Chroma ranks #10 in Search & Vector Databases AI search.

Chroma is an open-source search and vector database purpose-built for AI applications, founded in 2022 and headquartered in San Francisco. Licensed under Apache 2.0, it provides vector, sparse (BM25/SPLADE), full-text, regex, and metadata search through a unified API. Its serverless cloud offering, Chroma Cloud (GA August 2025), is built on object storage for automatic data tiering and cost efficiency. With over 26,000 GitHub stars, 15 million monthly downloads, and usage in over 90,000 open-source codebases, Chroma has become one of the most widely adopted vector databases in the developer community. It integrates natively with LangChain, LlamaIndex, and major embedding providers, making it a dominant default choice for RAG pipeline development and AI-powered semantic search applications.

Chroma (ChromaDB) is an open-source, AI-native search and vector database that enables developers to store, index, and retrieve high-dimensional embeddings for LLM applications. Its core database product supports hybrid retrieval—combining dense vector similarity, sparse (BM25/SPLADE) keyword, full-text, regex, and metadata search—through a simple Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, or Rust SDK. Chroma Cloud, the managed serverless offering GA since August 2025, is built on object storage (S3/GCS) with intelligent caching and tiering, SOC 2 Type II compliance, and a BYOC enterprise option. Complementary products include Chroma Sync (automated data ingestion from GitHub and web), Chroma Agent (self-editing search agent research project), and Package Search MCP for AI agent tool use.