by Qdrant Solutions GmbHVector databases
Managed clusters of the Apache 2.0 Qdrant engine, billed per node-hour on AWS, GCP or Azure, with a free 1 GB cluster and no minimum on Standard.
A 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.
Qdrant Cloud bills the nodes you provision by the hour, so a steady query and write load costs the same as an idle one; our scenario comes to $102.51 a month on three small nodes in AWS us-east-1. The engine is Apache 2.0, and the cloud FAQ answers "Can I move workloads back from Cloud to OSS later?" with yes, through snapshots. Hybrid search, payload filtering, multi-tenancy and scoped API keys are on every plan, and Standard adds backups, high availability and audit logs without a contract.
Against 3 other products we reviewed in Vector databases: what you pay for with each, the five access facts, the plan limits we recorded and each review's bottom line. The note under the table says how each one was checked.
| Metric | Qdrant Cloud | Zilliz Cloud | Pinecone | Weaviate Cloud |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What you're paying for | 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 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. | 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. |
| Overall score | 7.0 | 7.2Best | 6.8 | 6.2 |
| Free option | Free plan | Free plan | Free plan | Free plan |
| Card to start | No card needed | No card needed | –Not measured | No card needed |
| Getting access | Self-serve | Self-serve | Self-serve | Self-serve |
| Starter priceCheapest paid plan | $0.03566/node-hour | $4/million vCUs | $20/mo | $45/mo minimum |
| Pricing model | Usage-based | Usage-based | Usage-based | Usage-based |
| Pricing page | Public prices | Public prices | Public prices | Public prices |
| Billing unit | Provisioned nodes per hour (RAM, vCPU and disk), plus backup storage | Serverless: vCUs and GB-month; Dedicated: CU-hours and GB-month | Read units, write units and GB-month of storage (serverless) | Vector dimensions, GiB of storage and GiB of backup, for each of 3 replicas |
| Free option | Free 1 GB cluster (about 1M 768-dimension vectors), no card | Free 5 GB cluster, no card; $100 trial credits for 30 days | Starter free tier (2 GB, AWS us-east-1); 21-day Standard trial with $300 in credits | Free cluster (100,000 objects), no card |
| Reference scenario (1M vectors, 1M queries) | $102.51/mo on Standard (3 × mx1 nodes), official calculator | $113.28/mo on Serverless (GCP us-west1), computed | $176.60/mo on Standard, computed | $255/mo on Flex, official calculator |
| Plan minimum | None on Standard; Premium minimum not published | None | Builder $20 flat; Standard $50; Enterprise $500 a month | Flex $45 a month; Premium through sales |
| Hybrid search | Every plan (dense plus sparse or BM25) | Every plan (BM25 full-text plus vector) | Every plan (dense, sparse and full-text indexes) | Every plan (BM25F plus vector, fused) |
| Backups | Standard and up, scheduled; collection snapshots on every plan | Dedicated clusters; point-in-time recovery on Business Critical | Standard and up, scheduled; $0.10 per GB-month | Daily on Flex, kept 7 days; restore through support |
| SOC 2 / ISO 27001 | SOC 2 Type II; ISO 27001 not stated | SOC 2 Type II (under NDA) and ISO 27001:2022 | SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001:2022 | SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001:2022 (Markdown copy of the security page) |
| HIPAA BAA | From Standard; BAA scope through Solutions Engineering | Business Critical, through sales | Standard add-on $190/mo (6-month minimum); included on Enterprise | Premium Dedicated, through sales |
| EU regions | AWS Frankfurt and Ireland, GCP Frankfurt, Azure Germany West Central | Serverless in AWS Frankfurt; Dedicated in AWS, GCP and Azure EU regions | AWS Ireland and Frankfurt, GCP Netherlands, from Builder | Region selection on Dedicated tiers; EU regions not named |
| SSO | Premium (console sign-in) | SAML or OIDC on Enterprise and up | SAML on Standard and Enterprise | SAML on Premium |
| BYOC | Hybrid Cloud and Private Cloud, through sales | Through sales, annual commitment | Enterprise only, priced by sales | Named on the security page; through sales |
| Data export | Downloadable snapshots; scroll API | SDK iterators; backup file export in private preview | List and fetch API; no bulk export | Cursor API; Parquet export not available on Cloud |
| Self-host path | Qdrant open source (Apache 2.0), restore from snapshot | Milvus (Apache 2.0), same SDKs | None (Pinecone Local reached end of life on Oct 7, 2026) | Weaviate open source (BSD-3-Clause; some enterprise features licensed separately) |
| Bottom line | 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, 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. | 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. |
Evidence: Qdrant 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; 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. Prices in USD as listed, excluding tax. "–" means not recorded.
Review from public pages
Written from Qdrant Cloud's public pages (pricing, security or privacy, and docs) as read on Oct 16, 2026. We did not sign up, and no hands-on run is published yet.
We read Qdrant's pricing page and plan comparison, its pricing calculator, the cloud, security, inference, serverless, startup and brand pages, the Cloud docs on pricing and payments, Premium, backups, cluster configuration, encryption, RBAC, multitenancy, snapshots and migration, and the Cloud Service Agreement, DPA and SLA on Oct 16, 2026; we did not create a cluster. The trust center is behind a bot check and did not load for us.
