Chroma vs libSQL
Chroma
trychroma.comlibSQL
github.comSide by side
| Figure | Chroma | libSQL |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $250/mo | — |
| Free plan | 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 | 0 |
| Spec score · Embedded Databases | 9.4 (#1) | 7.7 (#20) |
| Deployment | The maker says Chroma can run locally with pip, npm, or Docker, on Chroma Cloud, or in a customer’s own VPC. | The project provides Docker instructions for launching primary and replica server instances. |
| 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. | The sqld user guide says cluster nodes communicate over gRPC with TLS and describes certificate and private-key configuration for primary and replica servers. |
| Support | The pricing page lists Community Slack for Starter, Slack support for Team, and dedicated support for Enterprise. | The repository links to libSQL documentation, Discord, and Turso documentation for project resources and community. |
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.