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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
88
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (5th), Search as a Service (1st)
Pinecone
Ranking in Vector Databases
5th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
AI Data Analysis (15th), AI Content Creation (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Vector Databases category, the mindshare of Elastic Search is 3.9%, down from 6.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pinecone is 7.1%, down from 8.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Vector Databases Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Elastic Search3.9%
Pinecone7.1%
Other89.0%
Vector Databases
 

Featured Reviews

Vaibhav Shukla - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at Agoda
Search performance has transformed large-scale intent discovery and hybrid query handling
While Elastic Search is a good product, I see areas for improvement, particularly regarding the misconception that any amount of data can simply be dumped into Elastic Search. When creating an index, careful consideration of data massaging is essential. Elastic Search stores mappings for various data types, which must remain below a certain threshold to maintain functionality. Users need to throttle the number of fields for searching to avoid overloading the system and ensure that the design of the document is efficient for the Elastic Search index. Additionally, I suggest utilizing ILM periodically throughout the year to manage data shuffling between clusters, preventing hotspots in the distribution of requests across nodes.
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

"I really like the visualization that you can do within it. That's really handy. Product-wise, it is a very good and stable product."
"Elasticsearch includes a graphical user interface (GUI) called Kibana. The GUI features are extremely beneficial to us."
"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 analytics with Elastic benefits us due to the huge traffic volume in our organization, which reaches up to 60,000 requests per second. With logs of approximately 25 GB per day, manually analyzing traffic behavior, payloads, headers, user agents, and other details is impractical."
"The solution is quite scalable and this is one of its advantages."
"On the subject of pricing, Elastic Search is very cost-efficient, as you can host it on-premises, which would incur zero cost, or take it as a SaaS-based service, where the expenses remain minimal."
"The solution has good security features. I have been happy with the dashboards and interface."
"The AI-based attribute tagging is a valuable feature."
"The initial installation and setup were straightforward."
"The semantic search capability is very good."
"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."
"The most valuable features of the solution are similarity search and maximal marginal relevance search for retrieval purposes."
"Pinecone's integration with AWS was seamless."
"The best thing about Pinecone is its private local host feature. It displays all the maintenance parameters and lets us view the data sent to the database. We can also see the status of the CD and which application it corresponds to."
"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."
"We chose Pinecone because it covers most of the use cases."
 

Cons

"Dashboards could be more flexible, and it would be nice to provide more drill-down capabilities."
"We have an issue with the volume of data that we can handle."
"They should improve its documentation. Their official documentation is not very informative. They can also improve their technical support. They don't help you much with the customized stuff. They also need to add more visuals. Currently, they have line charts, bar charts, and things like that, and they can add more types of visuals. They should also improve the alerts. They are not very simple to use and are a bit complex. They could add more options to the alerting system."
"While Elastic Search is a good product, I see areas for improvement, particularly regarding the misconception that any amount of data can simply be dumped into Elastic Search."
"I think the pricing of Elastic Search is really, really expensive."
"The reports could improve."
"Elastic Enterprise Search's tech support is good but it could be improved."
"More AI would be beneficial. I would also appreciate more simplicity in dashboards."
"The product fails to offer a serverless type of storage capacity."
"If Pinecone gave us RAG as a service, we'd be more than happy to use that."
"One major issue I have noticed with Pinecone is that it does not allow me to search based on metadata."
"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."
"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."
"I want to suggest that Pinecone requires a login and API key, but I would prefer not to have a login system and to use the environment directly."
"Pinecone can be made more budget-friendly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing structure depends on the scalability steps."
"The tool is not expensive. Its licensing costs are yearly."
"The solution is affordable."
"We are using the Community Edition because Elasticsearch's licensing model is not flexible or suitable for us. They ask for an annual subscription. We also got the development consultancy from Elasticsearch for 60 days or something like that, but they were just trying to do the same trick. That's why we didn't purchase it. We are just using the Community Edition."
"This is a free, open source software (FOSS) tool, which means no cost on the front-end. There are no free lunches in this world though. Technical skill to implement and support are costly on the back-end with ELK, whether you train/hire internally or go for premium services from Elastic."
"ELK has been considered as an alternative to Splunk to reduce licensing costs."
"There is a free version, and there is also a hosted version for which you have to pay. We're currently using the free version. If things go well, we might go for the paid version."
"An X-Pack license is more affordable than Splunk."
"I think Pinecone is cheaper to use than other options I've explored. However, I also remember that they offer a paid version."
"The solution is relatively cheaper than other vector DBs in the market."
"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."
"I have experience with the tool's free version."
report
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
14%
University
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business37
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise43
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
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.
881,455 professionals have used our research since 2012.