# Pinecone vs Zilliz Cloud

| Attribute | Pinecone | Zilliz Cloud |
|---|---|---|
| **vioscaleAI score** | 75.1 (75% (high)) | 79.5 (74% (medium)) |
| content.faq | `[{"answer":"A hosted vector database platform that enables developers to build AI-powered applications with vector search, retrieval-augmented generation, and semantic matching capabilities. It abstracts away infrastructure complexity with automatic scaling and pay-per-use pricing. It is indexed under Vector Databases.","source":"https://www.pinecone.io/pricing/","question":"What is Pinecone?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Pinecone offers a free tier, so you can start without paying. Paid plans start at $0.10 per egress. Prices are published openly on the vendor's own pricing page. Pricing changes often, so verify at source before relying on it.","source":"https://www.pinecone.io/pricing/","question":"Is Pinecone free?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"We have confirmed browser-based access to Pinecone. That is the extent of what we could verify from public sources, so it may well offer desktop or mobile clients we have not indexed.","source":"https://www.pinecone.io/pricing/","question":"What platforms does Pinecone support?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"We have only confirmed a cloud / SaaS deployment for Pinecone, so it appears to be vendor-hosted. If a self-hosted option exists we have not found it documented publicly.","source":"https://www.pinecone.io/pricing/","question":"Can Pinecone be self-hosted?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"We have confirmed 15 integrations for Pinecone, including Azure OpenAI, GitHub CoPilot, Azure Marketplace, Microsoft Marketplace, AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure and Google Drive, plus 7 more. This is what we could verify from public sources, so the vendor may support others we have not indexed.","source":"https://www.pinecone.io/pricing/","question":"What does Pinecone integrate with?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"We have independently confirmed SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA and GDPR for Pinecone. Certifications we do not list are ones we have not been able to verify from public sources, which is not the same as Pinecone not holding them. Always confirm compliance directly before you rely on it.","source":"https://www.pinecone.io/security/","question":"What security certifications does Pinecone have?","confidence":0.7}]` | `[{"answer":"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. It is indexed under Vector Databases.","source":"https://zilliz.com/pricing/unlimited-calculator","question":"What is Zilliz Cloud?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Zilliz Cloud offers a free tier, so you can start without paying. Paid plans are also available: Free, Serverless, Dedicated and BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud). Pricing changes often, so verify at source before relying on it.","source":"https://zilliz.com/pricing/unlimited-calculator","question":"Is Zilliz Cloud free?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Zilliz Cloud supports the web and a command-line interface. Platforms we have not confirmed are simply not listed here rather than ruled out.","source":"https://zilliz.com/pricing/unlimited-calculator","question":"What platforms does Zilliz Cloud support?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Not fully, on what we have confirmed. Zilliz Cloud is offered as cloud / SaaS and hybrid, and a hybrid deployment usually means some components can run on your own infrastructure while the rest stays vendor-hosted. We have not confirmed a completely self-hosted option, so check with the vendor if that is a requirement.","source":"https://zilliz.com/pricing/unlimited-calculator","question":"Can Zilliz Cloud be self-hosted?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"We have confirmed 19 integrations for Zilliz Cloud, including AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, LangChain, Fivetran, Google Ads, Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console, plus 11 more. This is what we could verify from public sources, so the vendor may support others we have not indexed.","source":"https://zilliz.com/pricing/unlimited-calculator","question":"What does Zilliz Cloud integrate with?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"We have independently confirmed SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA and GDPR for Zilliz Cloud. Certifications we do not list are ones we have not been able to verify from public sources, which is not the same as Zilliz Cloud not holding them. Always confirm compliance directly before you rely on it.","source":"https://zilliz.com/trust-center","question":"What security certifications does Zilliz Cloud have?","confidence":0.7}]` |
