Weaviate vs Pinecone
Compare deployment options, cost efficiency, and features to choose the right vector database for your application.
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
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.
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.
Feature Comparison
Infrastructure & Technical Details
| Feature | Weaviate | Pinecone |
|---|---|---|
| Deployment | Self-Hosted, Managed Cloud | Managed Cloud |
| Cost | Free (self-host), cloud starts ~$25/mo | Storage: $0.33/GB/mo; Write Units: $4/million; Read Units: $16/million; Minimum $50/mo |
| License | BSD | Proprietary |
| Index Types | HNSW, Hybrid dense+sparse | Dense (HNSW-like), Sparse |
| Cloud Providers | AWS, GCP | AWS, Azure, GCP |
| Regional Flexibility | low | low |
| Strengths Count | 8 | 7 |
| Weaknesses Count | 6 | 7 |