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Elastic Search vs Pinecone comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Elastic Search
Ranking in Vector Databases
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
87
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (6th), Search as a Service (1st)
Pinecone
Ranking in Vector Databases
6th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
AI Data Analysis (14th), AI Content Creation (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Vector Databases category, the mindshare of Elastic Search is 4.0%, down from 6.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pinecone is 7.3%, down from 8.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Vector Databases Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Elastic Search4.0%
Pinecone7.3%
Other88.7%
Vector Databases
 

Featured Reviews

MichaelSmith9 - PeerSpot reviewer
CTO at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
Unified search has powered feature‑driven research with minimal maintenance overhead
We haven't had the opportunity to use the hybrid search with Elastic Search yet. I think there's a place for it in our long-term solution, but we're not quite there yet. We haven't yet used any AI features built into Elastic Search. To do what we want to do with Elastic Search, the queries can get complex and require a fuller understanding of the DSL. Once we start to build that understanding, it's another muscle we have, so it's not a bad thing, but it just takes a while to get up and running with expertise for our engineers. It's not hard to learn how to use more complex things in Elastic Search; it's just a challenge we're going to face.
Pradeep Gudipati - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Technology Advisor at Kovaad technologies Pvt Ltd
Faced challenges with metadata filtering but have achieved reliable long-term memory for chat applications
We were looking at multiple options for a vector database, and we found Pinecone to be the easiest to integrate into our solution. Plus, it has a very generous free tier, which helps us as a startup. The best features Pinecone offers are quick setup and good indexing for us. The retrieval mechanisms are fast, and the integration with Python as with JavaScript and TypeScript libraries that Pinecone provides are very robust. Authentication is also very good. The namespaces feature allows us to break down or store data for each user separately, reducing interference and maintaining privacy as an important feature. Pinecone has positively impacted our organization by enhancing efficiency for the team, and the long-term effect has been that the chats have become much more personalized due to the memory added through a vector database. We are seeing that the trainees getting trained on the platform are more satisfied with the results or messages generated by AI.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The speed with which Elastic Search is able to search through all of the documents we place into it is quite remarkable, as we search through 65 billion documents in less than a second in most cases, on a constant consistent basis."
"The stability of Elasticsearch was very high, and I would rate it a ten."
"The security portion of Elasticsearch is particularly beneficial, allowing me to view and analyze security alerts."
"I have found the sort capability of Elastic very useful for allowing us to find the information we need very quickly."
"A nonstructured database that can manage large amounts of nonstructured data."
"Big businesses cannot survive without Elastic Search because it gives us very good visibility and handles our use cases very well."
"Elastic Search is very quick when handling a large volume of data."
"I would recommend Elastic Search to other people who want to have fast search in their applications."
"Pinecone has positively impacted our organization by enhancing efficiency for the team, and the long-term effect has been that the chats have become much more personalized due to the memory added through a vector database."
"The most valuable features of the solution are similarity search and maximal marginal relevance search for retrieval purposes."
"We chose Pinecone because it covers most of the use cases."
"The product's setup phase was easy."
"Pinecone has positively impacted our organization by enhancing efficiency for the team, and the long-term effect has been that the chats have become much more personalized due to the memory added through a vector database."
"Pinecone's integration with AWS was seamless."
"The semantic search capability is very good."
"Pinecone has positively impacted my organization by helping people in needle-in-a-haystack situations, as previously they had to grind through PDF documents, PowerPoint documents, and websites, but now with Pinecone, they can ask questions and receive references to documents along with the page numbers where that information exists, so they can use it as a reference or backtrack, especially for things such as FDA approvals where they can quote the exact page number from PDF documents, eliminating hallucination and providing real-time data that relies on an external vector database with enough guardrails to ensure it won't provide information not in the vector database, confining it to the information present in the indexes."
 

