Chroma
Limited native hybrid (users build RRF custom). Fast Rust core (v2.5). Acquired by Replit (definitive agreement announced 2026-10-23); Chroma Cloud is winding down (writes disabled 2026-11-22, reads disabled 2026-12-22) while open-source ChromaDB continues under Apache-2.0.
Acquired · Verified 2026-10-29 · fresh as of 2026-10-29 · 62 cited facts, 6 with a third-party source · 2 recorded changes · Suggest a correction
At a glance
- Type
- Embedded vector DB (Rust core) vendor fix
- Tier
- T1
- Section
- Vector-database infrastructure
- Latest release
- v1.6.0 (2026-10-13) repo fix
- License
- Apache-2.0 repo fix
- Pricing
- Chroma Cloud winding down: read-only from 2026-11-22, no reads after 2026-12-22, no new Cloud plans; open-source ChromaDB free (Apache-2.0) vendor fix
- Funding
- Acquired by Replit (definitive agreement announced 2026-10-23); prior $18M total $75M val Seed · 2023-04 vendor fix
- Freshness
- 2026-10-29 fix
- Layer
- model-infra repo fix
- Licensing
- open-source repo fix
- SDK languages
- python, rest, rust, typescript vendor fix
- Protocols
- mcp-server vendor fix
- Compliance
- soc2-type2 vendor fix
- Developer activity
- OpenRank 16.42 (12-mo avg 33.37) · 90 participants — 2026-09 third-party fix
When to use
Optimised for: low-latency similarity search + scale
Anti-fit: not for relational / graph-heavy queries (vector-first by design)
Pros & cons
Pros
Lowest-friction local vector store — embedded mode means zero ops for prototyping; popular default in agent tutorials.
Cons
Production scale-out story is less mature than Weaviate / Qdrant; managed cloud (Chroma Cloud) is newer.
Claims & capabilities
26k+ GitHub★ (some sources cite 25.6k); used in 90k+ open-source codebases on GitHub; downloaded 11M+ times monthly; Chroma Cloud GA August 2025; 4x faster writes/queries vs original Python after 2025 Rust rewrite; included in Zilliz VectorDBBench standard cross-engine benchmarks
Technical surface
- API surface
- REST, SDK: Python, JS/TS
- Backend storage
- SQLite (local) / custom cloud backend
- Deployment
- Both (self-hosted + managed cloud) — OSS embedded/server; Chroma Cloud serverless; single-tenant/BYOC on Enterprise
- Embedding model
- multiple supported
- Multi-tenancy
- Multi-tenant indexes with billions of vectors; AWS PrivateLink; BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud) for hard isolation
- MCP
- yes — official chroma-core/chroma-mcp (GitHub, Apache-2.0)
- A2A
- no Google A2A (Agent2Agent) integration documented as of 2026-05.
- OpenTelemetry
- via OpenTelemetry instrumentation
Compare Chroma with…
Alternatives to Chroma → live options ranked by shared design, licence, hosting and MCP support
Similar systems
Other vector-database infrastructure in the catalog, ranked by inbound references.
- Qdrant T1
Distribution-Based Score Fusion + RRF. Sparse vectors native; filtering via ANN graph modification.
- pgvector T1
Stores embeddings alongside relational + full-text data. HNSW + IVFFlat ANN indexes. Used as agent conversation memory via LangChain + MCP. Foundation of Supabase AI and many self-hosted RAG stacks.
- Weaviate T1
Hybrid Search 2.0 with learned ranking. BM25 + vector in unified index.
- Milvus T1
Multi-vector columns (10 simultaneous). Native hybrid search (v2.5). CAGRA + Vamana GPU/CPU (v2.6).
- Pinecone T1
Managed vector DB. Cascading sparse + dense + rerank pipeline; pinecone-rerank-v0 .
- MongoDB Atlas Vector Search T1
Agent memory store for both short-term (document) and long-term (vector). LangGraph checkpointer for stateful agents. Vector search extended to Community Edition (Sept 2025).
Sources (61 cited facts, 6 third-party)
Each fact links to the page it came from; the badge says who published it (how to read sources).
