Vector databases · Comparison

Pinecone vs Qdrant Cloud vs Weaviate Cloud

3 products compared side by side: what you pay for with each one first, then the five access facts, entry prices, recorded plan limits and the bottom line of each review. The evidence note under the table says how each product was checked.

Side by side

Pinecone vs Qdrant Cloud vs Weaviate Cloud: value, access facts, plan limits and bottom lines
Metric	Pinecone	Qdrant Cloud	Weaviate Cloud
What you're paying for	Saves engineering timeA serverless vector index with hybrid search, hosted models, backups and bulk import on a plan bought online, with no servers or replicas to size.	Worth the priceA managed open-source vector engine on nodes you size, with no per-query charge, an exit to self-hosted Qdrant and a free cluster for about 1M vectors.	Saves engineering timeThe open-source Weaviate engine run for you, with hybrid search, RBAC and multi-tenancy on every plan and no per-query or per-write charges.
Overall score	6.8	7.0Best	6.2
Free option	Free plan	Free plan	Free plan
Card to start	–Not measured	No card needed	No card needed
Getting access	Self-serve	Self-serve	Self-serve
Starter priceCheapest paid plan	$20/mo	$0.03566/node-hour	$45/mo minimum
Pricing model	Usage-based	Usage-based	Usage-based
Pricing page	Public prices	Public prices	Public prices
Billing unit	Read units, write units and GB-month of storage (serverless)	Provisioned nodes per hour (RAM, vCPU and disk), plus backup storage	Vector dimensions, GiB of storage and GiB of backup, for each of 3 replicas
Free option	Starter free tier (2 GB, AWS us-east-1); 21-day Standard trial with $300 in credits	Free 1 GB cluster (about 1M 768-dimension vectors), no card	Free cluster (100,000 objects), no card
Reference scenario (1M vectors, 1M queries)	$176.60/mo on Standard, computed	$102.51/mo on Standard (3 × mx1 nodes), official calculator	$255/mo on Flex, official calculator
Plan minimum	Builder $20 flat; Standard $50; Enterprise $500 a month	None on Standard; Premium minimum not published	Flex $45 a month; Premium through sales
Hybrid search	Every plan (dense, sparse and full-text indexes)	Every plan (dense plus sparse or BM25)	Every plan (BM25F plus vector, fused)
Backups	Standard and up, scheduled; $0.10 per GB-month	Standard and up, scheduled; collection snapshots on every plan	Daily on Flex, kept 7 days; restore through support
SOC 2 / ISO 27001	SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001:2022	SOC 2 Type II; ISO 27001 not stated	SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001:2022 (Markdown copy of the security page)
HIPAA BAA	Standard add-on $190/mo (6-month minimum); included on Enterprise	From Standard; BAA scope through Solutions Engineering	Premium Dedicated, through sales
EU regions	AWS Ireland and Frankfurt, GCP Netherlands, from Builder	AWS Frankfurt and Ireland, GCP Frankfurt, Azure Germany West Central	Region selection on Dedicated tiers; EU regions not named
SSO	SAML on Standard and Enterprise	Premium (console sign-in)	SAML on Premium
BYOC	Enterprise only, priced by sales	Hybrid Cloud and Private Cloud, through sales	Named on the security page; through sales
Data export	List and fetch API; no bulk export	Downloadable snapshots; scroll API	Cursor API; Parquet export not available on Cloud
Self-host path	None (Pinecone Local reached end of life on Oct 7, 2026)	Qdrant open source (Apache 2.0), restore from snapshot	Weaviate open source (BSD-3-Clause; some enterprise features licensed separately)
Bottom line	From its public pages, Pinecone puts the most on a self-serve plan here: hybrid search, backups, bulk import, SAML SSO and a HIPAA add-on all on Standard. Query cost grows with namespace size, and there is no open-source engine to fall back on.	From its public pages, Qdrant Cloud is managed open-source Qdrant billed by node-hour: no per-query charge, a large free cluster and a documented way back to self-hosting. Prices live in the calculator, and SSO and private networking need Premium.	From its public pages, Weaviate Cloud is the managed form of an open-source engine, billed by what you store with three replicas included. Enterprise controls sit on Premium through sales, and its rates are easiest to read through the calculator.

