Chroma vs Upstash Vector

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.

Upstash Vector is a serverless cloud vector database for applications that need vector search, including NLP, RAG, recommendations, image recognition, clustering and classification. It uses DiskANN for approximate nearest-neighbor queries and also lists FreshDiskANN as an index type. Developers can use its REST API and SDKs, with first-class Python and TypeScript support and additional SDKs for Go and PHP. Similarity options include Euclidean distance, cosine similarity and dot product. Vectors can carry metadata, and query filters can restrict matches using metadata expressions. Hybrid indexes combine dense semantic search with sparse exact-token search and fuse the results. Documented integrations include Vercel AI SDK, Flowise, LangChain, Langflow, LlamaIndex and LlamaParse. The pricing page lists a default top-k limit of 1,000, up to 48 KB of metadata and 1 MB of data per vector. The Free plan allows 10K daily queries or updates and up to 1 GB of data and metadata. Pay as You Go costs $0.40 a month, billed per 100K requests, with separate storage and bandwidth terms. Region availability varies by plan.