Vector databases · Comparison
Pinecone vs Weaviate Cloud vs Qdrant Cloud: Qdrant leads at 7.0; the same workload costs $102.51 to $255 a month
We read the pricing pages, calculators, trust, legal and documentation pages of three managed vector databases on the same day and scored them on the same six indicators. What 1M vectors and 1M queries a month cost, where backups, SSO and HIPAA sit, how you get your data out, and who should pick which.
On this page9 sections
On six indicators read from each vendor's public pages, Qdrant Cloud scores 7.0 out of 10, Pinecone 6.8 and Weaviate Cloud 6.2. For our reference scenario, 1M vectors of 1,536 dimensions with about 1 KB of metadata each, 1M queries and 1M upserts a month in one US region, Qdrant Cloud comes to $102.51 a month on three small nodes, Pinecone to $176.60 on Standard and Weaviate Cloud to $255 on Flex. Qdrant stands out for a free cluster that holds about 1M vectors, audit logs on its first paid plan and an Apache 2.0 engine you can take back in-house; Pinecone for putting hybrid search, backups, bulk import, SAML SSO and a HIPAA add-on on one self-serve plan; Weaviate for a bill that follows what you store rather than how often you query.
All three are in the Good band, and all three publish their unit prices, either on the pricing page or in an official calculator. The three bill in different units: Pinecone per read and write request, Weaviate per vector dimension stored, Qdrant per provisioned node-hour. The scores measure what the public pages commit to, not query speed, recall or uptime, and we did not sign up for any of them.
At a glance
| Pinecone | Weaviate Cloud | Qdrant Cloud | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What you pay for | A serverless index billed by read units, write units and storage | The open-source Weaviate engine, managed, billed by what you store | The open-source Qdrant engine on nodes you size |
| Free option | Starter (2 GB, AWS us-east-1); 21-day trial with $300 in credits | Free cluster, 100,000 objects, no card | Free cluster, about 1M 768-dimension vectors, no card |
| Reference scenario | $176.60 on Standard, computed | $255 on Flex, official calculator | $102.51 on Standard (3 nodes), official calculator |
| Plan minimum | $50 a month (Builder $20 flat, capped) | $45 a month | None |
| Hybrid search | Every plan | Every plan | Every plan |
| Backups | Standard and up, scheduled | Daily on Flex, kept 7 days | Standard and up, scheduled |
| Bulk import from object storage | Standard and up | Not documented | Not documented |
| SAML SSO | Standard | Premium, through sales | Premium, committed contract |
| HIPAA BAA | $190/mo add-on on Standard | Premium Dedicated, through sales | From Standard |
| Open-source engine | None | BSD-3-Clause | Apache 2.0 |
| Score (public pages) | 6.8 Good | 6.2 Good | 7.0 Good |
What the public pages show
Pinecone runs a serverless index you never size. Starter is free with 2 GB in AWS us-east-1, Builder is $20 a month with hard caps, and Standard bills usage above a $50 monthly minimum: a query costs 1 read unit per GB of the namespace it searches, and an upsert 1 write unit per KB, plus the record it replaces. Dense, sparse and full-text indexes and hosted embedding and reranking models are on every plan; Standard adds backups, bulk import, RBAC and SAML SSO.
Weaviate Cloud hosts the open-source Weaviate engine. It bills vector dimensions, disk and backups for the three replicas every paid cluster runs, and does not meter queries or writes. Flex is pay as you go from $45 a month; Premium is a prepaid contract through sales and holds SAML SSO, HIPAA, PrivateLink and customer-managed keys.
Qdrant Cloud runs the open-source Qdrant engine on clusters you size, billed per node-hour on AWS, GCP or Azure with no minimum. Its free cluster holds about 1M 768-dimension vectors. Standard adds scheduled backups, high availability and audit logs; Premium, a committed-spend contract, adds SAML SSO, private links and customer-managed keys.
Strengths and things to know
Pinecone. Strengths: hybrid and full-text search, backups, bulk import from S3, GCS or Azure Blob, RBAC and SAML SSO all on Standard; HIPAA as a published $190 add-on; SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001. Things to know: query cost grows with namespace size; Builder blocks usage at its caps rather than billing it; read and write prices are published as ranges by cloud and region; there is no open-source engine, and Pinecone Local reached end of life on Oct 7, 2026.
Weaviate Cloud. Strengths: an open-source engine behind the service; no per-query or per-write charge; three replicas and daily backups on every paid cluster; RBAC and multi-tenancy from the free tier up. Things to know: SAML SSO, HIPAA, private networking and customer-managed keys need Premium through sales; no plan lists an audit log; there is no import from object storage on Cloud; the pricing page leaves the time unit of its rates unstated, and the Premium minimum and a Plus plan differ between pages.
Qdrant Cloud. Strengths: no metering of queries or writes; an Apache 2.0 engine with snapshots you can download and restore yourself; the largest free cluster of the three; audit logs and scoped API keys on Standard. Things to know: you size the nodes; node prices sit in the calculator, and backup storage, extra disk and paid inference models have no published price; SAML SSO and private networking need Premium, whose minimum is not published; and the service agreement describes 12-month terms while the docs describe pay as you go.
