vioscale
Comparison

Milvus vs Pinecone

On the evidence we track, Pinecone leads this comparison with a composite score of 76/100. Scores are only directly comparable because these tools share a category; the full breakdown and every source is below.

Milvus full profile →Pinecone full profile →
Machine formatsJSONMarkdownGraphQLor send Accept: application/json
Attribute comparison across 2 tools
Attribute68Milvus76PineconeLeader
Vioscale score68 / 100low · 25%76 / 100medium · 61%
Commits last 30d100-
Github stars45,440-
Options{"cloud":true,"hybrid":true,"self_hosted":true}{"cloud":true,"self_hosted":true}
LongMilvus is an open-source vector database built for GenAI applications, enabling high-speed similarity search and scaling to tens of billions of vectors with minimal performance loss.Pinecone is a fully managed vector database built for AI. Writes are instantly searchable, indexing is automatic, and queries stay fast at any scale.
Capabilities{"deployment":"self_hosted","serverless":true,"storage_tier":"disk_backed","hybrid_search":true,"licence_class":"permissive_oss","product_class":"dedicated_dbms","horizontal_scale":"sharded_distributed"}{"deployment":"managed","serverless":true,"hybrid_search":true,"licence_class":"proprietary","multi_tenancy":true,"product_class":"dedicated_dbms","full_text_bm25":true,"horizontal_scale":"sharded_distributed","metadata_filtering":"pre_filter"}
Count-56
List-[{"name":"Agent Skills"},{"name":"Cursor Plugin"},{"name":"Claude Code Plugin"},{"name":"GitHub Copilot"},{"name":"Airbyte"},{"name":"Amazon Bedrock"},{"name":"Amazon Sagemaker"},{"name":"AWS Marketplace"},{"name":"Google Cloud Marketplace"},{"name":"Microsoft Marketplace"},{"name":"Cohere"},{"name":"OpenAI"},{"name":"Hugging Face"},{"name":"Databricks"},{"name":"Snowflake"},{"name":"Datadog"},{"name":"New Relic"},{"name":"LangChain"},{"name":"Llama Index"},{"name":"Haystack"},{"name":"Genkit"},{"name":"n8n"},{"name":"Zapier"},{"name":"Terraform"},{"name":"Pulumi"},{"name":"Box"},{"name":"Confluent"},{"name":"Unstructured"},{"name":"Vercel"},{"name":"OctoAI"},{"name":"Gemini CLI Extension"},{"name":"Anyscale"},{"name":"Apify"},{"name":"Aryn"},{"name":"Cloudera AI"},{"name":"Context Data"},{"name":"Datavolo"},{"name":"Estuary"},{"name":"FlowiseAI"},{"name":"Fleak"},{"name":"Gathr"},{"name":"HoneyHive"},{"name":"Instill AI"},{"name":"Jina"},{"name":"Langtrace"},{"name":"Matillion"},{"name":"Nexla"},{"name":"Nuclia"},{"name":"Redpanda"},{"name":"StreamNative"}]
PrimaryGo-
SpdxApache-2.0-
Availability-{"hqCountry":"US","primaryMarkets":[],"availabilityScope":"global","availableCountries":[],"notAvailableCountries":[]}
Support{"mac":true,"linux":true,"windows":true}{"cli":true,"web":true}
Pricing{"type":"open_source","summary":"Open-source with optional managed Zilliz Cloud (serverless and dedicated cluster; free trial available)","freeTier":true,"sourceUrl":"https://milvus.io","retrievedAt":"2026-08-05T13:26:39.808Z"}{"type":"hybrid","plans":[{"free":true,"name":"Starter","features":["Pinecone Database On-Demand","Pinecone Inference","Pinecone Assistant","Dense, Sparse, and Full-Text Indexes","Console","Metrics","Community Support via Discord"],"description":"For trying out and for small applications","contactSales":false},{"free":false,"name":"Builder","features":["Everything in Starter","Increased usage limits","Choose your cloud and region","Multiple projects and users","Prometheus and Datadog monitoring","Free support","Response SLAs available via add-on"],"components":[{"kind":"fixed","amount":20,"period":"month","currency":"USD"}],"description":"For solo developers and small teams","contactSales":false},{"free":false,"name":"Standard","features":["Everything in Builder","Pay-as-you-go beyond minimum","Dedicated Read Nodes (DRN)","Import from object storage","Backup and Restore","RBAC","SSO (SAML 2.0)","HIPAA add-on","Free support"],"components":[{"kind":"fixed","amount":50,"period":"month","currency":"USD"}],"description":"For production applications at any scale","contactSales":false},{"free":false,"name":"Enterprise","features":["Everything in Standard","99.95% Uptime SLA","Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC)","Private Endpoints","Customer Managed Encryption Keys","Audit Logs","Service Accounts","SAML roles","SCIM","HIPAA Compliance","Pro support included"],"components":[{"kind":"fixed","amount":500,"period":"month","currency":"USD"}],"description":"For mission-critical production applications","contactSales":false},{"free":false,"name":"Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC)","description":"Run Pinecone in your own cloud account with zero-access operations","contactSales":true}],"summary":"From $20/month. Free tier available. Standard plan includes 3-week trial with $300 credits.","currency":"USD","freeTier":true,"sourceUrl":"https://www.pinecone.io","retrievedAt":"2026-08-05T13:26:49.462Z","freeTrialDays":21,"startingPrice":{"amount":20,"period":"month","currency":"USD"},"billingPeriods":["month"]}
Free tierYesYes
Modelopen_sourcefreemium
Price levelfreemid
Starting gbp-20
TransparentYesYes
Cadence days5-
Sla pct-99.95
Status page-Yes
Gdpr-Yes
Hipaa-Yes
Iso27001-Yes
Soc2-Yes

Capabilities

Feature-by-feature on the axes that matter for vector databases. “-” means undocumented, not absent.

Capability comparison for Vector Databases
CapabilityMilvusPinecone
Deployment
DeploymentSelf-hostedManaged
Serverless / consumption pricing✓✓
Index
ANN index (HNSW / IVF / DiskANN / ScaNN / flat)--
Distance metrics (cosine / dot / Euclidean)--
Query
Metadata filtering-Pre-filter
Hybrid search (dense + sparse fusion)✓✓
Built-in BM25 / lexical-✓
Storage
Quantization--
On-disk vs in-memoryDisk-backed-
Scale
Multi-tenancy (namespaces / collections / tenants)-✓
Horizontal scaleSharded / distributedSharded / distributed
Consistency
Consistency--
Licensing
Licence classPermissive OSSProprietary
Classification
Purpose-built vs feature-of-parentDedicated DBMSDedicated DBMS

Comparison generated from independently-sourced facts. Every value links to its source and retrieval date. See the method.