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.

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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