Pick Chroma if
app teams who will run chromadb locally or pay Cloud usage after the Starter credits, and already have an embedding model.
Read the Chroma pageChroma vs Weaviate
Our take
Pick Chroma if app teams who will run chromadb locally or pay Cloud usage after the Starter credits, and already have an embedding model. Pick Weaviate if teams who will stay on Cloud Free $0 (100k objects, 1 GB RAM, 10 GB disk) or self-host, then buy Flex at $45/month when they need HA, 1,000 collections, and pay-as-you-go dimensions.
Best for
Chroma A retrieval index you own
Weaviate Vectors you can self-host or rent from $45 Flex
Free plan
Chroma $0 · pip install chromadb
Weaviate $0 · forever. 1 cluster / user. 100,000 objects. 1 GB memory. 10 GB disk. 1 collection, up to 3 tenants. Embeddings 2,000 req/day. Query Agent 1,000 req/month. Best-effort SLA
Lowest paid
Chroma Team (Cloud) $250/mo
Weaviate Premium Shared / Dedicated $0.003875/mo
Next step up
Chroma
Weaviate Embeddings (list) $0.025
Coding agent
Chroma
Weaviate Query Agent
Runs where
Chroma Local or hosted
Weaviate Local; you host it
Watch out
Chroma You bring the embedding bill
Weaviate Free is 100k objects and one collection
Last checked
Chroma 2026-10-22 · trychroma.com/pricing
Weaviate 2026-10-22 · weaviate.io/pricing
Which one, then?
Pick Weaviate if
teams who will stay on Cloud Free $0 (100k objects, 1 GB RAM, 10 GB disk) or self-host, then buy Flex at $45/month when they need HA, 1,000 collections, and pay-as-you-go dimensions.
Read the Weaviate page