Chroma vs FAISS

Chroma vs. FAISS

Compare Chroma vs. FAISS by the following set of capabilities. We want you to choose the best database for you, even if it’s not us.

Try Managed Milvus for free

Chroma vs. FAISS on Scalability

ChromaFAISS

Separation of storage and compute

❌

Separation of query and insertions

No. Can not scale beyond single node.

Multi-replication

❌

Dynamic segment placement vs. static data sharding

No distributed data replacement

Cloud-native

❌

Billion-scale vector support

❌

Chroma scalability

Without any distributed data replacement, Chroma is not able to scale beyond a single node

FAISS scalability

Without any distributed data replacement, FAISS is not able to scale beyond a single node

Chroma vs. FAISS on Functionality

Performance is the biggest challenge with vector databases as the number of unstructured data elements stored in a vector database grows into hundreds of millions or billions, and horizontal scaling across multiple nodes becomes paramount.

ChromaFAISS

Role-based Access Control (RBAC)

❌

Disk Index support

❌

Hybrid Search (ie Scalar filtering)

Yes with scalar filtering

❌

Partitions/namespaces/logical groups

❌

Index type supported

1 (HNSW)

FLAT, IVS_FLAT, IVF_SQ8, IVF_PQ, HNSW, BIN_FLAT and BIN_IVF_FLAT

Multiple in-memory indexes support

❌

Chroma functionality

Chroma uses HNSW algorithm to support kNN search.

FAISS functionality

FAISS is an algorithm to support kNN search.

Chroma vs. FAISS on Purpose-built

What’s your vector database for?

A vector database is a fully managed solution for storing, indexing, and searching across a massive dataset of unstructured data that leverages the power of embeddings from machine learning models. A vector database should have the following features:

Scalability and tunability
Multi-tenancy and data isolation
A complete suite of APIs
An intuitive user interface/administrative console

ChromaFAISS

Purpose-built for Vectors

✔️

Tunable consistency

❌

Support for both stream and batch of vector data

❌

Binary Vector support

❌

Multi-language SDK

Python, JavaScript

Database rollback

❌

Chroma vs. FAISS: what’s right for me?

Chroma

Chroma is maintained by a single commercial company offering a non-scalable single node. License: Apache-2.0 license

FAISS

Faiss is a powerful library for efficient similarity search and clustering of dense vectors, with GPU-accelerated algorithms and Python wrappers, developed at FAIR, the fundamental AI research team at Meta License: MIT license