Vector databases · Comparison

Pinecone vs Weaviate Cloud vs Zilliz 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 Weaviate Cloud vs Zilliz Cloud: value, access facts, plan limits and bottom lines
Metric	Pinecone	Weaviate Cloud	Zilliz 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.	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.	Saves engineering timeManaged Milvus with a serverless option billed per request, free bulk import from object storage, and the Apache 2.0 engine as a way out.
Overall score	6.8	6.2	7.2Best
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	$45/mo minimum	$4/million vCUs
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)	Vector dimensions, GiB of storage and GiB of backup, for each of 3 replicas	Serverless: vCUs and GB-month; Dedicated: CU-hours and GB-month
Free option	Starter free tier (2 GB, AWS us-east-1); 21-day Standard trial with $300 in credits	Free cluster (100,000 objects), no card	Free 5 GB cluster, no card; $100 trial credits for 30 days
Reference scenario (1M vectors, 1M queries)	$176.60/mo on Standard, computed	$255/mo on Flex, official calculator	$113.28/mo on Serverless (GCP us-west1), computed
Plan minimum	Builder $20 flat; Standard $50; Enterprise $500 a month	Flex $45 a month; Premium through sales	None
Hybrid search	Every plan (dense, sparse and full-text indexes)	Every plan (BM25F plus vector, fused)	Every plan (BM25 full-text plus vector)
Backups	Standard and up, scheduled; $0.10 per GB-month	Daily on Flex, kept 7 days; restore through support	Dedicated clusters; point-in-time recovery on Business Critical
SOC 2 / ISO 27001	SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001:2022	SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001:2022 (Markdown copy of the security page)	SOC 2 Type II (under NDA) and ISO 27001:2022
HIPAA BAA	Standard add-on $190/mo (6-month minimum); included on Enterprise	Premium Dedicated, through sales	Business Critical, through sales
EU regions	AWS Ireland and Frankfurt, GCP Netherlands, from Builder	Region selection on Dedicated tiers; EU regions not named	Serverless in AWS Frankfurt; Dedicated in AWS, GCP and Azure EU regions
SSO	SAML on Standard and Enterprise	SAML on Premium	SAML or OIDC on Enterprise and up
BYOC	Enterprise only, priced by sales	Named on the security page; through sales	Through sales, annual commitment
Data export	List and fetch API; no bulk export	Cursor API; Parquet export not available on Cloud	SDK iterators; backup file export in private preview
Self-host path	None (Pinecone Local reached end of life on Oct 7, 2026)	Weaviate open source (BSD-3-Clause; some enterprise features licensed separately)	Milvus (Apache 2.0), same SDKs
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, 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.	From its public pages, Zilliz Cloud is managed Milvus with per-request serverless billing, free bulk import, SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001, and an open-source exit. Serverless runs in two regions only, and several prices differ between its pages.

Evidence: Pinecone: 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; Zilliz 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 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 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 no per-request charges and three replicas on the first paid plan.
Pick Zilliz Cloud when
You want bulk import from object storage, and SAML SSO and an audit log on a plan bought online.
From our Zilliz Cloud review
Checked Oct 16, 2026
Pick Zilliz Cloud when
You want no monthly minimum, an open-source engine behind the service and a lower scenario cost ($113.28 against $176.60).
Pick Pinecone when
You want serverless in AWS us-east-1, backups on the serverless plan and a HIPAA add-on bought online.
From our Zilliz Cloud review
Checked Oct 16, 2026
Pick Zilliz Cloud when
You want bulk import from object storage and SSO without a sales contract.
Pick Weaviate Cloud when
You want no per-request billing and three replicas included on the first paid plan.

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
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
Zilliz Cloud
Standard (Serverless)
$4/million vCUs
Plus $0.30 per GB-month of storage; GCP us-west1 and AWS eu-central-1 only; no minimum
- Reads and writes billed in vCUs
- Import from object storage at no charge
- Organization and project RBAC, API keys
- No backups on Serverless clusters

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

Which one fits

If you need to start today without a sales call: Zilliz CloudSelf-serve sign-up, no card needed; the highest score of the 3 self-serve products here (7.2/10).
If you want to try it without entering a card: Zilliz CloudFree plan, no card needed, and the highest score of the 2 that skip the card (7.2/10).
Lowest starter price: Pinecone$20/mo for the Builder (flat, usage capped) plan. Zilliz Cloud lists no comparable paid price.
Highest overall score: Zilliz Cloud7.2/10 (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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