Pinecone vs SurrealDB
Pinecone
pinecone.io
SurrealDB
surrealdb.comSide by side
| Figure | Pinecone | SurrealDB |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $20/mo | $0.19/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 5 | 3 |
| Spec score · Ai Databases | 8.9 (#3) | 8.1 (#13) |
| Spec score · Database Software | 8.5 (#30) | 8.1 (#46) |
| Founded | 2019 | 2021 |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Headquarters | New York City, New York, United States | London, England |
| Integrations | The partner ecosystem covers AI and machine-learning tools, search, cloud infrastructure and services integrations. | The platform provides MCP access and supports Agent Skills and AI frameworks. |
| Security controls | Official security materials state AES-256 encryption at rest, TLS 1.2 in transit, RBAC, API-key roles, audit logs, private endpoints and customer-managed keys. | Permissions operate at role, record, field, table, document, and hierarchical user levels. |
| Vector search | The service stores dense and sparse vectors and performs approximate nearest-neighbor similarity search. | Yes |
Plans
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.