- What it is Embedded vector DB (Rust core) vendor
- What it does & what's distinct Limited native hybrid (users build RRF custom). Fast Rust core (v2.5). Acquired by Repli… vendor
- Claims / benefits 26k+ GitHub★ (some sources cite 25.6k); used in 90k+ open-source codebases on GitHub; do… repo
- Modalities text vendor
- Created 2022-10 repo
- Latest release v1.6.0 (2026-10-13) repo
- License Apache-2.0 repo
- GitHub chroma-core/chroma — ~29.1k stars, last commit 2026-10 repo
- Mindshare 2 inbound 4 HN · 1 press third-party
- Funding Acquired by Replit (definitive agreement announced 2026-10-23); prior $18M total $75M va… vendor
- Customers / scale 11-50 ppl third-party
- Pricing Chroma Cloud winding down: read-only from 2026-11-22, no reads after 2026-12-22, no new … vendor
- Compliance SOC 2 Type II (Enterprise modules); Apache-2.0 OSS self-hosted vendor
- Data handling Customer data stays within account; BYOK encryption; no vendor training on customer data… vendor
- Deployment Both (self-hosted + managed cloud) — OSS embedded/server; Chroma Cloud serverless; singl… vendor
- HQ US third-party
- Founders / pedigree Bloomberg Beta / AI Grant / Madrona; co-founders Jeff Huber (CEO) and Anton Troynikov; f… third-party
- Memory volume / scale no scale claim vendor
- Performance No public ANN-Benchmarks entry; designed for ease-of-use (LangChain) not raw throughput;… vendor
- API surface REST, SDK: Python, JS/TS vendor
- Backend storage SQLite (local) / custom cloud backend vendor
- Multi-tenancy Multi-tenant indexes with billions of vectors; AWS PrivateLink; BYOC (Bring Your Own Clo… vendor
- Encryption TLS/SSL in transit, AES at rest; CMEK via cloud KMS at collection level; SOC 2 Type II vendor
- Embedding model multiple supported vendor
- Consistency strong vendor
- Versioning none vendor
- Tombstoning hard-delete supported vendor
- Schema evolution free-form / no schema vendor
- Namespace primitives per-project vendor
- Contradiction handling always overwrite (last-write-wins) vendor
- Forgetting policy user-controlled forget vendor
- MCP support yes — official chroma-core/chroma-mcp (GitHub, Apache-2.0) repo
- OTel via OpenTelemetry instrumentation vendor
- Webhooks / events no vendor
- Import / export JSON via REST; SQLite backed vendor
- Runtimes Python, TypeScript/JavaScript, Rust vendor
- Validated verticals RAG developers, agent builders (broad horizontal); financial-services, healthcare, legal… vendor
- Time to running <10min (managed cloud) to <1hr (self-host Docker) vendor
- Anti-fit not for relational / graph-heavy queries (vector-first by design) vendor
- Optimised for low-latency similarity search + scale vendor
- Adjacent infrastructure BYO embedding model + LLM; this IS the vector store vendor
- Pros Lowest-friction local vector store — embedded mode means zero ops for prototyping; popul… vendor
- Cons Production scale-out story is less mature than Weaviate / Qdrant; managed cloud (Chroma … vendor
- Project & sources trychroma.com GitHub chroma-core/chroma vendor
- commit-trajectory [{"ym":"2025-09","cum":3425},{"ym":"2025-10","cum":3623},{"ym":"2025-11","cum":3704},{"y… repo
- download-trajectory [{"ym":"2025-11","monthly":4446814,"cum":4446814},{"ym":"2025-12","monthly":8685232,"cum… registry
- cost-input-usd-per-mtok 0 vendor
- cost-output-usd-per-mtok 0 vendor
- cost-tier free vendor
- cost-pricing-model free-tier vendor
- cost-last-verified 2026-06-29 vendor
- adoption-accelerator ai-grant third-party
- architecture-deployment-locus hybrid vendor
- licensing-bucket open-source repo
- positioning-platform-vs-product platform vendor
- taxonomy-three-layer-rollup model-infra repo
- developer-activity-opendigger {"activity":216.91,"as_of":"2026-09","openrank_12mo":33.37,"openrank_current":16.42,"par… third-party
- compliance-certifications soc2-type2 vendor
- sdk-languages python,rest,rust,typescript vendor
- protocol-support mcp-server vendor
- maturity ga registry
What changed
Changes to this record's lifecycle, licence, release, pricing and hosting facts, from the catalog's git history. Subscribe (Atom)
- 2026-10-29
- Pricing “Starter $0 + usage ($5 free credits); Team $250/mo + usage ($100 credits); Enterprise custom; OSS free” → “Chroma Cloud winding down: read-only from 2026-11-22, no reads after 2026-12-22, no new Cloud plans; open-source ChromaDB free (Apache-2.0)” source
- Funding / ownership “$18M total $75M val Seed · 2023-04” → “Acquired by Replit (definitive agreement announced 2026-10-23); prior $18M total $75M val Seed · 2023-04” source
- 2026-10-26
- Latest release “1.5.9 2026-05-05” → “v1.6.0 (2026-10-13)” source
- Pricing “Free + paid” → “Starter $0 + usage ($5 free credits); Team $250/mo + usage ($100 credits); Enterprise custom; OSS free” source
- Deployment “Both” → “Both (self-hosted + managed cloud) — OSS embedded/server; Chroma Cloud serverless; single-tenant/BYOC on Enterprise” source
- MCP support “via official adapter — chroma-mcp” → “yes — official chroma-core/chroma-mcp (GitHub, Apache-2.0)” source
Related systems
References (22)
