

What is Pinecone?
Pinecone is a vector database that powers AI applications with semantic search and knowledge retrieval capabilities. It stores vector embeddings from language models, performs similarity searches at scale, and integrates with frameworks like LangChain to help developers and data scientists build applications that understand meaning beyond exact keyword matches. With Pinecone, machine learning engineers can create more accurate AI chatbots, knowledge bases, and search systems.
What sets Pinecone apart?
Pinecone distinguishes itself with a serverless architecture that separates storage, reads, and writes to manage scaling without operational overhead. This distributed approach helps data scientists and ML engineers maintain sub-second query speeds even when working with billions of vectors across multiple data centers. Pinecone supports multi-cloud deployment across AWS, GCP, and Azure, giving organizations flexibility to align with existing infrastructure while maintaining consistent performance.
Pinecone Use Cases
- Vector similarity search
- RAG knowledge bases
- Recommendation systems
- Semantic document retrieval
- AI chatbot memory
Who uses Pinecone?
Features and Benefits
- Store and query vector embeddings to enable semantic search and retrieval augmented generation for AI applications.
Vector Database
- Automatically scales resources based on usage patterns without requiring infrastructure management.
Serverless Architecture
- Works with embeddings from any model or provider, including hosted options through the Inference API.
AI Model Integration
- Combines vector similarity with metadata filtering to deliver more relevant search results.
Hybrid Search
- Provides data encryption, access controls, and compliance certifications for secure AI deployments.
Enterprise Security
Pinecone Pros and Cons
Extremely fast query and indexing performance even at large scale
Simple API integration and quick setup process
Highly reliable with minimal downtime
Serverless option offers cost-effective scaling
Excellent documentation and customer support
Expensive pricing for larger-scale production usage
Limited datacenter regions and hosting options
Lacks some advanced security features like MFA
Challenging metadata management and schema changes
No self-hosted or on-premises deployment option
Pricing
Free TrialServerless indexes
Inference
Assistant
Console Metrics
Community Support
Unlimited Serverless usage
Unlimited Inference and Assistant usage
Choose your cloud and region
Import from object storage
Multiple projects and users
RBAC
Backups
Prometheus metrics
Free support
Response SLAs available via Developer/Pro support add-on
Everything in Standard
99.95% Uptime SLA
Single sign-on
Private Link
Customer Managed Encryption Keys
Audit Logs
Pro support included