Amazon OpenSearch Service vs Chroma
Amazon OpenSearch Service
aws.amazon.com
Chroma
trychroma.comSide by side
| Figure | Amazon OpenSearch Service | 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 · Ai Databases | 7.5 (#24) | 9.4 (#1) |
| Compliance | AWS says OpenSearch Service is HIPAA-eligible and compliant with PCI DSS, SOC, ISO, and FedRAMP standards. | Chroma Cloud says it completed a SOC 2 Type II examination. |
| Deployment | The vector database is available in fully managed and serverless configurations. | The maker says Chroma can run locally with pip, npm, or Docker, on Chroma Cloud, or in a customer’s own VPC. |
| Purpose | Amazon OpenSearch Service is a managed service for deploying and operating search, observability, and log analytics applications. | 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 | The service supports encryption at rest and in transit, and granular permissions for indices, documents, and fields. | 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. |
| Vector search | Its vector engine supports k-NN and ANN search using HNSW and IVF implementations, including searches over billions of high-dimensional vectors. | The product supports semantic similarity search over dense vector embeddings. |
Plans
In their own words
Amazon OpenSearch Service
Amazon OpenSearch Service 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.