Vector Database Comparison: Pinecone vs Weaviate vs Qdrant vs pgvector

Managed is faster to ship. Self-hosted is cheaper at scale and gives you compliance control.

The vector database landscape has four realistic choices for most teams. Here is the one-line version and then the detail.

	Managed (Pinecone, Weaviate Cloud)	Self-Hosted (Qdrant, Weaviate, pgvector)
Pinecone	Fastest to get running. Excellent performance. No self-host option. Pricing can be high.	—
Weaviate	Best hybrid search out of the box. Both managed cloud and self-hosted.	Self-hosted: Docker/K8s. Active community. Multi-tenant friendly.
Qdrant	Rust-based, very fast. Good filtering. Cloud or self-hosted.	Lightweight Docker deployment. Great for on-prem setups.
pgvector (Postgres)	Already in your Postgres. Zero new service. Good for under 5M vectors.	No extra infra if you are already on Postgres. Limited to ~10M vectors at scale.
Hybrid search	Pinecone: yes. Weaviate: best-in-class. Qdrant: yes.	pgvector: limited (requires FTS extension).
Cost model	Managed: monthly subscription or compute-units.	Self-hosted: infrastructure cost only.

Pick Managed (Pinecone, Weaviate Cloud) when

Use a managed service when: you want to move fast, do not have a DevOps team, or are under 10M vectors.

Pick Self-Hosted (Qdrant, Weaviate, pgvector) when

Use self-hosted when: compliance requires on-prem, you are at scale where managed costs are painful, or you need full control.

Bottom line

Start with pgvector if you are already on Postgres (free, zero new service). Migrate to Pinecone or Qdrant when you hit scale or need advanced filtering. Choose Weaviate when hybrid search quality is non-negotiable.

Need help picking — or stitching them together?

We do this for clients every week. Bring us the workflow, we'll bring the architecture.

Talk to us

Glossary