Chroma

Chroma is an open-source Vector Database that took off in early 2023, coming up in Python in minutes via "pip install chromadb." Low setup friction, a simple API, and integrations with LangChain and Llamaindex made it ubiquitous in prototyping. It runs as embedded, self-hosted Docker, or managed cloud. At true production scale teams sometimes graduate to Pinecone, Weaviate, or Qdrant, but Chroma has become the default for "I want to try my first RAG today."