| deployment.options | `{"cloud":true}` | `{"cloud":true}` |
| description.long | A hosted vector database platform that enables developers to build AI-powered applications with vector search, retrieval-augmented generation, and semantic matching capabilities. It abstracts away infrastructure complexity with automatic scaling and pay-per-use pricing. | 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. |
| features.capabilities | `{"ann_index":"HNSW, DiskANN","deployment":"managed","serverless":true,"consistency":"eventual","storage_tier":"tiered","hybrid_search":true,"licence_class":"proprietary","multi_tenancy":true,"product_class":"dedicated_dbms","full_text_bm25":true,"distance_metrics":"cosine","horizontal_scale":"sharded_distributed","metadata_filtering":"post_filter"}` | `{"ann_index":"HNSW, IVF, FLAT (brute-force), SCANN, DiskANN","deployment":"managed","serverless":true,"storage_tier":"tiered","hybrid_search":true,"licence_class":"proprietary","multi_tenancy":true,"product_class":"dedicated_dbms","full_text_bm25":true,"distance_metrics":"cosine, Euclidean","horizontal_scale":"sharded_distributed","metadata_filtering":"post_filter"}` |
| integrations.count | 8 | 1,000 |
| integrations.list | `[{"name":"Azure OpenAI"},{"name":"GitHub CoPilot"},{"name":"Azure Marketplace"},{"name":"Microsoft Marketplace"},{"name":"AWS","native":true,"category":"cloud_provider","direction":"bidirectional"},{"name":"Google Cloud Platform","native":true,"category":"cloud_provider","direction":"bidirectional"},{"name":"Microsoft Azure","native":true,"category":"cloud_provider","direction":"bidirectional"},{"name":"Google Drive","native":true,"category":"data_source","direction":"inbound"},{"name":"Slack","native":false,"category":"communication","direction":"bidirectional"},{"name":"Vercel","native":false,"category":"hosting","direction":"bidirectional"},{"name":"Claude","native":false,"category":"llm","direction":"bidirectional"},{"name":"Datadog","native":true,"category":"monitoring","direction":"outbound"},{"name":"Prometheus","native":true,"category":"monitoring","direction":"outbound"},{"name":"GCP","native":true},{"name":"Azure","native":true},{"name":"Cursor","native":false,"category":"ide"},{"name":"Vercel AI SDK","native":true,"category":"development","direction":"bidirectional"}]` | `[{"name":"AWS"},{"name":"Google Cloud"},{"name":"Azure"},{"name":"LangChain"},{"name":"Fivetran","native":true,"category":"data_integration"},{"name":"Google Ads","native":true,"category":"analytics"},{"name":"Google Analytics 4","native":true,"category":"analytics"},{"name":"Google Search Console","native":true,"category":"analytics"},{"name":"Google Sheets","native":true,"category":"data_integration"},{"name":"Hubspot","native":true,"category":"crm"},{"name":"LinkedIn Ad Analytics","native":true,"category":"analytics"},{"name":"Marketo","native":true,"category":"marketing"},{"name":"Microsoft Advertising","native":true,"category":"advertising"},{"name":"NetSuite SuiteAnalytics","native":true,"category":"erp"},{"name":"Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications","native":true,"category":"erp"},{"name":"Apache SeaTunnel","native":true,"category":"data_streaming"},{"name":"PostgreSQL/Pgvector","native":false,"category":"database"},{"name":"PyMilvus","native":true,"category":"sdk"},{"name":"Claude","native":false,"category":"ai_assistant","direction":"bidirectional"},{"name":"Prometheus","native":true,"category":"monitoring","direction":"outbound"},{"name":"HoneyHive","native":true,"category":"observability","direction":"bidirectional"},{"name":"Cohere","native":true,"category":"embeddings","direction":"bidirectional"},{"name":"Haystack","native":true,"category":"framework","direction":"bidirectional"},{"name":"FiftyOne","native":true,"category":"computer_vision","direction":"bidirectional"},{"name":"DSPy","native":true,"category":"llm","direction":"bidirectional"},{"name":"Voyage