Pinecone vs Milvus
Compare deployment options, cost efficiency, and features to choose the right vector database for your application.
Database Comparison
Milvus takes the lead.
Both Pinecone and Milvus are powerful vector databases designed for efficient similarity search and storage. However, their deployment options and features differ in important ways.
Why Milvus:
- Milvus ranks higher overall
- Milvus offers more deployment options
- Milvus is more cost-effective
- Milvus has more permissive licensing
- Milvus has 2 more strengths
Pinecone
Pinecone is a fully managed, proprietary cloud vector database designed for high-performance RAG pipelines. It abstracts away infrastructure, scaling, replication, and index management. Pinecone is popular among companies building production RAG systems that need predictable latency and fully hosted operations.
Milvus
Milvus is a flexible, open-source vector database built for local and hybrid cloud deployment. With support for IVF, HNSW, and DiskANN, it provides the widest indexing variety for tuning performance on large-scale workloads. Milvus is ideal when you want control, configurability, and low infrastructure cost.
Feature Comparison
Infrastructure & Technical Details
| Feature | Pinecone | Milvus |
|---|---|---|
| Deployment | Managed Cloud | Self-Hosted, Managed Cloud |
| Cost | Storage: $0.33/GB/mo; Write Units: $4/million; Read Units: $16/million; Minimum $50/mo | Free (self-hosted), infra cost only |
| License | Proprietary | Apache 2.0 |
| Index Types | Dense (HNSW-like), Sparse | IVF, HNSW, DiskANN |
| Cloud Providers | AWS, Azure, GCP | Any |
| Regional Flexibility | low | high |
| Strengths Count | 7 | 9 |
| Weaknesses Count | 7 | 6 |