Pinecone
7.8#3 in ai search and discovery platforms softwareFrom $20 a monthFree planWebAPILinuxmacOS
VisitPinecone vs Vespa
What both publish
| Fact | Pinecone | Vespa |
|---|---|---|
| API | Pinecone exposes REST and gRPC APIs for index administration and vector or document operations. | Applications can write data through HTTP/2, the Document API, or client tools, and can query through the Query API or custom request handlers. |
| Company legal name | The registered company name is Pinecone Systems, Inc. | The Norwegian business registry lists the company as VESPA.AI AS. |
| Documentation depth | Documentation includes conceptual guides, API references, SDK references, production checklists, import guidance and release notes. | Vespa documentation is organized into guides, tutorials, and reference material covering features and APIs. |
| Founded | 2019 | Gartner Peer Insights lists Vespa’s founding year as 2023. |
| Free plan | Yes | No |
| Headquarters | New York City, New York, United States | Vespa says its headquarters and engineering hub are in Trondheim, Norway. |
| Integrations | The partner ecosystem covers AI and machine-learning tools, search, cloud infrastructure and services integrations. | Vespa Cloud Enclave can run applications in customer accounts on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform. |
| Licence | The database platform is proprietary closed-source hosted software rather than an open-source product. | The Vespa repository states that its code is licensed under Apache 2.0. |
| Product | Pinecone describes its product as a fully managed vector database built for AI workloads. | Vespa is an AI search platform for online data-driven applications that combines retrieval, ranking, machine-learning inference, and real-time serving. |
| Search | The database supports dense, sparse, and full-text indexes, metadata filters, and namespaces. | Vespa supports vector and tensor search, positional text search, and search over structured data. |
| Security | Pinecone states that it encrypts data at rest and in transit using AES-256 and supports API key roles and RBAC. | The Vespa Cloud security guide describes data-plane requests protected with mutual TLS or, optionally, tokens, and says Vespa.ai has a SOC 2 attestation. |
Pinecone plans
- Builder$20 a month
- Standard$50 a month
- Enterprise$500 a month
- StarterFree
- Bring your own cloud (BYOC)Priced on request
Vespa plans
- Startup—
- Basic—
- Commercial—
- Enterprise—
- Enterprise *$0.18 a month
- Self ManagedPriced on request
Pick Pinecone if…
Pinecone suits teams building AI applications that need vector search, recommendations, or retrieval-augmented generation. Its web and API access, integrations, and multiple index types support varied implementation needs.
Pick Vespa if…
Vespa suits teams building AI applications that depend on search quality, ranking, fresh real-time data, or increasing retrieval traffic. It offers local, self-managed, and cloud deployment options.