Chroma vs Infinity
Chroma
trychroma.com
Infinity
infiniflow.orgSide by side
| Figure | Chroma | Infinity |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $250/mo | — |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | Yes | — |
| Android | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 4 | 0 |
| Spec score · Vector Databases | 9.4 (#1) | 7.8 (#14) |
| Deployment | The maker says Chroma can run locally with pip, npm, or Docker, on Chroma Cloud, or in a customer’s own VPC. | The quickstart documents deploying Infinity with Docker, while the binary guide offers Linux packages in deb, rpm, or tgz formats. |
| Purpose | Chroma is open-source data infrastructure for AI that stores embeddings and metadata and supports search and retrieval across text, images, and other modalities. | Infinity describes itself as an AI-native database for LLM applications that provides hybrid search. |
| Search | Chroma supports dense, sparse, and hybrid vector search, full-text and regex search, and metadata filtering. | It supports hybrid search across dense embeddings, sparse embeddings, tensors, and full text, with filtering. |
| Vector search | The product supports semantic similarity search over dense vector embeddings. | The search guide says HNSW is aimed at faster dense-vector search and IVF uses less memory; incoming streaming vectors are searched by brute force alongside indexed results. |
Plans
In their own words
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.