Chroma vs Weaviate

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.

Weaviate is an open-source AI vector database for storing, indexing and searching high-dimensional vectors, used as a foundation for search, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and agents. Its hybrid search combines vector retrieval with BM25 keyword search, alongside semantic and keyword search. Other listed capabilities include advanced filtering, vectorizer modules, configurable backups, native multi-tenancy, vector-index compression and tenant isolation. It can run as a hosted service or as a self-managed instance locally or with a cloud provider, with Docker and Kubernetes deployment options. Its integrations include AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere, Hugging Face and Ollama. Weaviate Cloud encrypts data in transit and at rest, supports role-based access controls and provides automated daily backups. The Free plan includes up to 100,000 objects, one collection and three tenants, but no backups or high-availability replication. Flex costs $45 a month; Premium costs $400 a month. Windows use is possible through containers such as Docker or WSL, but native Windows support is not offered. SDKs are listed for Python, TypeScript/JavaScript, Go, Java and C#.