Chroma
Depends
Confidence: Medium
Buy if you're a developer team that wants free self-hosted vector search or cheaper managed hosting than Pinecone.
Comparison
Chroma vs Milvus
Chroma and Milvus both land on Depends.
Milvus
Depends
Confidence: Medium
Buy it if you run AI similarity search at serious scale and have infra staff to operate a distributed database.
| Compare | Chroma | Milvus |
|---|---|---|
| Verdict | Depends | Depends |
| Best for | AI teams building RAG and semantic search | RAG and AI search teams at scale |
| Who it's not for | Non-technical teams wanting plug-and-play search | Hobby projects or apps under ~1M vectors |
| Privacy | Known 2026 CVEs: tenant-authorization bypass through v1.5.9 and unauthenticated Python-server RCE . patch fast and never expose unauthenticated.11 | Active CVE history through 2025-2026; safe only with fast patching. |
| Support quality | No support reviews for this Chroma found | No support evidence in sources reviewed |
| Public sentiment | Public reviews are sparse: G2 users praise hassle-free cloud deployment, but overall ratings sit at 3.3/5 across just 6 reviews.⁶ | Users praise Milvus's speed and scale; friction centers on setup complexity and running costs.16 |
| Biggest gotcha | CVE-2026-92782: versions through 1.5.9 fail tenant and database validation . patch before exposing11 | CVE-2025-64513: unauthenticated auth bypass in the proxy. Patch immediately if internet-exposed. |
Pick Chroma when
- AI teams building RAG and semantic search
- Developers wanting a free, self-hosted vector DB
- Startups fleeing Pinecone's $50 minimum spend
- Prototype-to-production embedding workloads
When Chroma is not a fit
- Non-technical teams wanting plug-and-play search
- Ops-light teams that can't chase CVE patches
- Enterprises needing vendor SLAs and dedicated support
- Anyone whose scale fits pgvector on existing Postgres
Pick Milvus when
- RAG and AI search teams at scale
- Billion-scale similarity search
- Engineering orgs wanting open source
- Teams with dedicated DevOps capacity
When Milvus is not a fit
- Hobby projects or apps under ~1M vectors
- Teams with no DevOps or Kubernetes experience
- Buyers wanting zero-maintenance managed simplicity
- Anyone who can't patch promptly after CVEs
Sources
- Chroma . open-source search infrastructure for AItrychroma.comofficial
- Pricing - Chromatrychroma.comofficial
- Pricing - Chroma Docs (Cloud)docs.trychroma.comofficial
- Security | Chromatrychroma.comofficial
- chroma-core/chroma on GitHubgithub.comofficial
review
review
- Chroma vector database review: pricing and fit . PE Collectivepecollective.comreview
- Is Chroma Cloud the Best Pinecone Alternative?maxrohde.comreview
- CVE-2026-92782: Chroma Authorization Bypass . SentinelOnesentinelone.comsecurity
security
- ChromaDB RCE Exposes Unauthenticated AI Infrastructure . CSA Labslabs.cloudsecurityalliance.orgsecurity
- Chroma raises $18M seed round . SiliconANGLEsiliconangle.comnews
review
review
review