Chroma

license

Apache-2.0(OSI)

source

public

core features withheld

no

Chroma's Apache-2.0 core is public and builds the whole product, with no paid tier or enterprise edition gating it. Chroma Cloud is a hosted service sold beside that core rather than a withheld piece of it, and the repository includes the Rust engine and the clients.

• https://docs.trychroma.com/docs/overview/oss recorded 2026-09-30

  Open-source page states "Chroma has two deployment modes" of distributed and single-node local, and that "our cloud offering simply runs the same open-source distributed system."

• https://docs.trychroma.com/docs/overview/oss recorded 2026-09-30

  Open-source page states "The database is and will always remain open-source (Apache 2.0)".

• https://raw.githubusercontent.com/chroma-core/chroma/main/LICENSE recorded 2026-09-30

  LICENSE file is the Apache-2.0 text: "Apache License" and "Version 2.0, January 2004" and "TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR USE, REPRODUCTION, AND DISTRIBUTION".

• https://raw.githubusercontent.com/chroma-core/chroma/main/pyproject.toml recorded 2026-09-30

  pyproject.toml lists "License :: OSI Approved :: Apache Software License" as a classifier for the chromadb package.

• https://raw.githubusercontent.com/chroma-core/chroma/main/README.md recorded 2026-09-30

  README calls Chroma "the open-source data infrastructure for AI", shows the Apache 2.0 license badge, and offers "client-server mode" beside the hosted service; searched the body for enterprise, paid tier and license key: none.

PyPI downloads of chromadb drive this reading, since that package is the channel Chroma declares for distribution. The figure therefore measures use of the product itself, not a proxy for it.

• https://pypistats.org/api/packages/chromadb/recent recorded 2026-10-07

  6,525,454 downloads in the trailing 30 days for chromadb (pypistats last_month)

Chroma is a complete retrieval system with vector, full-text and hybrid search plus metadata filtering, deployable embedded, as a self-hosted server, or distributed. It sits one step below Vespa, which also hosts and evaluates ranking models inside its serving path.

• https://docs.trychroma.com/docs/overview/introduction recorded 2026-09-30

  Introduction page lists "Keyword and regex search over your data without embeddings." and "Query by similarity and combine multiple search strategies."

• https://docs.trychroma.com/docs/overview/oss recorded 2026-09-30

  Open-source page states "Chroma has two deployment modes" of distributed and single-node local, and that "our cloud offering simply runs the same open-source distributed system."

• https://raw.githubusercontent.com/chroma-core/chroma/main/README.md recorded 2026-09-30

  README describes Chroma Cloud as "Our hosted service, Chroma Cloud, powers serverless vector, hybrid, and full-text search." beside the pip-installed library and "client-server mode".