> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.trychroma.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Introduction

> Chroma is the open-source data infrastructure for AI. It comes with everything you need to get started built-in.

Chroma gives you everything you need for retrieval: store embeddings with metadata, search with dense and sparse vectors, filter by metadata, and retrieve across text, images, and more.

## What Chroma Offers

<Columns cols={3}>
  <Card title="Document Storage" icon="database" href="/docs/collections/add-data">
    Store documents and metadata.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Embeddings" icon="microchip" href="/docs/embeddings/embedding-functions">
    Use any embedding model. OpenAI, Cohere, Hugging Face, sentence-transformers, and more.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Vector Search" icon="magnifying-glass" href="/docs/querying-collections/query-and-get">
    Dense, sparse, and hybrid search. Query by similarity and combine multiple search strategies.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Full-Text & Regex Search" icon="font" href="/docs/querying-collections/full-text-search">
    Keyword and regex search over your data without embeddings.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Metadata Filtering" icon="filter" href="/docs/querying-collections/metadata-filtering">
    Filter results at query time by metadata conditions.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Multi-Modal Retrieval" icon="image" href="/docs/embeddings/multimodal">
    Index and search images, audio, and other modalities alongside text.
  </Card>
</Columns>

## Quickstart

<Columns cols={2}>
  <Card title="Getting Started with the Chroma SDK" icon="python" iconType="brands" href="/docs/overview/getting-started">
    Create a self-hosted or cloud database and add data to it using the Chroma SDK.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Create a Chroma Cloud Database" icon="cloud" href="https://www.trychroma.com/signup">
    Create a scalable, zero-ops Chroma Cloud database to store your AI data.
  </Card>
</Columns>

## Example Projects

<Columns cols={2}>
  <Card title="Agentic Search" icon="robot" href="/guides/build/agentic-search">
    Build agents that iteratively search and refine results for complex queries.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Code Search" icon="code" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jw-4oC5HtK4">
    Index codebases to power coding agents using AST-aware chunking.
  </Card>
</Columns>

## Open Source

Chroma is licensed under [Apache 2.0](https://github.com/chroma-core/chroma/blob/main/LICENSE). Run it locally, self-host, or use [Chroma Cloud](https://trychroma.com) for a managed, serverless experience.