Pricing reality
Reference scenario: 1M vectors of 1,536 dimensions (float32) with about 1 KB of filterable metadata each, about 7.14 KB a record and 7.14 GB in all; 1M top-10 queries and 1M single-record upserts that replace existing records, per month; one US region; no extra replicas or quantization beyond the plan default; on the cheapest self-serve paid plan that can hold the data and run that usage, at US list prices, with any plan minimum.
| Service | Plan | Monthly cost | Where the number comes from |
|---|---|---|---|
| Qdrant Cloud | Standard, 3 × mx1 nodes (4 GiB RAM each), AWS us-east-1 | $102.51 | Official calculator: $0.04668 an hour × 24 × 30.5 days × 3 nodes; queries and writes not billed |
| Pinecone | Standard, AWS us-east-1 | $176.60 | Computed: 7.14M read units × $16 per million = $114.24, plus 15M write units × $4 per million = $60, plus 7.14 GB × $0.33 = $2.36 |
| Weaviate Cloud | Flex | $255 | Official calculator, default Performance Optimized profile (HNSW, RQ-8 compression); dimensions, storage and backups for 3 replicas |
The three figures rest on different things. Pinecone's grows with every query and with namespace size: twice the data doubles the read units per query. Weaviate's and Qdrant's do not move with query volume, but grow with what you store and, for Qdrant, with the RAM the nodes need; Weaviate's calculator offers only compressed profiles, and its Cost Optimized profile (HFresh index) comes to $198. Pinecone's Builder plan ($20 flat) holds the data but blocks reads above 2M read units a month, so the scenario needs Standard.
How we scored them
Every product in this category is scored on the same six indicators, read from the vendor's own pricing pages and calculators, trust, legal and documentation pages, with fixed formulas. The overall score is the plain mean. Our methodology page explains how these scores work.
| Indicator | Pinecone | Weaviate Cloud | Qdrant Cloud |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing clarity | 4 | 4 | 3 |
| Free tier and trial | 6 | 7 | 9 |
| Price for the reference scenario | 5.8 | 5.0 | 6.9 |
| Search and data features | 10 | 8.5 | 8.5 |
| Compliance and deployment | 7.6 | 5.5 | 6.1 |
| Access control and exit | 7.5 | 7.1 | 8.6 |
| Overall | 6.8 | 6.2 | 7.0 |
Pricing clarity loses a point for each price a page leaves out or each pair of pages that disagree: six for Pinecone and Weaviate, seven for Qdrant. Qdrant's lead comes from its free cluster, its scenario price and its exit path (downloadable snapshots and an Apache 2.0 engine). Pinecone leads on features and compliance because backups, bulk import, SSO and HIPAA are all on Standard. Weaviate's lower score comes mostly from its scenario price and from compliance and deployment, where HIPAA, EU data residency, private networking and customer-managed keys go through sales.
Also in this category
Zilliz Cloud scores 7.2: managed Milvus with per-request serverless billing and no minimum, free import from object storage, SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001, and $113.28 a month for our scenario (computed) on Serverless in GCP us-west1, since Serverless has no AWS US region. turbopuffer scores 5.6: the lowest scenario cost here at $30 a month (computed), with every database feature from a $16 minimum, but no free tier, no automated backups and no open-source engine.
Who should choose which
- Choose Qdrant Cloud if you want a predictable bill set by the nodes you pick, a free cluster for about 1M vectors and the option to run the same Apache 2.0 engine yourself. Look elsewhere if you need SAML SSO or private networking without a committed contract, or would rather not size nodes.
- Choose Pinecone if you want no capacity planning and hybrid search, backups, bulk import, SAML SSO and HIPAA on one self-serve plan. Look elsewhere if you run many queries against one large namespace, or want an open-source fallback.
- Choose Weaviate Cloud if you want the managed form of an open-source engine and a bill that follows stored data rather than query volume, with three replicas included. Look elsewhere if you need SSO, HIPAA or an audit log without a sales contract, or bulk import from object storage.
Bottom line
From public pages alone, Qdrant Cloud edges out Pinecone, 7.0 to 6.8: Qdrant with the lower scenario cost, the larger free tier and an open-source way out; Pinecone with the most complete self-serve plan for search features, SSO and HIPAA. Weaviate Cloud, at 6.2, suits teams that want an open-source engine with no per-query charges and can take enterprise controls through a contract. For all three, price your own data size and query volume: the billing units differ enough that the order can change.
How we checked
We read the vendors' pricing pages and official calculators, plan comparisons, trust and security pages, legal terms and documentation on Oct 16, 2026, in US English and US dollars. The calculators fill in by script, so we read them in a browser; Qdrant's calculator picks a region from the visitor's location, so we set AWS us-east-1. Weaviate's and Qdrant's trust portals sit behind a bot check and did not load, so their SOC 2 claims come from the vendors' security pages and docs. We did not sign up, create a cluster or call an API. Facts the pages did not state, such as Qdrant's Premium minimum or Pinecone's per-region unit prices, are left out rather than guessed. Every figure is on the vendors' pages as of that date or, where marked, computed from them.
