ │ ░▓ ▓░ ▼ ░▓ ▓░ ═════════════════════════════════════ ░▓ ▓░ ░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ ░▓ ▓░ ░▓ ▓░ ┌────────── CHROMA VPC ─────────────┐ ░▓ ▓░ │ │ ░▓ ▓░ │ █ CONTROL PLANE █ │ ░▓ ▓░ │ │ ░▓ ▓░ │ Managed by Chroma │ ░▓ ▓░ │ Monitoring, backups, ops │ ░▓ ▓░ │ │ ░▓ ▓░ └───────────────────────────────────┘ ░▓ ▓░ ░▓ ▓░ ✓ BYOC in your VPC ░▓ ▓░ ✓ Multi-region replication ░▓ ▓░ ✓ 0-ops management ░▓ ▓░ ░▓ ▓░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░▓ ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒
[▶] Videos
[●] Open source community
Open-source databases give your team the control and flexibility to build exactly what you need. No licensing limits, no vendor lock-in, just reliable performance backed by a large community.
Github →
Chroma has over 24k GitHub stars and is used in over 90k other open-source codebases on GitHub. It is downloaded over 8M times a month.
Discord →
Join the Discord to see what people are building!
Run Chroma OSS →
Run Chroma on your own infrastructure with our open-source deployment guides.
[◆] Support
Open-source →
Join our 10K person strong Discord community to get fast and expert help from the open-source community.
All plans →
Helpful support direct from engineers on the Chroma team
Pro Plan →
Direct Slack communication for fast support and help designing and iterating your search system.
Enterprise Plan →
Customized SLAs ensure your team gets 24/7 assistance.
[▲] Research
Our research spans both basic and applied research for search, retrieval, agents, and context engineering.
[■] Updates
Chroma's project is rapidly improving. Here are the latest updates.
Chroma Web Sync
Automatically crawl, scrape, chunk and embed web pages.
Nov 2025
Sparse Vector Search
First class support for BM25 and SPLADE vectors.
October 2025
Introducing Chroma Sync
Automatically chunk, embed, and index GitHub repos.
Oct 2025
wal3: Chroma's Write-Ahead Log
A Write-Ahead Log for Chroma, Built on Object Storage
Sep 2025
Package Search MCP
Query thousands of open-source repos through MCP.
Sep 2025
Collection Forking
Fast duplication of collections with copy-on-write.
Aug 2025
Designing a query execution engine
A push-based, morsel-driven execution engine in Rust.
Aug 2025
70% Data Throughput Increase
Performance boost using base64 vector encoding.
Jul 2025
Regex Search Support
Search using regular expressions with new operators.
Jun 2025
JavaScript Client V3
Complete rewrite with reduced bundle size.
Jun 2025
We’re looking for curious people who are dedicated to becoming world-class at their craft to join our team.
Get started
Get up and running in 30 seconds or less with $5 in free credits.
Quick Start
pip install chromadbJavaScript / TypeScriptJavaScript / TypeScript getting started docs →
npm install chromadb