Kinetica vs Pinecone
Kinetica
kinetica.com
Pinecone
pinecone.ioSide by side
| Figure | Kinetica | Pinecone |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $1.80/mo | $20/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 3 | 5 |
| Spec score · Ai Databases | 8.6 (#6) | 8.9 (#3) |
| Spec score · Database Software | 8.0 (#52) | 8.5 (#30) |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Headquarters | Vienna, Virginia, United States | New York City, New York, United States |
| Integrations | Kinetica's vector search page says embedding providers include OpenAI, NVIDIA NIM, and locally hosted models with a compatible inference endpoint. | The partner ecosystem covers AI and machine-learning tools, search, cloud infrastructure and services integrations. |
| Product | Kinetica describes itself as a distributed, hardware-accelerated database for real-time analytics, combining SQL, vector, graph, time-series, and spatial workloads in one engine. | Pinecone describes its product as a fully managed vector database built for AI workloads. |
| Security | Kinetica documents role-based permissions, granular access to tables and schemas, and row and column controls including masking and obfuscation. | Pinecone states that it encrypts data at rest and in transit using AES-256 and supports API key roles and RBAC. |
| Support | Kinetica offers Basic, Standard, and Premium support tiers; Premium includes off-hours and weekend coverage, follow-the-sun case management, and monthly incident reporting. | The Starter plan includes community support via Discord; paid plans include free support, and Enterprise includes Pro support. |
| Vector search | Kinetica says new embeddings are searchable as they land and that vector search can run with structured filters, joins, and time windows in one SQL statement. | The service stores dense and sparse vectors and performs approximate nearest-neighbor similarity search. |
Plans
Kinetica
- Dedicated Cloud$1.80 a month
- Developer EditionFree
- Enterprise EditionPriced 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
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.