Vector Databases & RAG InfrafreemiumNew

Pinecone

Fully managed vector database with a free Starter plan

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What Pinecone does

  • Fully managed vector database with a free Starter plan
  • Starter includes about 2 GB storage and monthly read/write units
  • Serverless indexes with integrated inference

Pinecone — straight answers

What is Pinecone?

Pinecone is listed under Vector Databases & RAG Infra, in the Code & Development category on Flocci AI Tools. Fully managed vector database with a free Starter plan. It is freemium — a usable free tier with paid plans above it, and it lives at pinecone.io.

Is Pinecone free?

Pinecone is freemium: there is a free tier you can work in and paid plans above it. It is one of 404 freemium tools in the catalog, all labelled the same way so you are never surprised by a paywall.

What can Pinecone do?

Pinecone does 3 things the catalog singles out: Fully managed vector database with a free starter plan; starter includes about 2 gb storage and monthly read/write units; serverless indexes with integrated inference.

What is the best free alternative to Pinecone?

LanceDB is the closest free alternative: it sits in the same Vector Databases & RAG Infra sub-category and is free. Microsoft GraphRAG, Milvus and pgvector also start free. The full list is on the alternatives page.

See the full list →

Pinecone alternatives

Compare all alternatives →

Qdrant

Vector Databases & RAG Infra
freemium
  • Open-source Rust-based vector database, self-hostable for free with no scale limit
  • Managed free tier cluster (0.5 vCPU/1GB RAM/4GB disk) for prototyping RAG apps with no card required for OSS use
  • Hybrid Cloud option to run managed clusters on your own infrastructure for compliance-sensitive RAG
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Weaviate

Vector Databases & RAG Infra
freemium
  • Free managed cloud plan (100k objects, 1GB memory, 10GB disk) to explore without self-hosting
  • Open-source core project can be self-hosted for free indefinitely, same engine as the managed cloud
  • Built-in hybrid (vector + keyword) search and native embedding/query-agent integrations
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Chroma

Vector Databases & RAG Infra
freemium
  • Fully open-source embedded/self-hosted vector store, the default choice bundled into countless RAG tutorials and frameworks
  • Chroma Cloud managed tier starts with free usage credits, no subscription
  • Simple Python/JS-native API designed to be the easiest on-ramp to RAG for developers
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Microsoft GraphRAG

Vector Databases & RAG Infra
freeNew
  • Builds knowledge graphs and community summaries from private text for RAG
  • Answers global, dataset-wide questions that vector RAG misses
  • Open-source Python library and CLI
  • Works with OpenAI-compatible and local models
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Milvus

Vector Databases & RAG Infra
freeNew
  • Cloud-native Apache-2.0 vector database for large-scale similarity search
  • Runs from a single-file Lite mode to distributed clusters
  • Managed Zilliz Cloud has a separate free tier
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LanceDB

Vector Databases & RAG Infra
freeNew
  • Embedded, developer-friendly retrieval library for multimodal AI
  • Columnar Lance format with vector and full-text search
  • Apache-2.0
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Head-to-head comparisons

Pinecone vs QdrantPinecone vs WeaviatePinecone vs ChromaPinecone vs Microsoft GraphRAGPinecone vs MilvusPinecone vs LanceDB