What is Pinecone?
Managed vector database for search, RAG and agents.
Who is Pinecone best for?
Pinecone is best for developers building search, RAG or agent memory who want a hosted vector database.
RAG and semantic search in production
A managed vector database with dense, sparse and full-text indexes, so retrieval runs without you hosting or tuning anything.
Developers building with coding agents
A plugin for Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, Codex and Gemini, plus a CLI and an MCP server, puts search, upsert and rerank a command away.
Prototypes and side projects
The free Starter plan holds up to 2 GB and includes embedding and reranking quotas, enough for a small search or chat app.
Regulated companies
SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, GDPR and ISO 27001 certification, single sign-on and private networking, with an option to run Pinecone in your own cloud.
How much does Pinecone cost?
Pinecone has a free Starter plan and a $20 a month Builder plan, while Standard and Enterprise are pay as you go with minimum spends of $50 and $500 a month.
- Up to 2 GB storage, 2M write units and 1M read units a month
- Up to 5 indexes, on AWS us-east-1 only
- Community support on Discord
- Up to 10 GB storage, 5M write units and 2M read units a month
- Any cloud and region, up to 5 users
- Prometheus and Datadog monitoring
- Storage at $0.33 per GB a month, reads from $16 per million units
- Backups, RBAC and single sign-on
- 3-week trial with $300 in credits
- 99.95% uptime SLA
- Private endpoints, audit logs and your own encryption keys
- Pro support included
On Standard, write units cost $4 to $4.50 per million and read units $16 to $18 per million; on Enterprise they cost $6 to $6.75 and $24 to $27, depending on cloud and region. HIPAA is a $190 a month add-on on Standard. Running Pinecone inside your own cloud account is priced on request, and committed-use contracts earn discounts. Full pricing on pinecone.io. We checked these prices on .
How do readers rate Pinecone?
No one has rated Pinecone yet. Be the first.
Sign in to rate. One rating per account.
What are the best Pinecone alternatives?
Three tools on Recaply do Pinecone's job. All three are open source, so you can run them on your own server.
QdrantOpen SourceChoose it when you want to host it yourself and keep your data on your own server.
MilvusOpen SourceChoose it when you want vector search on your own hardware or Kubernetes, so embeddings stay in your network and no usage bill grows
SupavecOpen SourceChoose it when you want an open-source RAG service that ingests and searches your own files, self-hosted under Apache 2.0.
More open source alternatives
See all
Questions about Pinecone
What is Pinecone?
Managed vector database for search, RAG and agents.
Who is Pinecone for?
Pinecone is best for developers building search, RAG or agent memory who want a hosted vector database.
Does Pinecone have a free trial of its paid plans?
Yes. Pinecone's Standard plan comes with a 3-week trial that includes $300 in credits, and Enterprise trials are available on request. The Starter plan is free with no time limit, but it caps storage, reads and writes.
How much does Pinecone cost?
Pinecone's paid plans are Builder at $20 per month, flat, Standard at $50 monthly minimum, then pay as you go and Enterprise at $500 monthly minimum, then pay as you go.
Is there an open source alternative to Pinecone?
Yes. Qdrant, Milvus, Supavec and Deeplake and 1 more are open source tools that do the same job, so you can run your own.
What are the best Pinecone alternatives?
The closest alternatives on Recaply are Qdrant, Milvus and Supavec.
Where can I try Pinecone?
On its official website, pinecone.io.
Can I run Pinecone in my own cloud account?
Yes. Pinecone's bring-your-own-cloud option runs it inside your own cloud account and VPC, and Pinecone needs no SSH, VPN or inbound access to operate it. It is priced on request and comes with Pro support.
Upstash
PlanetScale
Sevalla
TiDB
Google Firebase
Appwrite