Algolia vs Chroma
Algolia
algolia.com
Chroma
trychroma.comSide by side
| Figure | Algolia | Chroma |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $0.50/mo | $250/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| iOS | Yes | Yes |
| Android | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 7 | 4 |
| Spec score · Search Databases | 9.5 (#1) | 9.3 (#2) |
| Company legal name | The U.S. contracting entity is Algolia, Inc., a Delaware corporation; Algolia SAS is the French simplified joint-stock entity. | The terms identify the service provider as Chroma Inc. |
| Licence | The core Algolia service is proprietary hosted software rather than an open-source search engine. | Chroma is released under the Apache 2.0 licence. |
| Rating on G2 | 4.5 out of 5 from 455 reviews | 4.2 out of 5 from 6 reviews. |
| Support | Algolia describes support levels ranging from community access to 24/7 enterprise-grade response times; professional services are optional. | The pricing page lists Community Slack for Starter, Slack support for Team, and dedicated support for Enterprise. |
| What it does | Algolia is a hosted search and discovery platform that lets companies index their own data and expose fast search through APIs and user interfaces. | ChromaDB is open-source search infrastructure for AI applications, combining vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. |
Plans
Algolia
- GrowPriced on request
- Grow PlusPriced on request
- ElevatePriced on request
- FreeFree
- Grow$0.50 a month
- Grow Plus$1.75 a month
- ElevatePrice not published
In their own words
Algolia
Algolia is an API-first search solution that combines keyword and semantic methods to return results. Its listed capabilities include NeuralSearch, AI Ranking, personalization, AI Synonyms, analytics, A/B testing, merchandising, a crawler, autocomplete, and query categorization. It is presented for site, ecommerce, and enterprise search across retail, manufacturing, media, financial services, and other use cases. Listed integrations include Adobe, BigCommerce, commercetools, Supabase, Shopify, Salesforce, Segment, and Google Tag Manager. Developers can use InstantSearch libraries for JavaScript, React, Vue, Angular, iOS, and Android, alongside API clients for multiple programming languages. Algolia reports an average search response time under 20 milliseconds and more than 1 billion queries processed every 5 seconds. The Free plan costs nothing and includes 10K search requests/month, 50K records, and allowances for recommendation requests and crawls. It has a 1 GB index size and a 20-index maximum per application. Grow and Grow Plus list 100 GB index size and 50 indices; hosting locations vary by plan.
Chroma
Chroma is open-source infrastructure for storing embeddings and metadata, then searching and retrieving information across text, images, and other modalities. Search options include dense, sparse, and hybrid vector search, plus full-text and regex search and metadata filtering. It can run locally through pip, npm, or Docker, on Chroma Cloud, or in a customer’s own VPC. The maker says its Apache 2.0-licensed codebase powers both the open-source database and Chroma Cloud. Documented integrations include embedding providers such as OpenAI, Cohere, Google Gemini, Hugging Face, Jina AI, and Ollama, and frameworks such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, Haystack, Streamlit, and DeepEval. Cloud security features include encryption in transit and at rest, SSO, role-based access control, and employee MFA; Chroma Cloud has completed a SOC 2 Type II examination. Starter is free, with 10 databases and 10 team members. Team is $250 a month plus usage and includes $100 credits, 100 databases, and 30 team members.