Chroma, now 4x faster#

Two years ago, we set out to make AI retrieval effortless for developers. 30+ million downloads later, that vision is becoming reality with widespread adoption across hackathon projects, fast-growing AI startups, and Fortune 500 companies.

Today, we’re excited to announce that local Chroma is 4× faster for common write and query workflows, thanks to a new core written in Rust. These changes are available in the v1.0 pre-release today, and will be moving to general availability in a few weeks.

Performance Gains#

Write speed - 3-5x faster writes. Dramatically increasing the speed of your initial ingestion.
Query speed - 3-5x faster queries. Perform large query sweeps in a fraction of the time.
True multithreading - No more waiting for the GIL. Use Chroma from as many Python threads as your system can handle.

Dataset of 1M OpenAI 1536 dimensional embeddings. Using default local Chroma settings on a 12 core M2 Macbook.

A foundation for the future#

This rewrite isn’t just about speed — it’s about what’s next.

We’re bringing first-class support for local Chroma in JS, Ruby, and Swift, with native bindings and WASM-powered browser deployments.

With a shared Rust core between local and distributed Chroma, we’re laying the groundwork for seamless local-to-cloud workflows. AI engineers need to iterate on datasets and push them to production effortlessly — we’re building Chroma to make that easy.

Interested in using Chroma Cloud? It’s in Private Technical Preview — join the waitlist here

Try it yourself#

We are releasing Chroma v1.0 in pre-release today, if you have feedback while we are in pre-release, please file issues or feature requests here.

Command Line

This version is fully API-compatible with previous releases — it's the same Chroma you know and love, now just significantly faster. If you're upgrading, check out our migration guide for details on any minor changes between the versions.

We can’t wait to see how you use Chroma v1.0 to speed up your prototyping, experimentation and production workflows. Let us know how we can make it even better for you.