AI","native":true,"category":"embeddings","direction":"bidirectional"},{"name":"Jina AI","native":true,"category":"embeddings","direction":"bidirectional"},{"name":"n8n","native":true,"category":"automation","direction":"bidirectional"},{"name":"DocsGPT","native":true,"category":"documentation","direction":"bidirectional"},{"name":"vLLM","native":true,"category":"llm","direction":"bidirectional"},{"name":"Langflow","native":true,"category":"framework","direction":"bidirectional"},{"name":"Vanna","native":true,"category":"sql","direction":"bidirectional"}]` |
| market.availability | `{"primaryMarkets":[],"availabilityScope":"global","availableCountries":[],"notAvailableCountries":[]}` | `{"primaryMarkets":[],"availabilityScope":"global","availableCountries":[],"notAvailableCountries":[]}` |
| platform.support | `{"web":true}` | `{"cli":true,"web":true}` |
| pricing | `{"type":"hybrid","plans":[{"free":true,"name":"Starter","summary":"Free","features":["Dense, Sparse, and Full-Text Indexes","Console Metrics","Community Support via Discord","USA region only"],"components":[{"kind":"fixed","amount":0,"period":"month","currency":"USD"}],"description":"For trying out and for small applications","contactSales":false,"includedLimits":{"egress":"1GB/mo","indexes":"5","storage":"2GB","namespaces":"100 per index","read_units":"1M/mo","write_units":"2M/mo","input_tokens":"500k/mo","output_tokens":"300k/mo","reranking_requests":"500/mo","inference_embedding_tokens":"5M/mo"}},{"free":false,"name":"Builder","summary":"$20/month flat","features":["Everything in Starter","Increased usage limits","Multiple projects and users","Any cloud and region","Prometheus and Datadog monitoring","Free support, with response SLAs via Developer/Pro support add-on"],"components":[{"kind":"fixed","amount":20,"period":"month","currency":"USD"}],"description":"For solo developers and small teams","contactSales":false,"includedLimits":{"egress":"10GB/mo","indexes":"10 per project","storage":"10GB","namespaces":"1,000 per index","write_units":"5M/mo","output_tokens":"1M/mo","reranking_requests":"1,000/mo","inference_embedding_tokens":"10M/mo"}},{"free":false,"name":"Standard","summary":"$50/month minimum + usage-based. 3-week free trial with $300 credits.","features":["Everything in Builder","Unlimited storage","Pay-as-you-go Database On-Demand, Inference, and Assistant usage","Dedicated Read Nodes","Import from object storage","Backup and Restore","RBAC","SSO (SAML 2.0)","HIPAA add-on available"],"components":[{"kind":"fixed","amount":50,"period":"month","currency":"USD"},{"per":{"qty":1,"unit":"GB"},"kind":"metered","unit":"storage","amount":0.33,"currency":"USD"},{"per":{"qty":1,"unit":"million"},"kind":"metered","unit":"write_units","amount":4,"currency":"USD"},{"per":{"qty":1,"unit":"million"},"kind":"metered","unit":"read_units","amount":16,"currency":"USD"},{"per":{"qty":1,"unit":"GB"},"kind":"metered","unit":"egress","amount":0.1,"currency":"USD"}],"description":"For production applications at any scale","contactSales":false,"includedLimits":{"indexes":"20 per project","storage":"Unlimited","namespaces":"200 per index"}},{"free":false,"name":"Enterprise","summary":"$500/month minimum + usage-based","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 included"],"components":[{"kind":"fixed","amount":500,"period":"month","currency":"USD"}],"description":"For mission-critical production applications","contactSales":false,"includedLimits":{"indexes":"200 per project","uptime_sla":"99.95%"}},{"free":false,"name":"Bring Your Own Cloud","summary":"Custom pricing","features":["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"],"description":"For organizations requiring the highest level of security and control","contactSales":true}],"addOns":[{"name":"HIPAA add-on","components":[{"kind":"fixed","amount":190,"period":"month","currency":"USD"}]}],"summary":"Free tier available. Paid plans from $20/month; production plans $50–$500/month minimum plus usage-based