Pinecone
Managed vector DB. Cascading sparse + dense + rerank pipeline; pinecone-rerank-v0 .
Active · Verified 2026-10-26 · fresh as of 2026-10-26 · 56 cited facts, 5 with a third-party source · 1 recorded change · Suggest a correction
At a glance
- Type
- Managed vector DB + cascading retrieval vendor fix
- Tier
- T1
- Section
- Vector-database infrastructure
- Latest release
- not applicable — not OSS fix
- License
- not applicable — not OSS fix
- GitHub
- not applicable — no GitHub repo fix
- Pricing
- Starter free (2 GB, 2M WU/1M RU per mo); Builder $20/mo; Standard $50/mo minimum; Enterprise $500/mo minimum vendor fix
- Funding
- $138M total $750M val Series B · 2023-04 third-party fix
- Freshness
- 2026-10-26 fix
- Layer
- model-infra repo fix
- Licensing
- commercial vendor fix
- SDK languages
- go, java, python, rest, typescript vendor fix
- Protocols
- mcp-server vendor fix
- Compliance
- ccpa, gdpr, hipaa, iso27001, soc2-type2 vendor fix
When to use
Optimised for: low-latency similarity search + scale
Anti-fit: not for relational / graph-heavy queries (vector-first by design)
Pros & cons
Pros
Most established managed vector DB with the deepest enterprise sales motion; serverless pricing makes small deployments cheap.
Cons
Closed-source / cloud-only; pricing scales aggressively at high volume; less control than self-hosted alternatives.
Claims & capabilities
Production benchmarks: design platform sustains ~600 QPS on 135M vectors at P50 45ms / P99 96ms; scales to ~2,200 QPS at P50 60ms; e-commerce marketplace 5,700 QPS on 1.4B vectors at tens-of-ms median latency; Dedicated Read Nodes (DRN, December 2025 public preview) for predictable performance. Serverless architecture separates storage and stateless query compute
Technical surface
- API surface
- REST, gRPC, SDK: Python, Node.js, Java, Go
- Backend storage
- custom (proprietary serverless vector index, S3-backed)
- Deployment
- Managed-only — serverless SaaS on AWS/GCP/Azure; BYOC (GA 2026-09) runs in the customer's cloud account
- Embedding model
- BYO
- Multi-tenancy
- Logical resource isolation in serverless; CMEK additionally per-namespace key separation; project + organization RBAC
- MCP
- yes — official @pinecone-database/mcp (npm) plus per-Assistant remote MCP servers
- A2A
- no Google A2A (Agent2Agent) integration documented as of 2026-05.
- OpenTelemetry
- first-class — Prometheus + Datadog + OTel
Alternatives to Pinecone → live options ranked by shared design, licence, hosting and MCP support
Similar systems
Other vector-database infrastructure in the catalog, ranked by inbound references.
- Qdrant T1
Distribution-Based Score Fusion + RRF. Sparse vectors native; filtering via ANN graph modification.
- Chroma T1
Limited native hybrid (users build RRF custom). Fast Rust core (v2.5). Acquired by Replit (definitive agreement announced 2026-10-23); Chroma Cloud is winding down (writes disabled 2026-11-22, reads disabled 2026-12-22) while open-source ChromaDB continues under Apache-2.0.
- pgvector T1
Stores embeddings alongside relational + full-text data. HNSW + IVFFlat ANN indexes. Used as agent conversation memory via LangChain + MCP. Foundation of Supabase AI and many self-hosted RAG stacks.
- Weaviate T1
Hybrid Search 2.0 with learned ranking. BM25 + vector in unified index.
- Milvus T1
Multi-vector columns (10 simultaneous). Native hybrid search (v2.5). CAGRA + Vamana GPU/CPU (v2.6).
- MongoDB Atlas Vector Search T1
Agent memory store for both short-term (document) and long-term (vector). LangGraph checkpointer for stateful agents. Vector search extended to Community Edition (Sept 2025).
Sources (55 cited facts, 5 third-party)
Each fact links to the page it came from; the badge says who published it (how to read sources).