Evidence: Pinecone: facts checked 2026-10-16 from its public sign-up and pricing pages, no completed hands-on run; Qdrant Cloud: facts checked 2026-10-16 from its public sign-up and pricing pages, no completed hands-on run; Weaviate Cloud: facts checked 2026-10-16 from its public sign-up and pricing pages, no completed hands-on run. Prices in USD as listed, excluding tax. "–" means not recorded.

When to pick each

In the words of each review, with the date its facts were checked.

From our Pinecone review
Checked Oct 16, 2026
Pick Pinecone when
You want per-request billing with no nodes to size, and SAML SSO and a HIPAA add-on on a plan bought online.
Pick Qdrant Cloud when
You want an Apache 2.0 engine you can self-host, downloadable snapshots and a lower scenario cost ($102.51 a month).
From our Pinecone review
Checked Oct 16, 2026
Pick Pinecone when
You want bulk import from object storage, SAML SSO on a self-serve plan and a lower scenario cost ($176.60 against $255).
Pick Weaviate Cloud when
You want an open-source engine with the same API and a bill that does not grow with the number of queries.
From our Qdrant Cloud review
Checked Oct 16, 2026
Pick Qdrant Cloud when
You want node-based pricing with no per-query charge, an Apache 2.0 engine to fall back on and a lower scenario cost ($102.51 against $176.60).
Pick Pinecone when
You want SAML SSO, bulk import and a HIPAA add-on on a self-serve plan without sizing nodes.
From our Qdrant Cloud review
Checked Oct 16, 2026
Pick Qdrant Cloud when
You want audit logs on the first paid plan, downloadable snapshots and a lower scenario cost.
Pick Weaviate Cloud when
You want three replicas and backups included without sizing nodes, and ISO 27001.
From our Weaviate Cloud review
Checked Oct 16, 2026
Pick Weaviate Cloud when
You want an open-source engine with the same API and a bill that does not grow with query volume.
Pick Pinecone when
You want SAML SSO, bulk import from object storage and a HIPAA add-on on a plan bought online.
From our Weaviate Cloud review
Checked Oct 16, 2026
Pick Weaviate Cloud when
You want three replicas and backups included without sizing nodes, and ISO 27001.
Pick Qdrant Cloud when
You want an audit log on the first paid plan, downloadable snapshots and a lower scenario cost ($102.51 a month).

Entry price

Baseline: each product's cheapest paid plan, per month. Included usage differs, so read the line under each price.

PineconeLowest price
Builder
$20/mo
Flat fee, card billing only; usage beyond the caps is blocked, not billed
- Up to 10 GB storage, 5M write units and 2M read units a month
- 10 GB egress a month
- US, EU and Asia regions on AWS, GCP and Azure
- No backups, bulk import or RBAC
Qdrant Cloud
Standard
$0.03566/node-hour
Smallest node (2 GiB RAM, 0.5 vCPU, 8 GiB disk) in AWS us-east-1, about $26.10 a month; billed hourly, no minimum
- Nodes up to 256 GiB RAM and 64 vCPU
- Scheduled backups and high-availability setups
- Audit logs on Qdrant 1.17 and later
- AWS, GCP and Azure regions, EU included
Weaviate Cloud
Flex
$45/mo minimum
Pay as you go, monthly; from $0.00465 per 1M vector dimensions, $0.12 per GiB storage, $0.03036 per GiB backup
- Highly available clusters with replication
- Daily backups kept 7 days
- AWS or GCP, 7 regions
- Embeddings and Query Agent billed by usage

Prices as listed on each pricing page, in USD per month, excluding tax. Observed: Pinecone 2026-10-16, Qdrant Cloud 2026-10-16, Weaviate Cloud 2026-10-16.

Which one fits

If you need to start today without a sales call: Qdrant CloudSelf-serve sign-up, no card needed; the highest score of the 3 self-serve products here (7.0/10).
If you want to try it without entering a card: Qdrant CloudFree plan, no card needed, and the highest score of the 2 that skip the card (7.0/10).
Lowest starter price: Pinecone$20/mo for the Builder (flat, usage capped) plan. Qdrant Cloud lists no comparable paid price.
Highest overall score: Qdrant Cloud7.0/10 (Good). The review shows the score breakdown and the run behind it.

Picked by fixed rules from the table above, not by hand. How we score

Full reviews

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