Pinecone

license

proprietary(SaaS)

source

closed

self-host

none(BYOC runs Pinecone-managed in customer VPC, not OSS)

managed

Pinecone-Cloud

Fully proprietary managed vector DB; no open source core (contrast Milvus/Qdrant which are OSI-licensed). BYOC is still closed-source software run in customer cloud.

• https://www.pinecone.io/pricing/ recorded 2026-06-04

  proprietary tiered SaaS pricing (Starter/Builder/Standard/Enterprise/BYOC); no OSS/self-host license

• https://docs.pinecone.io/guides/get-started/overview recorded 2026-06-04

  described as 'fully managed vector database', billions of items searched in ms