The pricing page shows plans but no prices; node prices appear only in the calculator, which picked Singapore from our location until we set AWS us-east-1. For 1M vectors of 1,536 dimensions with replication factor 1 and no quantization it recommends three 4 GiB nodes at $0.04668 an hour each, $102.51 a month. Extra disk and AWS disk tiers sit in the calculator's data without unit labels, backup storage is billed at a price not shown, and paid inference models are priced only in the console.
Some pages disagree. The Cloud Service Agreement makes each order a 12-month term that renews unless notice is given 90 days ahead, while the docs describe Standard as pay as you go; SSO is "included" with Premium in the docs and a "Premium add-on" on the security page; and customer-managed keys cover AWS and GCP on the pricing page but also Azure in the docs. A serverless offering is announced as "Coming soon" with no pricing.
The same engine runs self-hosted, and the cloud FAQ says workloads can move back to open source by exporting a snapshot and restoring it.
vs Pinecone: Pinecone and turbopuffer have no self-hostable engine.
Standard bills provisioned nodes hourly, so 1M queries and 1M upserts a month add nothing beyond the nodes in our scenario.
vs Pinecone: Pinecone bills read units per GB of namespace on each query.
The free cluster holds about 1M 768-dimension vectors with hybrid search, filtering and multi-tenancy, and needs no card.
vs Weaviate Cloud: Weaviate Cloud’s free tier holds 100,000 objects; turbopuffer has no free tier.
Audit logs come with every paid cluster, and API keys can be read-only or limited to chosen collections, with an expiry.
vs Weaviate Cloud: Weaviate Cloud lists no audit log on any plan.
Standard runs on AWS, GCP and Azure, including Frankfurt and Ireland on AWS, Frankfurt on GCP and Germany West Central on Azure.
Standard bills the nodes you provision. When RAM or disk use stays above 80%, the account owner gets an email alert, and resizing needs your approval.
Workaround: The calculator and the capacity-planning guide estimate RAM and disk from vector count, dimensions, replication and quantization.
The pricing page has no unit prices; node prices are in the calculator, and backup storage, extra disk and paid inference models have no published price.
SAML SSO, private links, customer-managed keys and multi-AZ clusters are on Premium, a committed-spend contract whose minimum and rates are not published.
Free clusters are suspended after 1 week unused and deleted after 4 weeks if not reactivated.
Qdrant Cloud bills provisioned nodes by the hour, each a bundle of RAM, vCPU and disk: in AWS us-east-1 from $0.03566 an hour (2 GiB RAM) up to $4.56448 (256 GiB, 64 vCPU; GPU nodes cost more), plus backup storage and paid inference tokens. There is no minimum on Standard and no charge per query or write. For our scenario the calculator recommends 3 × mx1 nodes (4 GiB RAM, 0.5 vCPU, 16 GiB disk each): $0.04668 × 24 hours × 30.5 days × 3 = $102.51 a month, before backups. Costs rise with RAM: replicas, more vectors or no quantization need more or larger nodes. Premium rates and its minimum are set by contract; startups can get 20% off for 12 months.
Collection snapshots are tar archives you can download through the API, per node on multi-node clusters, and restore on self-hosted Qdrant (Apache 2.0) of the same or the next minor version; the scroll API pages through points. Managed backups stay in the cluster’s provider and region and cannot be downloaded. The service agreement allows deletion 30 days after an order expires, and orders renew for 12 months unless notice is given 90 days ahead.
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.
| Limit | As recorded |
|---|---|
| Billing unit | Provisioned nodes per hour (RAM, vCPU and disk), plus backup storage |
| Free option | Free 1 GB cluster (about 1M 768-dimension vectors), no card |
| Reference scenario (1M vectors, 1M queries) | $102.51/mo on Standard (3 × mx1 nodes), official calculator |
| Plan minimum | None on Standard; Premium minimum not published |
| Hybrid search | Every plan (dense plus sparse or BM25) |
| Backups | Standard and up, scheduled; collection snapshots on every plan |
| SOC 2 / ISO 27001 | SOC 2 Type II; ISO 27001 not stated |
| HIPAA BAA | From Standard; BAA scope through Solutions Engineering |
| EU regions | AWS Frankfurt and Ireland, GCP Frankfurt, Azure Germany West Central |
| SSO | Premium (console sign-in) |
| BYOC | Hybrid Cloud and Private Cloud, through sales |
| Data export | Downloadable snapshots; scroll API |
| Self-host path | Qdrant open source (Apache 2.0), restore from snapshot |
Read from the vendor's public pages on Oct 16, 2026. No hands-on run is published yet. How we check
We have not published a sign-up run for Qdrant Cloud yet. The access facts above were read from its sign-up and pricing pages on Oct 16, 2026.
We have not published API calls for Qdrant Cloud yet.
Qdrant Cloud lists 4 plans. The cheapest paid plan, Standard, smallest node (AWS us-east-1), costs $0.03566/node-hour.
Prices as listed, USD, excluding tax; observed 2026-10-16.
Source: qdrant.tech pricing page. Prices change; the observed date above is when our agent read them.
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.
