Comparisons
Chroma vs LanceDB

Chroma vs. LanceDB

Compare Chroma vs. LanceDB 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. LanceDB on Scalability

ChromaLanceDB

Separation of storage and compute

❌

Yes.

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

No (static data sharding coming soon)

Cloud-native

❌

Billion-scale vector support

❌

Chroma scalability

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

LanceDB

LanceDB is an open-source vector database that's designed to store, manage, query and retrieve embeddings on multi-modal data. LanceDB and its underlying data format, Lance, are built to scale to really large amounts of data (hundreds of terabytes, 200M+ vectors).

Chroma vs. LanceDB 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.

ChromaLanceDB

Role-based Access Control (RBAC)

❌

Disk Index support

❌

Hybrid Search (ie Scalar filtering)

Yes with scalar filtering

Yes, vector search & keyword search

Partitions/namespaces/logical groups

❌

Index type supported

1 (HNSW)

IVF-PQ, HNSW

(LanceDB adopts a disk-based indexing philosophy.)

Multiple in-memory indexes support

❌

Chroma functionality

Chroma uses HNSW algorithm to support kNN search.

Chroma vs. LanceDB 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

ChromaLanceDB

Purpose-built for Vectors

✔️

❌

Tunable consistency

❌

Support for both stream and batch of vector data

❌

Binary Vector support

❌

Multi-language SDK

Python, JavaScript

Python, Javascript/Typescript, and Rust

Database rollback

❌

✔️

Chroma vs. LanceDB: 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

LanceDB

LanceDB is an open-source vector database that's designed to store, manage, query and retrieve embeddings on multi-modal data. It also provides a SaaS solution called LanceDB Cloud that runs serverless in the cloud.

Apache 2.0