Cons

"The reports could improve."
"They could improve some of the platform's infrastructure management capabilities."
"To do what we want to do with Elastic Search, the queries can get complex and require a fuller understanding of the DSL."
"It would be useful to include an assistant into Kibana for recommendations, advice, tutorials, or things that can help improve my daily work with Elastic Search."
"The upgrade experience and inflexibility with fields keeps Elastic Search from being a perfect 10."
"Elastic Search could benefit from a more user-friendly onboarding process for beginners."
"There were also some difficult times with parallel and point-in-time interfaces, so better documentation could help, particularly more example-driven content."
"The metadata gets stored along with indexes and isn't queryable."
"For testing purposes, the product should offer support locally as it is one area where the tool has shortcomings."
"The tool does not confirm whether a file is deleted or not."
"Onboarding could be better and smoother."
"Pinecone is good as it is, but had it been on AWS infrastructure, we wouldn't experience some network lags because it's outside AWS."
"The product fails to offer a serverless type of storage capacity."
"One major issue I have noticed with Pinecone is that it does not allow me to search based on metadata."
"If Pinecone gave us RAG as a service, we'd be more than happy to use that."
"Pinecone can be made more budget-friendly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool is not expensive. Its licensing costs are yearly."
"The solution is free."
"We are using the free open-sourced version of this solution."
"​The pricing and license model are clear: node-based model."
"The pricing structure depends on the scalability steps."
"An X-Pack license is more affordable than Splunk."
"we are using a licensed version of the product."
"To access all the features available you require both the open source license and the production license."
"I have experience with the tool's free version."
"I think Pinecone is cheaper to use than other options I've explored. However, I also remember that they offer a paid version."
"Pinecone is not cheap; it's actually quite expensive. We find that using Pinecone can raise our budget significantly. On the other hand, using open-source options is more budget-friendly."
"The solution is relatively cheaper than other vector DBs in the market."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
University
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business37
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise42
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise3
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about ELK Elasticsearch?
Logsign provides us with the capability to execute multiple queries according to our requirements. The indexing is very high, making it effective for storing and retrieving logs. The real-time anal...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ELK Elasticsearch?
Elastic Search's pricing totally depends on the server. Managed services from AWS are used, and we have worked on a self-managed Elastic Search cluster. On the AWS side, it is very expensive becaus...
What needs improvement with ELK Elasticsearch?
To be honest, there is only one downside of Elastic Search that makes sense because we use a basic license, which is a free license. We do not have some features available because of the free licen...
What do you like most about Pinecone?
We chose Pinecone because it covers most of the use cases.
What needs improvement with Pinecone?
I give Pinecone a nine out of ten because I hope it provides an end-to-end agentic solution, but currently, it doesn't have those agentic capabilities, meaning I have to create a Streamlit applicat...
What is your primary use case for Pinecone?
My main use case for Pinecone is creating vector indexes for GenAI applications. A specific example of how I use Pinecone in one of my projects is utilizing a RAG pipeline where I take text from PD...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Elastic Enterprise Search, Swiftype, Elastic Cloud
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

T-Mobile, Adobe, Booking.com, BMW, Telegraph Media Group, Cisco, Karbon, Deezer, NORBr, Labelbox, Fingerprint, Relativity, NHS Hospital, Met Office, Proximus, Go1, Mentat, Bluestone Analytics, Humanz, Hutch, Auchan, Sitecore, Linklaters, Socren, Infotrack, Pfizer, Engadget, Airbus, Grab, Vimeo, Ticketmaster, Asana, Twilio, Blizzard, Comcast, RWE and many others.
1. Airbnb 2. DoorDash 3. Instacart 4. Lyft 5. Pinterest 6. Reddit 7. Slack 8. Snapchat 9. Spotify 10. TikTok 11. Twitter 12. Uber 13. Zoom 14. Adobe 15. Amazon 16. Apple 17. Facebook 18. Google 19. IBM 20. Microsoft 21. Netflix 22. Salesforce 23. Shopify 24. Square 25. Tesla 26. TikTok 27. Twitch 28. Uber Eats 29. WhatsApp 30. Yelp 31. Zillow 32. Zynga
Find out what your peers are saying about Elastic Search vs. Pinecone and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
880,844 professionals have used our research since 2012.