Redis vs Pinecone
The real-time data platform — in-memory DB + cache + vector + search
vs. Managed vector database for AI — RAG, semantic search, recommendations
Pricing tiers
Redis
Free
30 MB. Single DB. Community support. AWS + GCP only.
Free
Redis OSS
BSD-licensed Redis (or source-available RSALv2 for newer). Self-host free.
$0 base (usage-based)
Essentials
From $5/mo. 250 MB to 100 GB. SAML SSO, RBAC, 99.99% uptime.
$5/mo
Pro
From $200/mo. Dedicated. Active-Active multi-region. Auto-tiering. 99.999% uptime.
$200/mo
Enterprise
Custom annual. SOC2, HIPAA, private deployment.
Custom
Pinecone
Starter (Free)
2 GB storage, 2M write units/mo, 1M read units/mo, up to 5 indexes. us-east-1 AWS only.
Free
Standard
$50/month minimum. Unlimited storage ($0.33/GB/mo) + writes ($4-4.50/M) + reads ($16-18/M). 20 indexes/project. Multi-region, multi-cloud.
$50/mo
HIPAA Add-on
$190/month add-on for HIPAA-eligible workloads.
$190/mo
Enterprise
$500/month minimum. Higher per-unit rates for dedicated infra + SLA. 200 indexes.
$500/mo
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing free on Redis vs starter on Pinecone.
| Metric | Redis | Pinecone |
|---|---|---|
| No overlapping quota metrics for these tiers. | ||
Features
Redis · 21 features
- Active-Active (CRDT) — Multi-region live-write replication.
- Auto-Tiering (Flex) — RAM + SSD tiered storage.
- Bitmaps + Bitfields — Compact boolean storage.
- Geo — Geospatial queries on lat/lon.
- Hashes — Field-value maps per key.
- HyperLogLog — Probabilistic cardinality.
- Lists — Linked list — push/pop/range.
- Lua Scripting — Server-side Lua + Functions.
- Pub/Sub — Channel-based messaging.
- RedisBloom — Bloom + Cuckoo + Count-Min Sketch + TopK.
- Redis Cluster — Horizontal sharding.
- RediSearch — Full-text + vector search engine.
- RedisInsight — Official GUI for Redis.
- RedisJSON — Native JSON document support.
- RedisTimeSeries — Time-series data type.
- Replication — Primary-replica async replication.
- Sets — Unique element sets.
- Sorted Sets (ZSet) — Score-ranked sets for leaderboards.
- Streams — Append-only log (Kafka-like).
- Strings — Primitive + binary-safe key-value.
- Transactions (MULTI/EXEC) — Atomic command batches.
Pinecone · 13 features
- Backups + PITR — Automated + manual backups.
- HIPAA Eligible — BAA available via add-on.
- Metadata Filtering — Filter vectors on metadata at query time.
- Monitoring — Metrics endpoint, export to Datadog/Prometheus.
- Namespaces — Multi-tenancy inside an index. Isolate vectors per customer.
- Pinecone Assistant — RAG-as-a-service: upload docs → get a ready chat endpoint.
- Pinecone Inference — Hosted embedding models (multilingual-e5, llama-text-embed-v2, etc.) inside data…
- Pod-Based Indexes — Dedicated pods (p1, s1, p2) for consistent low-latency workloads.
- Private Networking — AWS PrivateLink / VPC peering on Enterprise.
- RBAC — Per-project + per-API-key roles.
- Rerank (Cohere-backed) — Optional reranker on top of vector search.
- Serverless Indexes — Pay per use. No provisioning. Auto-scales.
- Sparse-Dense Vectors — Hybrid search: sparse (keyword) + dense (semantic) together.
Developer interfaces
| Kind | Redis | Pinecone |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | redis-cli | Pinecone CLI |
| SDK | go-redis, Jedis + Lettuce, node-redis, redis-py, redis-rs | go-pinecone, @pinecone-database/pinecone, pinecone-java-client, Pinecone.NET, pinecone (Python) |
| REST | Redis Cloud API | Data Plane (per-index), Pinecone Control Plane |
| MCP | — | Pinecone MCP |
| OTHER | RedisInsight GUI, RESP protocol | — |
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