# Chroma vs Milvus

**Leader by Vioscale score:** Chroma

| Attribute | Chroma | Milvus |
|---|---|---|
| **Vioscale score** | 70.4 (45% (low)) | 68.2 (25% (low)) |
| activity.commits_last_30d | 81 | 100 |
| adoption.github_stars | 28,915 | 45,440 |
| adoption.package_downloads_weekly | 2,914,029 | - |
| deployment.options | `{"cloud":true,"self_hosted":true}` | `{"cloud":true,"hybrid":true,"self_hosted":true}` |
| description.long | Fast, serverless, and scalable infrastructure supporting vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search across terabytes of data. Built on object storage and trusted by millions of developers. | Milvus is an open-source vector database built for GenAI applications, enabling high-speed similarity search and scaling to tens of billions of vectors with minimal performance loss. |
| features.capabilities | `{"deployment":"managed","serverless":true,"storage_tier":"disk_backed","hybrid_search":true,"licence_class":"permissive_oss","multi_tenancy":true,"product_class":"dedicated_dbms","full_text_bm25":true,"horizontal_scale":"sharded_distributed","metadata_filtering":"pre_filter"}` | `{"deployment":"self_hosted","serverless":true,"storage_tier":"disk_backed","hybrid_search":true,"licence_class":"permissive_oss","product_class":"dedicated_dbms","horizontal_scale":"sharded_distributed"}` |
| language.primary | Rust | Go |
| license.spdx | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| market.availability | `{"hqCountry":"US","primaryMarkets":[],"availabilityScope":"global","availableCountries":[],"notAvailableCountries":[]}` | - |
| platform.support | `{"cli":true,"web":true}` | `{"mac":true,"linux":true,"windows":true}` |
| pricing | `{"type":"usage","plans":[{"free":true,"name":"Starter","summary":"$0/month + usage","features":["10 databases","10 team members","$5 free credits"],"components":[{"kind":"fixed","amount":0,"period":"month","currency":"USD"},{"per":{"qty":1,"unit":"GiB"},"kind":"metered","amount":0,"currency":"USD"},{"per":{"qty":1,"unit":"GiB"},"kind":"metered","amount":2.5,"period":"month","currency":"USD"},{"per":{"qty":1,"unit":"TiB"},"kind":"metered","amount":0.0075,"currency":"USD"},{"per":{"qty":1,"unit":"GiB"},"kind":"metered","amount":0.09,"currency":"USD"}],"description":"Get up and running quickly. Free credits then usage-based pricing.","contactSales":false,"includedLimits":{"databases":"10","team_members":"10"}},{"free":false,"name":"Team","summary":"$250/month + usage","features":["100 databases","30 team members","$100 included credits","Slack support","SOC II"],"components":[{"kind":"fixed","amount":250,"period":"month","currency":"USD"},{"per":{"qty":1,"unit":"GiB"},"kind":"metered","amount":0,"currency":"USD"},{"per":{"qty":1,"unit":"GiB"},"kind":"metered","amount":2.5,"period":"month","currency":"USD"},{"per":{"qty":1,"unit":"TiB"},"kind":"metered","amount":0.0075,"currency":"USD"},{"per":{"qty":1,"unit":"GiB"},"kind":"metered","amount":0.09,"currency":"USD"}],"description":"Scale your production use cases. $100 credits then usage-based pricing.","contactSales":false,"includedLimits":{"databases":"100","team_members":"30"}},{"free":false,"name":"Enterprise","summary":"Custom pricing","features":["Unlimited databases","Unlimited team members","Dedicated support","Single tenant clusters","BYOC clusters","SLAs"],"description":"For organizations prioritizing security, scale, support, and confidence.","contactSales":true}],"summary":"From free (Starter with $5 credits) or $250/month (Team). Usage-based: $0 write, $2.50/GiB storage, $0.0075/TiB query, $0.09/GiB network.","currency":"USD","freeTier":true,"sourceUrl":"https://www.trychroma.com","retrievedAt":"2026-08-05T13:09:33.762Z","startingPrice":{"amount":0,"period":"month","currency":"USD"},"billingPeriods":["month"]}` | `{"type":"open_source","summary":"Open-source with optional managed Zilliz Cloud (serverless and dedicated cluster; free trial available)","freeTier":true,"sourceUrl":"https://milvus.io","retrievedAt":"2026-08-05T13:26:39.808Z"}` |
| pricing.free_tier | yes | yes |
| pricing.model | commercial | open_source |
| pricing.price_level | free | free |
| pricing.starting_gbp | 0 | - |
| pricing.transparent | yes | yes |
| release.cadence_days | 4 | 5 |
| reliability.status_page | yes | - |
| security.gdpr | yes | - |
| security.soc2 | yes | - |

## Capabilities (Vector Databases)

| Capability | Chroma | Milvus |
|---|:--:|:--:|
| **Deployment** |  |  |
| Deployment | Managed | Self-hosted |
| Serverless / consumption pricing | ✓ | ✓ |
| **Index** |  |  |
| ANN index (HNSW / IVF / DiskANN / ScaNN / flat) | - | - |
| Distance metrics (cosine / dot / Euclidean) | - | - |
| **Query** |  |  |
| Metadata filtering | Pre-filter | - |
| Hybrid search (dense + sparse fusion) | ✓ | ✓ |
| Built-in BM25 / lexical | ✓ | - |
| **Storage** |  |  |
| Quantization | - | - |
| On-disk vs in-memory | Disk-backed | Disk-backed |
| **Scale** |  |  |
| Multi-tenancy (namespaces / collections / tenants) | ✓ | - |
| Horizontal scale | Sharded / distributed | Sharded / distributed |
| **Consistency** |  |  |
| Consistency | - | - |
| **Licensing** |  |  |
| Licence class | Permissive OSS | Permissive OSS |
| **Classification** |  |  |
| Purpose-built vs feature-of-parent | Dedicated DBMS | Dedicated DBMS |

*Source: Vioscale. Generated 2026-08-07T00:01:46.267Z. "-" = undocumented, not absent.*