- What it is Managed vector DB + cascading retrieval vendor
- What it does & what's distinct Managed vector DB. Cascading sparse + dense + rerank pipeline; pinecone-rerank-v0 . vendor
- Claims / benefits Production benchmarks: design platform sustains ~600 QPS on 135M vectors at P50 45ms / P… vendor
- Modalities text vendor
- Created 2022-01 third-party
- Mindshare 3 inbound 433 jobs 616 HN · 2 press third-party
- Funding $138M total $750M val Series B · 2023-04 third-party
- Customers / scale $27M ARR 51-200 ppl no data (customer page exists but no public named logos confirmed) third-party
- Pricing Starter free (2 GB, 2M WU/1M RU per mo); Builder $20/mo; Standard $50/mo minimum; Enterp… vendor
- Compliance SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA (BAA available), ISO 27001, GDPR-compliant vendor
- Data handling Never trains on customer data (data used only for API call servicing); BYOK supported (C… vendor
- Deployment Managed-only — serverless SaaS on AWS/GCP/Azure; BYOC (GA 2026-09) runs in the customer'… vendor
- HQ US vendor
- Founders / pedigree AWS / True Ventures-backed; founder Edo Liberty (Yale CS PhD; ex-head of Yahoo Research … third-party
- Memory volume / scale no scale claim (serverless) vendor
- Performance p95 query latency <50ms at 100M-vector scale; ANN-Benchmarks-equivalent recall@10 >0.95 … vendor
- API surface REST, gRPC, SDK: Python, Node.js, Java, Go vendor
- Latency p50/p99 p50 query <100ms (vendor-stated for serverless) vendor
- Backend storage custom (proprietary serverless vector index, S3-backed) vendor
- Multi-tenancy Logical resource isolation in serverless; CMEK additionally per-namespace key separation… vendor
- Encryption AES-256 at rest, TLS 1.2 in transit; CMEK via cloud KMS; SOC 2 Type II 2025 (zero deviat… vendor
- SSO / RBAC SSO + RBAC vendor
- Embedding model BYO vendor
- Consistency eventual vendor
- Versioning none vendor
- Tombstoning hard-delete supported vendor
- Schema evolution schema with migration vendor
- Namespace primitives per-tenant vendor
- Contradiction handling always overwrite (last-write-wins) vendor
- Forgetting policy user-controlled forget vendor
- MCP support yes — official @pinecone-database/mcp (npm) plus per-Assistant remote MCP servers vendor
- OTel first-class — Prometheus + Datadog + OTel vendor
- Import / export Parquet bulk import/export; JSON via REST vendor
- Runtimes Python, Node.js/TypeScript, Java, Go vendor
- Validated verticals RAG developers, agent builders (broad horizontal); financial-services, healthcare, legal… vendor
- Time to running <10min (managed cloud) to <1hr (self-host Docker) vendor
- Anti-fit not for relational / graph-heavy queries (vector-first by design) vendor
- Optimised for low-latency similarity search + scale vendor
- Adjacent infrastructure BYO embedding model + LLM; this IS the vector store vendor
- Pros Most established managed vector DB with the deepest enterprise sales motion; serverless … vendor
- Cons Closed-source / cloud-only; pricing scales aggressively at high volume; less control tha… vendor
- Project & sources pinecone.io docs vendor
- cost-input-usd-per-mtok 0 vendor
- cost-output-usd-per-mtok 0 vendor
- cost-tier free vendor
- cost-pricing-model free-tier vendor
- cost-last-verified 2026-06-29 vendor
- architecture-deployment-locus cloud vendor
- licensing-bucket commercial vendor
- positioning-platform-vs-product platform vendor
- taxonomy-three-layer-rollup model-infra repo
- compliance-certifications ccpa,gdpr,hipaa,iso27001,soc2-type2 vendor
- sdk-languages go,java,python,rest,typescript vendor
- protocol-support mcp-server vendor
- maturity ga registry
What changed
Changes to this record's lifecycle, licence, release, pricing and hosting facts, from the catalog's git history. Subscribe (Atom)
- 2026-10-26
- Pricing “Free + paid” → “Starter free (2 GB, 2M WU/1M RU per mo); Builder $20/mo; Standard $50/mo minimum; Enterprise $500/mo minimum” source
- Deployment “Hybrid” → “Managed-only — serverless SaaS on AWS/GCP/Azure; BYOC (GA 2026-09) runs in the customer's cloud account” source
- MCP support “via official adapter — Pinecone MCP server” → “yes — official @pinecone-database/mcp (npm) plus per-Assistant remote MCP servers” source
Related systems
References (16)
