Pinecone

type: managed

freeTier: 2GB storage, 5 indexes, 1M vectors at 1536 dim

pricingNote: Standard tier from $25/month. Serverless billed per read/write/storage. Enterprise dedicated tier from ~$2k/month.

maxVectorsPaid: unlimited

license: Proprietary

notes: Most-deployed managed vector DB. Serverless tier removed instance sizing as a concern. Strong on metadata filtering + namespace multi-tenancy.


Turbopuffer

freeTier: 1k namespaces, 10M vectors

pricingNote: Pure usage-based: $0.30 per 1M reads, $0.10 per 1M writes, $0.20 per GB-month object storage. No fixed tier.

notes: 10-100x cheaper than Pinecone at scale by storing vectors on object storage (S3/GCS) and caching hot data in memory. Cold reads slower; warm reads competitive with in-memory dbs.


Qdrant Cloud

type: hybrid

hostingOptions: cloud self-host

freeTier: 1GB cluster, single node

pricingNote: Cluster pricing from $25/month for the smallest paid tier. Self-hosted Qdrant is free under Apache-2.0.

notes: Strong open-source story; Apache-2.0 with feature-parity between cloud and self-host. Native sparse vector support (not just bm25 hybrid). Rust core.


Weaviate Cloud

freeTier: 14-day sandbox

pricingNote: Standard tier from $25/month. Enterprise dedicated and serverless tiers available. Self-hosted Weaviate free under BSD-3.

notes: Schema-first; first-class hybrid search and built-in modules for embedding generation, reranking, and generative answers. The closest thing to a "RAG framework as a database."


Milvus / Zilliz Cloud

hostingOptions: cloud self-host embedded

freeTier: 5GB on Zilliz Cloud serverless

pricingNote: Zilliz Cloud serverless pure usage-based; dedicated clusters from ~$100/month. Milvus self-host free under Apache-2.0.

maxVectorsPaid: tens of billions

notes: Most battle-tested at very-large scale (10B+ vectors). GPU index option (CAGRA) for ultra-low-latency ANN. Embedded mode (Milvus Lite) for single-node test harnesses.


Chroma

freeTier: Cloud: $5 free credit. Self-host: free under Apache-2.0

pricingNote: Chroma Cloud usage-based: $2.50 per 1M writes, $0.075 per GB storage, $0.075 per 1M reads. Self-host or embedded is free.

notes: Developer-first ergonomics. Best embedded option for single-process Python/JS apps; the default in many LangChain/LlamaIndex tutorials. Hybrid search not native (rerank externally).


pgvector (Postgres)

type: oss

freeTier: Same as your Postgres host (Supabase free tier, Neon free tier, etc)

pricingNote: Pricing follows your Postgres host. Supabase Pro from $25/month, Neon from $19/month, AWS RDS varies.

maxVectorsPaid: limited by Postgres scaling

license: PostgreSQL

notes: Postgres extension. Best fit when your app already has Postgres and your vector workload is small to medium. Hybrid via tsvector + vector. HNSW + IVFFlat indexes.


LanceDB

freeTier: Cloud: 1 GB free. Self-host or embedded: free under Apache-2.0

pricingNote: LanceDB Cloud usage-based: $0.20 per GB-month storage, $0.30 per 1M reads. Embedded (in-process Rust + Python/JS bindings) free.

notes: Columnar Lance file format on object storage. Embedded mode rivals SQLite for ergonomics: zero-config, single binary. Strong analytics queries on the same table as vector search.


MongoDB Atlas Vector Search

freeTier: M0 cluster (512MB)

pricingNote: M10 cluster from $9/month with vector search included. Atlas Search billed by storage + queries on dedicated tiers.

notes: Best fit when MongoDB is already your operational database. Hybrid via Atlas Search ($search) + vector ($vectorSearch) in one aggregation pipeline.


Vespa Cloud

freeTier: $300 trial credit

pricingNote: Pure usage-based on Vespa Cloud (compute + storage). Self-hosted Vespa free under Apache-2.0.

notes: Yahoo-built; powers very-large-scale search and recommendation systems (10B+ docs). Steepest learning curve in the catalog but the strongest hybrid retrieval and ranking story.


Elasticsearch

freeTier: Elastic Cloud 14-day trial

pricingNote: Elastic Cloud Standard from ~$95/month. Self-hosted via Elastic License v2 (free for most uses).

license: Elastic License v2 / SSPL

released: 2022 (vector)

notes: Best fit when you already use Elastic for log/text search and want vector co-located. Native HNSW. Full BM25 + vector hybrid scoring with first-class RRF.


OpenSearch

freeTier: AWS OpenSearch Serverless: pay-as-you-go from ~$50/mo minimum

pricingNote: AWS OpenSearch Service: ~$0.14/hour for the smallest instance. AWS OpenSearch Serverless minimum ~$50/month. Self-host free under Apache-2.0.

notes: Apache-2.0 fork of Elasticsearch 7.10. AWS-native with serverless option. Best fit for AWS-heavy stacks that want hybrid search without licensing entanglements.