Comparison
Pinecone vs Milvus
Overview
Pinecone is a fully managed, serverless vector database purpose-built for production AI. It handles embedding storage, indexing and low-latency similarity search at scale so teams can build RAG and semantic search without managing infrastructure.
Milvus is an open-source vector database designed for billion-scale similarity search. A graduated LF AI & Data project, it supports multiple index types and GPU acceleration, with a managed offering available through Zilliz Cloud.
Features
- —Fully managed serverless architecture
- —Low-latency similarity search
- —Metadata filtering
- —Namespaces and multitenancy
- —Automatic scaling
- —Hybrid dense + sparse search
- —Billion-scale vector search
- —Multiple ANN index types
- —GPU acceleration
- —Cloud-native distributed design
- —Hybrid search with scalar filtering
- —Managed Zilliz Cloud option
Pricing
Pinecone
freemiumFree plan available
| Plan | Price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Starter | Free | Free tier for small projects. |
| Standard | Contact sales | Usage-based, from a monthly minimum. |
| Enterprise | Contact sales | Custom pricing and support. |
Milvus
open sourceFree plan availableMilvus is free and open source (Apache 2.0). Managed hosting available via Zilliz Cloud with a free tier.
| Plan | Price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Open Source | Free | Self-hosted Apache 2.0. |
| Zilliz Cloud | Contact sales | Managed, free tier plus paid. |
Company Fit
Pinecone
StartupSMBEnterprise
Milvus
StartupSMBEnterprise