Chroma vs Kinetica
Chroma
trychroma.comKinetica
kinetica.comSide by side
| Figure | Chroma | Kinetica |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $250/mo | $1.80/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | Yes | — |
| Android | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 4 | 3 |
| Spec score · Ai Databases | 9.4 (#1) | 8.6 (#6) |
| Spec score · Database Software | 8.7 (#20) | 8.0 (#52) |
| Enterprise deployment | Enterprise deployment options listed include multi-tenant cloud, single-tenant nodes and clusters, BYOC, and on-premises deployment. | Enterprise Edition is self-managed and can run on customer-selected hardware, on-premise, or through AWS and Azure Marketplace. |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Security | 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. | Kinetica documents role-based permissions, granular access to tables and schemas, and row and column controls including masking and obfuscation. |
| Support | The pricing page lists Community Slack for Starter, Slack support for Team, and dedicated support for Enterprise. | Kinetica offers Basic, Standard, and Premium support tiers; Premium includes off-hours and weekend coverage, follow-the-sun case management, and monthly incident reporting. |
| Vector search | The product supports semantic similarity search over dense vector embeddings. | Kinetica says new embeddings are searchable as they land and that vector search can run with structured filters, joins, and time windows in one SQL statement. |
Plans
Kinetica
- Dedicated Cloud$1.80 a month
- Developer EditionFree
- Enterprise EditionPriced on request
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.