Chroma vs SurrealDB
Chroma
trychroma.com
SurrealDB
surrealdb.comSide by side
| Figure | Chroma | SurrealDB |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $250/mo | $0.19/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| iOS | Yes | — |
| Android | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 4 | 3 |
| Spec score · Ai Databases | 9.4 (#1) | 8.1 (#13) |
| Spec score · Database Software | 8.7 (#20) | 8.1 (#46) |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Security controls | The security page states that customer data is encrypted in transit and at rest, employee production access requires MFA, and AWS GuardDuty and Inspector are used for threat detection. | Permissions operate at role, record, field, table, document, and hierarchical user levels. |
| Vector search | The product supports semantic similarity search over dense vector embeddings. | Yes |
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.