Teams migrate when hitting Chroma's scale limits. Gain: production-ready performance, distributed scaling, 30-40ms p99 latency. Trade-off: more setup complexity, learning curve for advanced features.

Teams migrate for fully managed production deployment. Gain: zero ops, enterprise SLA, scales to billions. Trade-off: cloud-only, expensive at scale, vendor lock-in.

Enterprises migrate for massive scale. Gain: proven at billion-vector scale, horizontal scaling, strong community. Trade-off: complex operations, steeper learning curve.

Postgres teams choose to stay in existing stack. Gain: no new infrastructure, familiar tooling, SQL queries. Trade-off: less specialized, performance varies by scale.

Teams migrate for better hybrid search. Gain: superior vector + BM25 hybrid, GraphQL API, knowledge graph features. Trade-off: heavier resource usage, more complex than Chroma.