Weaviate vs Pinecone

Compare deployment options, cost efficiency, and features to choose the right vector database for your application. If you want to compare these models on your data, try Agentset.

Database Comparison

Weaviate takes the lead.

Both Weaviate and Pinecone are powerful vector databases designed for efficient similarity search and storage. However, their deployment options and features differ in important ways.

Why Weaviate:

  • Weaviate ranks higher overall
  • Weaviate offers more deployment options
  • Weaviate is more cost-effective
  • Weaviate has more permissive licensing
  • Weaviate has 1 more strengths

Vector Databases Are Just One Piece of RAG

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Weaviate

Weaviate is a cloud and self-hosted vector database offering hybrid dense+sparse search, strong metadata filtering, and a modular storage layer. It is designed for enterprise and production RAG workloads that require flexibility and scalable cloud hosting.

Deployment: Self-Hosted, Managed Cloud
Cost: Free (self-host), cloud starts ~$25/mo
License: BSD
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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.

Deployment: Managed Cloud
Cost: Storage: $0.33/GB/mo; Write Units: $4/million; Read Units: $16/million; Minimum $50/mo
License: Proprietary
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Build RAG in Minutes, Not Months

Agentset gives you a complete RAG API with fully managed vector storage and retrieval. Upload your data, call the API, and get accurate results from day one.

import { Agentset } from "agentset";

const agentset = new Agentset();
const ns = agentset.namespace("ns_1234");

const results = await ns.search(
  "What is multi-head attention?"
);

for (const result of results) {
  console.log(result.text);
}

Feature Comparison

Infrastructure & Technical Details

FeatureWeaviatePinecone
DeploymentSelf-Hosted, Managed CloudManaged Cloud
CostFree (self-host), cloud starts ~$25/moStorage: $0.33/GB/mo; Write Units: $4/million; Read Units: $16/million; Minimum $50/mo
LicenseBSDProprietary
Index TypesHNSW, Hybrid dense+sparseDense (HNSW-like), Sparse
Cloud ProvidersAWS, GCPAWS, Azure, GCP
Regional Flexibilitylowlow
Strengths87
Weaknesses67