# ChromaDB

The open-source search infrastructure for AI. Fast, serverless, and scalable. Supporting vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Built on object storage and trusted by millions of developers.

Start free on Cloud [Read the docs](https://docs.trychroma.com/docs/overview/introduction)

### Network Error

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## Open source at the core

Chroma is licensed under Apache 2.0. The same codebase powers both the open-source database and Chroma Cloud, so there is no vendor lock-in.

### Single-node

Run locally with pip, npm, or Docker. In-memory or persistent storage.

### Chroma Cloud

Fully managed, serverless, and scalable. No provisioning, no tuning. Get started in under 30 seconds.

### Bring your own cloud

Deploy in your own VPC with multi-region replication and point-in-time recovery. Full control over your infrastructure.

Many search methods, one platform

Chroma unifies dense vector search, sparse vector search, full-text search, regex matching, and metadata filtering in a single query interface. Combine them with hybrid search for the best retrieval quality.

- Sparse vector search
- Lexical search (BM25, SPLADE)
- Vector search
- Semantic similarity search
- Full-text search
- Trigram and regex search
- Metadata search
- Filtering and faceted search
- Forking
- Dataset versioning, A/B testing, and roll-outs
- CLI

```javascript
// configure client and collection for sparse embeddings (BM25, SPLADE)
// Add documents with sparse embeddings (BM25)
await collection.add({
  ids: ["id1", "id2"],
  documents: ["Document about databases", "ML tutorial"]
})

// Query with sparse vector
const sparseRank = Knn({ query: "ML", key: "sparse_embedding" });

// Build and execute search
const search = new Search()
  .rank(sparseRank)
  .limit(10)
  .select(K.DOCUMENT, K.SCORE);

const results = await collection.search(search);
```

Terminal Output

```
$ node sparse-search.js
Connecting to Chroma...
✓ Connected successfully
Creating collection 'my_collection'...
✓ Collection created

Adding documents with sparse embeddings (BM25)...
✓ Added 2 documents

Querying with sparse vector...
✓ Query completed in 18ms

Results (ranked by BM25 score):
[\
  {\
    id: "id1",\
    document: "Document about databases",\
    score: 0.87,\
    metadata: {}\
  },\
  {\
    id: "id2",\
    document: "ML tutorial",\
    score: 0.45,\
    metadata: {}\
  }\
]
```

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                     |
| p90                    | 27ms                     |
| p99                    | 57ms                     |

[Contact us](/content/talk-with-us/index.html) to run a POC for your specific workload.

Dedicated clusters can be scaled to your specific requirements.

Technical specs

- Write throughput (per collection) 30 MB/s (2000+ QPS)
- Concurrent reads (per collection) 10 (200+ QPS)
- Collections per database 1M
- Records per collection 5M
- Recall 90-100%
- 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

## Start searching with Chroma

Start free on Cloud.