Amazon CloudSearch vs Chroma
Amazon CloudSearch
aws.amazon.com
Chroma
trychroma.comSide by side
| Figure | Amazon CloudSearch | Chroma |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | $250/mo |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| iOS | — | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 4 |
| Spec score · Search Databases | 7.5 (#22) | 9.3 (#2) |
| Purpose | Amazon CloudSearch is a managed AWS Cloud service for setting up, managing, and scaling search for a website or application. | Chroma is open-source data infrastructure for AI that stores embeddings and metadata and supports search and retrieval across text, images, and other modalities. |
| Security | CloudSearch supports HTTPS and integrates with IAM to control access to configuration, document, search, and suggest services. | Chroma Cloud says customer data is encrypted in transit and at rest and that access controls include SSO, role-based access control, and employee MFA. |
Plans
In their own words
Amazon CloudSearch
Amazon CloudSearch has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.
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.