- Alibaba Qwen 3 family integrates with — Chroma's docs have a Alibaba Qwen 3 family integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Baseten integrates with — Chroma's docs have a Baseten integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Braintrust integrates with — Chroma's docs have a Braintrust integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Cohere Embed integrates with — Chroma's docs have a Cohere Embed integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Confident AI / DeepEval integrates with — Chroma's docs have a Confident AI / DeepEval integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Google Agent Development Kit (ADK) integrates with — Chroma's docs have a Google Agent Development Kit (ADK) integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Google Gemini 3 family integrates with — Chroma's docs have a Google Gemini 3 family integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Haystack (framework) integrates with — Chroma's docs have a Haystack (framework) integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Hugging Face Inference API (Embeddings) integrates with — Chroma's docs have a Hugging Face embedding-function page that calls the Hugging Face Inference API. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Jina AI Embeddings integrates with — Chroma's docs have a Jina AI Embeddings integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- LangChain (framework) integrates with — Chroma's docs have a LangChain (framework) integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- LlamaIndex (framework) integrates with — Chroma's docs have a LlamaIndex (framework) integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Mem0 integrates with — Chroma's docs have a Mem0 integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Mistral Embed integrates with — Chroma's docs have a Mistral Embed integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Model Context Protocol (MCP spec) integrates with — Chroma's docs have a Model Context Protocol (MCP spec) integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Nomic Embed integrates with — Chroma's docs have a Nomic Embed integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- OpenAI Embeddings integrates with — Chroma's docs have a OpenAI Embeddings integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- OpenLLMetry (Traceloop) integrates with — Chroma's docs have a OpenLLMetry (Traceloop) integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Roboflow integrates with — Chroma's docs have a Roboflow integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Sentence Transformers integrates with — Chroma's docs have a Sentence Transformers integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Together AI integrates with — Chroma's docs have a Together AI integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Voyage AI (MongoDB) integrates with — Chroma's docs have a Voyage AI (MongoDB) integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
Referenced by (18)
- AutoGen Memory integrates with — Microsoft AutoGen autogen-ext ships a ChromaDB vector memory implementation (autogen_ext.memory.chromadb). (verified 2026-10-29)
- Cohere Embed integrates with — Cohere docs "Integrating Embedding Models with Other Tools": Chroma and Cohere guide. (verified 2026-10-29)
- CrewAI integrates with — CrewAI knowledge docs say ChromaDB is the default vector store for its RAG client. (verified 2026-10-29)
- CrewAI Memory depends on at runtime — backend-storage cell: pluggable (ChromaDB default)
- Dapr Agents integrates with — Dapr Agents vector-stores integrations include a Chroma vector store. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Dify integrates with — Dify self-host VECTOR_STORE supports `chroma` as the knowledge-base vector store. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Google Agent Development Kit (ADK) integrates with — ADK integrations catalog has a "Chroma MCP tool for ADK" page (Store and retrieve information using semantic vector search). (verified 2026-10-29)
- Haystack (framework) integrates with — Haystack integrations directory has a Chroma integration page ("A Document Store for storing and retrieval from Chroma"). (verified 2026-10-29)
- LangChain (framework) integrates with — LangChain docs have a Chroma integration provider page (Open-source embedding database for AI apps). (verified 2026-10-29)
- LlamaIndex (framework) integrates with — LlamaIndex has an official vector store integration package llama-index-vector-stores-chroma in its repo. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Mastra integrates with — Mastra repo ships the @mastra/chroma vector store package. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Mem0 integrates with — Mem0 docs have a Chroma vector store page for Mem0 open source. (verified 2026-10-29)
- MemPalace builds on — Independent analysis suggests the score is driven by verbatim storage + ChromaDB defaults rather than the palace structure.
- Microsoft Semantic Kernel integrates with — Semantic Kernel docs list an out-of-the-box Chroma vector store connector. (verified 2026-10-29)
- n8n (AI agent flows) integrates with — n8n built-in AI cluster node: Chroma Vector Store node. (verified 2026-10-29)
- OpenLLMetry (Traceloop) integrates with — OpenLLMetry's What's Supported page lists Chroma as instrumented out of the box. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Phidata (now Agno) integrates with — Agno ships a chroma vector DB integration module (agno.vectordb.chroma). (verified 2026-10-29)
- Superpowers episodic-memory plugin integrates with — SQLite + FTS5 with optional Chroma vector