Pinecone vs. OpenSearch
Compare Pinecone vs. OpenSearch by the following set of capabilities. We want you to choose the best database for you, even if it’s not us.
Pinecone vs. OpenSearch on Scalability
Yes, for the Serverless tier.
Yes, for the Serverless tier.
Yes.
Static sharding
Both
Pinecone
Pinecone supports the separation of compute and storage with their Serveless Tier.
For its POD-based clusters, Pinecone employs static sharding, which requires users to manually reshard data when scaling out the cluster.
OpenSearch
OpenSearch supports horizontal scaling, cluster management optimizations, and efficient shard allocation, making it suitable for handling large datasets and high query loads effectively.
Pinecone vs. OpenSearch on Functionality
Yes, with limited roles (only Org Owner & members are supported)
Available with the Pinecone S1 solution only
Yes. Sparse & Dense Vectors and Scalar filtering.
yes, vector search & keyword search & scalar filtered search
Yes. Users cans organizes data into namespaces and should aware that there are a limited number of namespaces available. Please consult with Pinecone on the limitations.
Closed source Index (proprietary)
ANN
Pinecone
RBAC is not enough for large organizations. Storage optimized (S1 ) has some performance challenges and can only get 10-50 QPS. The number of namespaces is limited and users should be careful when using metadata filtering as a way around this limitation as it will have a big impact on performance. Furthermore, data isolation is not available with this approach.
OpenSearch
OpenSearch supports:
- Vectors with up to 16,000 dimensions.
- Vector generation through external libraries or directly within OpenSearch.
- Both binary and dense vectors.
- Cosine Similarity, Inner Product, and L2 Distance (Euclidean).
- Integration with multiple engines, including NMSLIB, Faiss, and Lucene, to facilitate vector indexing and searching.
Pinecone vs. OpenSearch on Purpose-built
No. Vector search is an add-on to OpenSearch.
REST API, Python, Node.js
Java, Python, JavaScript, Go, and .Net
yes, with the collection backup & restore
Pinecone vs. OpenSearch: what’s right for me?
Pinecone
Pinecone is a managed, cloud-native vector database.
SaaS
OpenSearch
OpenSearch is an open-source software suite for search, analytics, security monitoring, and observability applications. It is not purpose-built for vector storage and search workloads but introduces a vector search plugin to provide this capability. Amazon OpenSearch Service is an AWS-managed service for OpenSearch.
Apache 2.0