Chroma vs. TiDB

Compare Chroma vs. TiDB 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. TiDB on Scalability

ChromaTiDB

Separation of storage and compute

❌

Separation of query and insertions

No. Can not scale beyond single node.

Yes.

Multi-replication

❌

Dynamic segment placement vs. static data sharding

No distributed data replacement

Both

Cloud-native

❌

Billion-scale vector support

❌

Chroma scalability

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

TiDB

TiDB is designed with scalability as one of its core features. It offers both horizontal and vertical scaling capabilities to handle growing workloads and data volumes.

Chroma vs. TiDB 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.

ChromaTiDB

Role-based Access Control (RBAC)

❌

Disk Index support

❌

Hybrid Search (ie Scalar filtering)

Yes with scalar filtering

Yes, vector search & SQL search

Partitions/namespaces/logical groups

❌

Index type supported

1 (HNSW)

HNSW

Multiple in-memory indexes support

❌

No. HNSW only

Chroma functionality

Chroma uses HNSW algorithm to support kNN search.

TiDB

TiDB offers vector search through its serverless cluster and supports vectors with a maximum dimension of 16,000. The Vector data type in TiDB is designed to store single-precision floating-point numbers (Float32). It only supports cosine distance and L2 distance for similarity measurement.

Chroma vs. TiDB 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

ChromaTiDB

Purpose-built for Vectors

✔️

No, vector search is an add-on to TiDB Cloud serverless.

Tunable consistency

❌

Support for both stream and batch of vector data

❌

Binary Vector support

❌

Multi-language SDK

Python, JavaScript

No. TiDB does not provide specific SDKs. Instead, it is designed to be compatible with MySQL, which means TiDB can be used with any language with MySQL client or driver support.

Database rollback

❌

Chroma vs. TiDB: 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

TiDB

TiDB is an open-source distributed SQL database for OLAP and OLTP workloads. It now offers a vector search capability (in public beta) as an add-on to its SaaS solution, TiDB Cloud Serverless.

Apache 2.0