Open source alternatives to Pinecone

By GitHub stars it is Milvus, with 46,654 stars and a commit on 13 Nov. Choose Milvus when you want vector search on your own hardware or Kubernetes, so embeddings stay in your network and no usage bill grows. Next come Qdrant (35,540 stars) and Deeplake (9,267 stars).

Yes. The code of all 5 is public under Apache 2.0, so you can use them with no licence fee. Running one yourself costs the server and your time to look after it, and some makers also sell a hosted plan.

Start from the job you use Pinecone for. Choose Qdrant when you want to host it yourself and keep your data on your own server. Choose Supavec when you want an open-source RAG service that ingests and searches your own files, self-hosted under Apache 2.0.

All 5: Milvus, Qdrant, Deeplake, HelixDB and Supavec. Each tool's page says what it needs to run.

3 of the 5 we track had a commit in the last 30 days, among them Milvus, Qdrant and HelixDB. The quietest is Supavec, last changed on 28 Dec 2025. A recent commit shows the project is kept up, not that it will stay that way.

Apache 2.0 (5). MIT, BSD and Apache let you change and reuse the code freely.

The hosting. Pinecone's maker runs the servers for you; with an open source tool the updates, backups, security fixes and support are yours, unless you take the maker's hosted plan. Features differ too, so check what each one imports and exports before you move your data.