- AWS SageMaker integrates with — Pinecone's integrations directory has a AWS SageMaker integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Claude Code (Anthropic) integrates with — Pinecone's integrations directory has a Claude Code (Anthropic) integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Cohere Embed integrates with — Pinecone's integrations directory has a Cohere Embed integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Cursor (IDE) integrates with — Pinecone's integrations directory has a Cursor (IDE) integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Flowise Memory integrates with — Pinecone's integrations directory has a Flowise Memory integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Genkit integrates with — Pinecone's integrations directory has a Genkit integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Haystack (framework) integrates with — Pinecone's integrations directory has a Haystack (framework) integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Jina AI Embeddings integrates with — Pinecone's integrations directory has a Jina AI Embeddings integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- LangChain (framework) integrates with — Pinecone's integrations directory has a LangChain (framework) integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- LlamaIndex (framework) integrates with — Pinecone's integrations directory has a LlamaIndex (framework) integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- n8n (AI agent flows) integrates with — Pinecone's integrations directory has a n8n (AI agent flows) integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- OpenAI Codex CLI integrates with — Pinecone's integrations directory has a OpenAI Codex CLI integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- OpenAI Embeddings integrates with — Pinecone's integrations directory has a OpenAI Embeddings integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- OpenLLMetry (Traceloop) integrates with — Pinecone's integrations directory has a OpenLLMetry (Traceloop) integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- TruLens integrates with — Pinecone's integrations directory has a TruLens integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Voyage AI (MongoDB) integrates with — Pinecone's integrations directory has a Voyage AI (MongoDB) integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
Referenced by (16)
- Agno (Phidata) Memory integrates with — Single-line integrations with LanceDB, Pinecone, Weaviate, Qdrant.
- Bifrost (Maxim AI) integrates with — Bifrost docs have a Pinecone vector-database integration page for semantic caching. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Cohere Embed integrates with — Cohere docs "Integrating Embedding Models with Other Tools": Pinecone and Cohere guide. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Google Agent Development Kit (ADK) integrates with — ADK integrations catalog has a "Pinecone MCP tool for ADK" page (Store data, perform semantic search, and rerank results). (verified 2026-10-29)
- Haystack (framework) integrates with — Haystack integrations directory has a Pinecone integration page ("Use a Pinecone database with Haystack"). (verified 2026-10-29)
- LangChain (framework) integrates with — LangChain docs have a Pinecone integration provider page (Managed vector database for ML applications). (verified 2026-10-29)
- Langflow integrates with — Langflow components bundle: Pinecone vector store component. (verified 2026-10-29)
- LlamaIndex (framework) integrates with — LlamaIndex has an official vector store integration package llama-index-vector-stores-pinecone in its repo. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Mastra integrates with — Mastra repo ships the @mastra/pinecone vector store package. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Mem0 integrates with — Mem0 docs have a Pinecone vector store page for Mem0 open source. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Microsoft Semantic Kernel integrates with — Semantic Kernel docs list an out-of-the-box Pinecone vector store connector. (verified 2026-10-29)
- n8n (AI agent flows) integrates with — n8n built-in AI cluster node: Pinecone Vector Store node. (verified 2026-10-29)
- n8n AI Agent Memory integrates with — vector store nodes (Qdrant, Pinecone, MongoDB Atlas) for semantic recall
- OpenAI Agents SDK Memory builds on — Long-term tier typically backed by external vector DBs (Pinecone, etc.).
- OpenLLMetry (Traceloop) integrates with — OpenLLMetry's What's Supported page lists Pinecone as instrumented out of the box. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Phidata (now Agno) integrates with — Agno ships a pineconedb vector DB integration module (agno.vectordb.pineconedb). (verified 2026-10-29)