vioscaleAI
Comparison

Pinecone vs Zilliz Cloud

No clear leader: Zilliz Cloud (79.5) and Pinecone (75.1) are within the 5-point margin; treat as a tie. The attribute-by-attribute breakdown below, with a source and date on every value, is the honest way to compare them.

Pinecone full profile →Zilliz Cloud full profile →
Machine formatsMarkdownJSONGraphQLMarkdown is open. JSON and GraphQL need a free key.
Pinecone75
Zilliz Cloud80
Score
vioscaleAI score
Pinecone75 / 100medium · 74%
Zilliz Cloud80 / 100medium · 74%
Pricing
Free tier
Pinecone✓
Zilliz Cloud✓
Model
Pineconefreemium
Zilliz Cloudfreemium
Price level
Pineconemid
Zilliz Cloudhigh
Starting price
Pinecone$20
Zilliz Cloud$197
Transparent
Pinecone✓
Zilliz Cloud✓
Integrations
Count
Pinecone8
Zilliz Cloud1,000
Security
Certifications
Gdpr
Pinecone✓
Zilliz Cloud✓
Hipaa
Pinecone✓
Zilliz Cloud✓
Iso27001
Pinecone✓
Zilliz Cloud✓
Soc2
Pinecone✓
Zilliz Cloud✓
Trust center
Reliability
Sla pct
Pinecone99.95
Zilliz Cloud99.95
Status page
Pinecone✓
Zilliz Cloud✓
Market
Availability
Content
Faq
Pinecone6 items
Zilliz Cloud6 items

Capabilities

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

Deployment
Deployment
PineconeManaged
Zilliz CloudManaged
Serverless / consumption pricing
Pinecone✓
Zilliz Cloud✓
Index
ANN index (HNSW / IVF / DiskANN / ScaNN / flat)
PineconeHNSW, DiskANN
Zilliz CloudHNSW, IVF, FLAT (brute-force), SCANN, DiskANN
Distance metrics (cosine / dot / Euclidean)
Pineconecosine
Zilliz Cloudcosine, Euclidean
Query
Metadata filtering
PineconePost-filter
Zilliz CloudPost-filter
Hybrid search (dense + sparse fusion)
Pinecone✓
Zilliz Cloud✓
Built-in BM25 / lexical
Pinecone✓
Zilliz Cloud✓
Storage
Quantization
Pinecone-
Zilliz Cloud-
On-disk vs in-memory
PineconeTiered
Zilliz CloudTiered
Scale
Multi-tenancy (namespaces / collections / tenants)
Pinecone✓
Zilliz Cloud✓
Horizontal scale
PineconeSharded / distributed
Zilliz CloudSharded / distributed
Consistency
Consistency
PineconeEventual
Zilliz Cloud-
Licensing
Licence class
PineconeProprietary
Zilliz CloudProprietary
Classification
Purpose-built vs feature-of-parent
PineconeDedicated DBMS
Zilliz CloudDedicated DBMS

What each one is

The product in its own terms, so the numbers below have context.

Pinecone

A cloud-hosted vector database designed for AI applications, enabling fast semantic search and retrieval without performance degradation at scale. Supports dense, sparse, and full-text search with automatic indexing and built-in compliance for production use.

Independently observed

Zilliz Cloud

Zilliz Cloud is a managed cloud service built on the open-source Milvus vector database. It handles storage, indexing, and similarity search at scale for unstructured data, supporting vector search, full-text search, and hybrid retrieval for AI and machine learning workloads.

Independently observed

Pricing

List pricing as published by each vendor, with the date we read it. Always verify at the source before you buy.

Pinecone

from $20/moHybridFree tier21-day trial

Free tier available. Paid plans from $20/month; production plans $50–$500/month minimum plus usage-based charges.

  • StarterFree
    • Dense, Sparse, and Full-Text Indexes
    • Console Metrics
    • Community Support via Discord
    • USA region only
  • Builder$20/month flat
    • Everything in Starter
    • Increased usage limits
    • Multiple projects and users
    • Any cloud and region
    • Prometheus and Datadog monitoring
    • +1 more
  • Standard$50/month minimum + usage-based. 3-week free trial with $300 credits.
    • Everything in Builder
    • Unlimited storage
    • Pay-as-you-go Database On-Demand, Inference, and Assistant usage
    • Dedicated Read Nodes
    • Import from object storage
    • +4 more
  • Enterprise$500/month minimum + usage-based
    • Everything in Standard
    • 99.95% Uptime SLA
    • Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC)
    • Private Endpoints
    • Customer Managed Encryption Keys
    • +5 more
  • Bring Your Own CloudContact sales
    • Pinecone runs in customer's cloud account and VPC
    • Zero-access operations – no SSH, VPN, or inbound access
    • Outbound-only operations with auditable trail
    • AWS PrivateLink, GCP Private Service Connect, or Azure Private Link
as of verify ↗

Zilliz Cloud

from $197/moHybridFree tier30-day trial

Free tier with 5 GB storage. Serverless pricing from $0/month pay-per-query. Dedicated clusters from $197/month. Annual commitments available.

  • FreeFree
    • Community support via Slack
    • Vector search
    • Filtered search
    • Range search
  • ServerlessPay-per-query pricing, system-managed auto-scaling
    • Fully managed vector databases
    • Backup and restore
    • Basic monitoring
    • Built-in encryption for data in transit and at rest
    • Vector search
    • +2 more
  • DedicatedFrom $197/month base, plus $0.126/GB storage, dedicated infrastructure
    • 99.95% uptime SLA
    • SSO (SAML 2.0)
    • Granular RBAC
    • Multi-replica and elastic scaling
    • Global cluster with disaster recovery
    • +9 more
  • BYOCContact sales
as of verify ↗

Platform & deployment

Where each product runs and how it can be hosted. A dash means undocumented, not unsupported.

Platforms
Web
Pinecone✓
Zilliz Cloud✓
CLI
Pinecone✗
Zilliz Cloud✓
Deployment
Cloud / SaaS
Pinecone✓
Zilliz Cloud✓
Hybrid
Pinecone✓
Zilliz Cloud✗

Integrations

What each product connects to. Counts come from the vendor's own integration directory where one exists.

In common (4)
  • AWS
  • Claude
  • Prometheus
  • Azure

Pinecone

20 total - 16 not shared
  • Azure OpenAI
  • GitHub CoPilot
  • Azure Marketplace
  • Microsoft Marketplace
  • Google Cloud Platform
  • Microsoft Azure
  • Google Drive
  • Slack
  • Vercel
  • Datadog
  • GCP
  • Cursor
  • Vercel AI SDK
  • Confluent
  • Zapier
  • Discord
Independently observed

Zilliz Cloud

32 total - 28 not shared
  • Google Cloud
  • LangChain
  • Fivetran
  • Google Ads
  • Google Analytics 4
  • Google Search Console
  • Google Sheets
  • Hubspot
  • LinkedIn Ad Analytics
  • Marketo
  • Microsoft Advertising
  • NetSuite SuiteAnalytics
  • Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications
  • Apache SeaTunnel
  • PostgreSQL/Pgvector
  • PyMilvus
  • HoneyHive
  • Cohere
  • Haystack
  • FiftyOne
  • DSPy
  • Voyage AI
  • Jina AI
  • n8n
  • +4 more
Independently observed
Still deciding?

Pinecone or Zilliz Cloud: which one depends on you

A composite score cannot know your constraints. Describe them and both get re-weighted against what you actually need, with the evidence behind every position.

Free to run, no account needed to start. How the evaluation works

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