charges.","currency":"USD","freeTier":true,"sourceUrl":"https://www.pinecone.io/pricing/","retrievedAt":"2026-09-03T18:00:54.251Z","freeTrialDays":21,"startingPrice":{"amount":20,"period":"month","currency":"USD"},"billingPeriods":["month"]}` | `{"type":"hybrid","plans":[{"free":true,"name":"Free","summary":"$0/month, 5 GB storage, 5 collections","features":["Community support via Slack","Vector search","Filtered search","Range search"],"components":[{"kind":"fixed","amount":0,"period":"month","currency":"USD"}],"description":"Community tier with limited resources for non-production use","contactSales":false,"includedLimits":{"storage":"5 GB/month","collections":"5"}},{"free":false,"name":"Serverless","summary":"Pay-per-query pricing, system-managed auto-scaling","features":["Fully managed vector databases","Backup and restore","Basic monitoring","Built-in encryption for data in transit and at rest","Vector search","Hybrid search","Full text search"],"description":"Usage-based pricing for variable workloads with automatic scaling","contactSales":false},{"free":false,"name":"Dedicated","summary":"From $197/month base, plus $0.126/GB storage, dedicated infrastructure","features":["99.95% uptime SLA","SSO (SAML 2.0)","Granular RBAC","Multi-replica and elastic scaling","Global cluster with disaster recovery","Advanced security: CMEK and full-path in-transit encryption","HIPAA-eligible","Audit logs","Cross-region backup","Continuous data protection","All search types","MFA","API key management","Fine-grained metrics with real-time monitoring"],"commitment":"monthly","components":[{"kind":"fixed","amount":197,"period":"month","currency":"USD"},{"per":{"qty":1,"unit":"GB"},"kind":"metered","amount":0.126,"currency":"USD"}],"description":"Reserved, isolated environments for production workloads with guaranteed performance","contactSales":false},{"free":false,"name":"BYOC","description":"Bring Your Own Cloud deployment with custom infrastructure and compliance requirements","contactSales":true}],"summary":"Free tier with 5 GB storage. Serverless pricing from $0/month pay-per-query. Dedicated clusters from $197/month. Annual commitments available.","currency":"USD","freeTier":true,"sourceUrl":"https://zilliz.com/pricing","retrievedAt":"2026-09-18T12:32:51.755Z","freeTrialDays":30,"startingPrice":{"amount":197,"period":"month","currency":"USD"},"billingPeriods":["month","year"]}` |
| pricing.free_tier | yes | yes |
| pricing.model | freemium | freemium |
| pricing.price_level | mid | high |
| pricing.starting_price | `{"amount":20,"currency":"USD"}` | `{"amount":197,"currency":"USD"}` |
| pricing.transparent | yes | yes |
| reliability.sla_pct | 99.95 | 99.95 |
| reliability.status_page | yes | yes |
| security.certifications | `[{"name":"SOC 2 Type II","level":"Type II","status":"active"}]` | `[{"name":"SOC 2 Type II","level":"Type II","status":"active"},{"name":"ISO/IEC 27001","status":"active"}]` |
| security.gdpr | yes | yes |
| security.hipaa | yes | yes |
| security.iso27001 | yes | yes |
| security.soc2 | yes | yes |
| security.trust_center | https://www.pinecone.io/security/ | https://zilliz.com/trust-center |

## Capabilities (Vector Databases)

| Capability | Pinecone | Zilliz Cloud |
|---|:--:|:--:|
| **Deployment** |  |  |
| Deployment | Managed | Managed |
| Serverless / consumption pricing | ✓ | ✓ |
| **Index** |  |  |
| ANN index (HNSW / IVF / DiskANN / ScaNN / flat) | HNSW, DiskANN | HNSW, IVF, FLAT (brute-force), SCANN, DiskANN |
| Distance metrics (cosine / dot / Euclidean) | cosine | cosine, Euclidean |
| **Query** |  |  |
| Metadata filtering | Post-filter | Post-filter |
| Hybrid search (dense + sparse fusion) | ✓ | ✓ |
| Built-in BM25 / lexical | ✓ | ✓ |
| **Storage** |  |  |
| Quantization | - | - |
| On-disk vs in-memory | Tiered | Tiered |
| **Scale** |  |  |
| Multi-tenancy (namespaces / collections / tenants) | ✓ | ✓ |
| Horizontal scale | Sharded / distributed | Sharded / distributed |
| **Consistency** |  |  |
| Consistency | Eventual | - |
| **Licensing** |  |  |
| Licence class | Proprietary | Proprietary |
| **Classification** |  |  |
| Purpose-built vs feature-of-parent | Dedicated DBMS | Dedicated DBMS |

*Source: vioscaleAI. Generated 2026-09-21T01:31:44.532Z. "-" = undocumented, not absent.*