Elasticsearch vs Pinecone
Elasticsearch
elastic.coPinecone
pinecone.ioSide by side
| Figure | Elasticsearch | Pinecone |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $99/mo | $20/mo |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 8 | 5 |
| Spec score · Vector Databases | 8.5 (#4) | 8.9 (#2) |
| Spec score · Ai Databases | 8.4 (#7) | 8.9 (#3) |
| Spec score · Search Databases | 8.3 (#10) | 8.8 (#4) |
| Founded | 2012 | 2019 |
| Headquarters | Amsterdam, Netherlands, and Mountain View, California, United States | New York City, New York, United States |
| Integrations | Elastic describes 350+ integrations and supports ingestion through Elastic Agent, connectors, APIs, language clients, and Logstash. | The partner ecosystem covers AI and machine-learning tools, search, cloud infrastructure and services integrations. |
| Search | It supports full-text, semantic, and hybrid search with filters, ranking, and reranking. | The database supports dense, sparse, and full-text indexes, metadata filters, and namespaces. |
| Support | Elastic Cloud Hosted and Serverless offer four support tiers depending on subscription tier. | The Starter plan includes community support via Discord; paid plans include free support, and Enterprise includes Pro support. |
Plans
Elasticsearch
- BasicPriced on request
- Standard$99 a month
- Gold$114 a month
- Platinum$131 a month
- Enterprise$184 a month
- Elastic Cloud HostedPrice not published
- Elastic Cloud ServerlessPrice not published
- Self-managed ElasticsearchPriced on request
Pinecone
- Builder$20 a month
- Standard$50 a month
- Enterprise$500 a month
- StarterFree
- Bring your own cloud (BYOC)Priced on request
In their own words
Elasticsearch
Elasticsearch has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.
Pinecone
Pinecone is a fully managed vector database for AI workloads, available through web and API access. Its stated uses include semantic search, recommendations and retrieval-augmented generation. It supports dense, sparse and full-text indexes, metadata filters and namespaces; the maker says automatic indexing makes new writes searchable within seconds. Listed integrations include LangChain, LlamaIndex, OpenAI, Cohere, Databricks, Snowflake and Airbyte. The free Starter plan has limits including one project, two users, five indexes and 100 namespaces per index. Builder costs $20 a month. Standard is $50 a month minimum applied to usage, with usage above that minimum charged pay-as-you-go; Enterprise is $500 a month minimum on the same basis. Pinecone says it encrypts data at rest and in transit and supports API-key roles and RBAC. It lists SOC 2 Type II certification, HIPAA compliance with a BAA available on request, GDPR readiness and a 99.95% uptime SLA. Its TypeScript SDK is intended for server-side use because browser use can expose API keys.