Chroma Cloud is a hosted, production-grade deployment of Chroma built from everything we learned shipping the single-node engine, re-architected into a distributed system for scale. Under the hood, it’s a cloud-native, distributed implementation of Chroma, but the API stays the same, so you can move from single-node to cloud without rewriting your app. Chroma Cloud runs across AWS and GCP and uses a distributed vector index to enable massive scale without provisioning or tuning infrastructure.

Distributed indexing

Chroma Cloud uses an implementation of SPANN combined with SPFresh for our distributed vector index, enabling indexes to scale horizontally. Chroma Cloud’s strong consistency is driven by wal3, our object-storage backed write-ahead log.

In practice, this means you can:

  • Ingest large collections without babysitting index operations.
  • Query with low latency while your workload scales across a distributed infrastructure.
  • Rely on a production-grade indexing path that’s tuned and operated for you (so you don’t have to become an indexing expert).

Dense, sparse, full-text, and metadata search

Modern search and retrieval isn’t one-size-fits-all, Chroma Cloud supports a variety of index types:

  • Dense vector search for semantic similarity over embeddings.
  • BM25 and SPLADE for keyword-style search to capture exact term matches.
  • Full-text search (FTS) and regex on documents when you need lexical matching over raw text.
  • Metadata filtering with inverted indexes on metadata values to narrow results efficiently.

Collection forking

Chroma Cloud Forking lets you duplicate a collection quickly without paying the time and cost of re-indexing. Forked collections share underlying data with the parent and only incur additional storage cost for incremental changes, keeping forks fast and cost-efficient.

This is ideal for:

  • Versioned datasets (e.g., codebases by commit/tag)
  • A/B testing retrieval settings and prompts against the “same” corpus
  • Multi-tenant or per-customer variants without duplicating everything upfront

Dashboard

Chroma Cloud includes a robust web based dashboard for day-to-day operations. Collaborate with your team, inspect and validate collection contents, and monitor usage and billing, all in one place.

  • Collection configuration persists inside of Chroma’s dashboard, test and debug queries directly
  • View performance metrics like p50, p90 and p99 query latencies as well as request and storage volumes

Insights and metrics

In the dashboard, you can track key operational signals for your Cloud DBs and collections, including:

  • Usage and activity so you can spot spikes, trends, and regressions.
  • Storage and data growth to understand how collections are evolving as you ingest more data.
  • Billing and spend visibility tied to usage so teams can stay on top of costs.

CLI

The Chroma CLI is deeply integrated with Chroma Cloud so you can manage workflows from your terminal.

  • Authenticate with chroma login, then use per-team profiles that persist API keys and tenant IDs locally
  • Manage databases and explore data in collections with a built in collection browser
  • Copy local data to and from Chroma Cloud: use chroma copy to copy one or more collections (or --all) from a local Chroma server into a Chroma Cloud DB.

Pricing

Chroma Cloud is usage-based: you pay for what you use as you scale up (and scale down).

  • No minimums, get started with production-grade infrastructure without upfront commitments.
  • Predictable, transparent metering so teams can track and manage spend over time.

If you’re building anything from a prototype to a mission-critical production workload, Chroma Cloud is the fastest path to reliable, scalable retrieval, powered by the open-source Chroma engine, fully managed for you.