# Milvus vs Pinecone

**Leader by Vioscale score:** Pinecone

| Attribute | Milvus | Pinecone |
|---|---|---|
| **Vioscale score** | 68.2 (25% (low)) | 75.5 (61% (medium)) |
| activity.commits_last_30d | 100 | - |
| adoption.github_stars | 45,440 | - |
| deployment.options | `{"cloud":true,"hybrid":true,"self_hosted":true}` | `{"cloud":true,"self_hosted":true}` |
| description.long | Milvus 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. |
| features.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"}` |
| integrations.count | - | 56 |
| integrations.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"}]` |
| language.primary | Go | - |
| license.spdx | Apache-2.0 | - |
| market.availability | - | `{"hqCountry":"US","primaryMarkets":[],"availabilityScope":"global","availableCountries":[],"notAvailableCountries":[]}` |
| platform.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"]}` |
| pricing.free_tier | yes | yes |
| pricing.model | open_source | freemium |
| pricing.price_level | free | mid |
| pricing.starting_gbp | - | 20 |
| pricing.transparent | yes | yes |
| release.cadence_days | 5 | - |
| reliability.sla_pct | - | 99.95 |
| reliability.status_page | - | yes |
| security.gdpr | - | yes |
| security.hipaa | - | yes |
| security.iso27001 | - | yes |
| security.soc2 | - | yes |

## Capabilities (Vector Databases)

| Capability | Milvus | Pinecone |
|---|:--:|:--:|
| **Deployment** |  |  |
| Deployment | Self-hosted | Managed |
| 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-memory | Disk-backed | - |
| **Scale** |  |  |
| Multi-tenancy (namespaces / collections / tenants) | - | ✓ |
| Horizontal scale | Sharded / distributed | Sharded / distributed |
| **Consistency** |  |  |
| Consistency | - | - |
| **Licensing** |  |  |
| Licence class | Permissive OSS | Proprietary |
| **Classification** |  |  |
| Purpose-built vs feature-of-parent | Dedicated DBMS | Dedicated DBMS |

*Source: Vioscale. Generated 2026-08-07T00:01:22.696Z. "-" = undocumented, not absent.*