Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Chroma vs Elastic Search comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Chroma
Ranking in Vector Databases
9th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.5
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Elastic Search
Ranking in Vector Databases
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
88
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (6th), Search as a Service (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Vector Databases category, the mindshare of Chroma is 9.2%, down from 14.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Search is 4.0%, down from 6.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Vector Databases Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Elastic Search4.0%
Chroma9.2%
Other86.8%
Vector Databases
 

Featured Reviews

Sameer Bhangale - PeerSpot reviewer
Leader, Data Science Practice at a computer software company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Used for RAG (Retrieval-augmented generation) and provides good documentation
If I have to deploy my application in a scalable environment with lots of data and users, I sometimes need to create multiple instances of my database or have a distributed database across different machines. Using Kubernetes, I can quickly increase the horizontal spread of Milvus because it is containerized and readily available. I don't have to do anything by myself. New users can go to Chroma's 'Get Started' page and follow it like a tutorial. Then, they will be ready to use the solution. Chroma has helped us reduce the overall project post production time. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.
Vaibhav Shukla - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at Agoda
Search performance has transformed large-scale intent discovery and hybrid query handling
While Elastic Search is a good product, I see areas for improvement, particularly regarding the misconception that any amount of data can simply be dumped into Elastic Search. When creating an index, careful consideration of data massaging is essential. Elastic Search stores mappings for various data types, which must remain below a certain threshold to maintain functionality. Users need to throttle the number of fields for searching to avoid overloading the system and ensure that the design of the document is efficient for the Elastic Search index. Additionally, I suggest utilizing ILM periodically throughout the year to manage data shuffling between clusters, preventing hotspots in the distribution of requests across nodes.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The solution's most valuable feature is its documentation, which allows new users to easily learn, deploy, and use it."
"It's very easy to set up and runs easily."
"The solution offers good stability."
"The ability to aggregate log and machine data into a searchable index reduces time to identify and isolate issues for an application. Saves time in triage and incident response by eliminating manual steps to access and parse logs on separate systems, within large infrastructure footprints."
"From a technical point of view, there are no significant issues recalled as Elastic Search has been absolutely awesome for this use case and covers 100% of the needs."
"The machine learning features of Elastic Search are very interesting, including the possibility to include models such as ELSER and different multilingual models that let us fine-tune our searches and use them in our search projects."
"The most valuable features of Elastic Enterprise Search are it's cloud-ready and we do a lot of infrastructure as code. By using ELK, we're able to deploy the solution as part of our ISC deployment."
"Using real-time search functionality to support operational decisions has been helpful."
"You have dashboards, it is visual, there are maps, you can create canvases. It's more visual than anything that I've ever used."
"The products comes with REST APIs."
 

Cons

"I think Chroma doesn't have a ready-made containerized image available."
"The hybrid algorithm needs improvement."
"Could have more open source tools and testing."
"Elastic Enterprise Search can improve by adding some kind of search that can be used out of the box without too much struggle with configuration. With every kind of search engine, there is some kind of special function that you need to do. A simple out-of-the-box search would be useful."
"Improving machine learning capabilities would be beneficial."
"I think the biggest issue we had with Elastic Search was regarding integrations with our multi-factor authentication tool."
"We see the need for some improvements with Elasticsearch. We would like the Elasticsearch package to include training lessons for our staff."
"Performance improvement could come from skipping background refresh on search idle shards (which is already being addressed in the upcoming seventh version)."
"There is a maximum of 10,000 entries, so the limitation means that if I wanted to analyze certain IP addresses more than 10,000 times, I wouldn't be able to dump or print that information."
"The reports could improve."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The current version is an open-source."
"The solution is free."
"The basic license is free, but it comes with a lot of features that aren't free. With a gold license, we get active directory integration. With a platinum license, we get alerting."
"We are using the free open-sourced version of this solution."
"The solution is not expensive because users have the option of choosing the managed or the subscription model."
"We are using the open-sourced version."
"we are using a licensed version of the product."
"We are paying $1,500 a month to use the solution. If you want to have endpoint protection you need to pay more."
"ELK has been considered as an alternative to Splunk to reduce licensing costs."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Vector Databases solutions are best for your needs.
881,114 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
University
8%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business37
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise43
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Chroma?
The solution's most valuable feature is its documentation, which allows new users to easily learn, deploy, and use it.
What needs improvement with Chroma?
The hybrid algorithm needs improvement.
What is your primary use case for Chroma?
We collect customer's feedback, and then we present it to the clients.
What do you like most about ELK Elasticsearch?
Logsign provides us with the capability to execute multiple queries according to our requirements. The indexing is very high, making it effective for storing and retrieving logs. The real-time anal...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ELK Elasticsearch?
Elastic Search's pricing totally depends on the server. Managed services from AWS are used, and we have worked on a self-managed Elastic Search cluster. On the AWS side, it is very expensive becaus...
What needs improvement with ELK Elasticsearch?
To be honest, there is only one downside of Elastic Search that makes sense because we use a basic license, which is a free license. We do not have some features available because of the free licen...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Elastic Enterprise Search, Swiftype, Elastic Cloud
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

1. Google 2. Netflix 3. Amazon 4. Facebook 5. Microsoft 6. Apple 7. Twitter 8. Spotify 9. Adobe 10. Uber 11. Airbnb 12. LinkedIn 13. Pinterest 14. Snapchat 15. Dropbox 16. Salesforce 17. IBM 18. Intel 19. Oracle 20. Cisco 21. HP 22. Dell 23. Samsung 24. Sony 25. LG 26. Panasonic 27. Philips 28. Toshiba 29. Nokia 30. Motorola 31. Xiaomi 32. Huawei
T-Mobile, Adobe, Booking.com, BMW, Telegraph Media Group, Cisco, Karbon, Deezer, NORBr, Labelbox, Fingerprint, Relativity, NHS Hospital, Met Office, Proximus, Go1, Mentat, Bluestone Analytics, Humanz, Hutch, Auchan, Sitecore, Linklaters, Socren, Infotrack, Pfizer, Engadget, Airbus, Grab, Vimeo, Ticketmaster, Asana, Twilio, Blizzard, Comcast, RWE and many others.
Find out what your peers are saying about Chroma vs. Elastic Search and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,114 professionals have used our research since 2012.