Chroma vs Zilliz Cloud
Chroma
trychroma.com
Zilliz Cloud
zilliz.comSide by side
| Figure | Chroma | Zilliz Cloud |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $250/mo | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| iOS | Yes | — |
| Android | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 4 | 4 |
| Spec score · Ai Databases | 9.4 (#1) | 7.3 (#31) |
| Spec score · Vector Databases | 9.4 (#1) | 7.3 (#23) |
| Spec score · Search Databases | 9.3 (#2) | 7.3 (#26) |
| Spec score · Search & Vector Database Platforms | 9.3 (#2) | 7.3 (#16) |
| Search | Chroma supports dense, sparse, and hybrid vector search, full-text and regex search, and metadata filtering. | The service supports approximate nearest neighbor vector search, filtered search, hybrid search, and full-text search. |
| 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. | Zilliz Cloud documents TLS 1.2 or higher in transit and AES-256 encryption at rest. |
| Support | The pricing page lists Community Slack for Starter, Slack support for Team, and dedicated support for Enterprise. | Users can contact Zilliz Support to request access to features in private preview. |
Plans
Zilliz Cloud
- Free clusterFree
- Business CriticalPriced on request
- DedicatedPriced on request
- ServerlessPriced 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.
Zilliz Cloud
Zilliz Cloud is a managed Milvus service for deploying and scaling vector search applications. It supports approximate nearest neighbor, filtered, hybrid, and full-text search. Teams can choose Free, Serverless, or Dedicated cluster deployments; Serverless clusters scale automatically to zero. During ingestion, the service can create vector embeddings from raw text using a configured embedding function.
Documented integrations include Prometheus, Datadog, AWS S3, Azure Blob Storage, Google Cloud Storage, and external model providers. Migration sources include Pinecone, Qdrant, Elasticsearch, and PostgreSQL. The service supports sparse vectors, metadata filtering, up to 32768 dimensions, and a range of index types, including FLAT, HNSW, DISKANN, and AUTOINDEX. SDKs are listed for Python, Java, Go, Node.js, and C++. The Free cluster costs nothing and includes 5 GB storage, 2.5M vCUs/month, and up to 5 collections. Dedicated and Serverless pricing is pay as you go; storage charges apply to stored data and backup files even when a cluster is stopped.