Our take
Pick Pinecone if rAG / search teams who will stay on Starter at $0 (2 GB, 1M read units) while they open a first Assistant, then buy Builder at $20 / month flat or Standard at $50 / month minimum when they need multi-cloud and pay-as-you-go. Pick Qdrant if rAG teams who will run OSS or Cloud Free for $0 (1 GB / 4 GB, ~1M × 768-d vectors) and only open Standard when they need dedicated RAM and a 99.5% SLA.
Best for
Pinecone Indexes plus an Assistant you start at $0
Qdrant Store and search embeddings you already made
Free plan
Pinecone No free plan
Qdrant $0 · you host Docker / Kubernetes / Edge
Lowest paid
Pinecone Builder $20
Qdrant Cloud Standard $85/mo
Next step up
Pinecone Support add-ons $29
Qdrant
Runs where
Pinecone Local or hosted
Qdrant
Watch out
Pinecone Starter is a usage cap, not unlimited vectors
Qdrant Free Cloud suspends after 1 idle week
Last checked
Pinecone 2026-10-23 · pinecone.io/pricing
Qdrant 2026-10-22 · qdrant.tech/pricing
rAG / search teams who will stay on Starter at $0 (2 GB, 1M read units) while they open a first Assistant, then buy Builder at $20 / month flat or Standard at $50 / month minimum when they need multi-cloud and pay-as-you-go.
Read the Pinecone pagerAG teams who will run OSS or Cloud Free for $0 (1 GB / 4 GB, ~1M × 768-d vectors) and only open Standard when they need dedicated RAM and a 99.5% SLA.
Read the Qdrant page
