Pinecone vs Upstash Vector
Pinecone
pinecone.ioUpstash Vector
upstash.comSide by side
| Figure | Pinecone | Upstash Vector |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $20/mo | $0.40/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 5 | 4 |
| Spec score · Vector Databases | 8.9 (#2) | 7.9 (#13) |
| Headquarters | New York City, New York, United States | California |
| Hybrid search | Pinecone supports combined dense semantic and sparse keyword retrieval in the same database. | Hybrid indexes combine dense semantic search and sparse exact-token search, then fuse the results. |
| Integrations | The partner ecosystem covers AI and machine-learning tools, search, cloud infrastructure and services integrations. | The documentation provides integrations for Vercel AI SDK, Flowise, LangChain, Langflow, LlamaIndex, and LlamaParse. |
| Support | The Starter plan includes community support via Discord; paid plans include free support, and Enterprise includes Pro support. | Enterprise features include professional support with a response-time SLA, a dedicated Slack channel, and a dedicated account manager. |
Plans
Pinecone
- Builder$20 a month
- Standard$50 a month
- Enterprise$500 a month
- StarterFree
- Bring your own cloud (BYOC)Priced on request
Upstash Vector
- FreeFree
- Pay as You Go$0.40 a month
- Fixed$60 a month
- EnterprisePriced 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.
Upstash Vector
Upstash Vector is a serverless cloud vector database for applications that need vector search, including NLP, RAG, recommendations, image recognition, clustering and classification. It uses DiskANN for approximate nearest-neighbor queries and also lists FreshDiskANN as an index type. Developers can use its REST API and SDKs, with first-class Python and TypeScript support and additional SDKs for Go and PHP. Similarity options include Euclidean distance, cosine similarity and dot product. Vectors can carry metadata, and query filters can restrict matches using metadata expressions. Hybrid indexes combine dense semantic search with sparse exact-token search and fuse the results. Documented integrations include Vercel AI SDK, Flowise, LangChain, Langflow, LlamaIndex and LlamaParse. The pricing page lists a default top-k limit of 1,000, up to 48 KB of metadata and 1 MB of data per vector. The Free plan allows 10K daily queries or updates and up to 1 GB of data and metadata. Pay as You Go costs $0.40 a month, billed per 100K requests, with separate storage and bandwidth terms. Region availability varies by plan.