Chroma

Chroma is an open source embeddings database natively designed for AI applications: semantic search, RAG, and agent memory. The library is free, installs in a single command, and runs locally, in-memory, or in a self-hosted client-server mode. Chroma Cloud, the managed service, offers a Starter plan at $0/month with usage-based billing beyond $5 in included credits, a Team plan at $250/month including $100 in credits and SOC 2 compliance features, and an Enterprise plan on request with dedicated clusters and BYOC deployment. Beyond included credits, usage-based billing is based on writes ($2.50/GiB), storage ($0.33/GiB/month), and volume of data returned ($0.09/GiB).

Chroma is available only in English, with no French version of the website or documentation. The vendor does not publish GDPR guarantees or dedicated European hosting for the Starter plan; SOC 2 compliance is mentioned only from the Team plan onward. Python and JavaScript APIs allow easy integration with LangChain, LlamaIndex, OpenAI, Hugging Face, Haystack, and Streamlit, making it a popular choice for rapid prototyping of RAG systems. The main limitation is scaling: Chroma works well for small to medium-sized projects, but usage-based pricing can climb quickly on large volumes without clear visibility of the final cost once included credits are exceeded.