Weaviate

Weaviate is an open-source vector search engine developed by SeMI Technologies. A managed service was recently announced, named Weaviate Cloud Service.

Users of Weaviate like that it provides modules for transforming raw data into vector embeddings. This is useful if you do not have any other means of deploying and managing embedding models and are not using a third-party embedding service like OpenAI, Cohere, or Hugging Face.

The “all-in-one” packaging makes Weaviate an option to consider for smaller projects that lack data engineering or ML engineering support.

A common complaint from users who tried Weaviate (both the self-hosted library and Weaviate Cloud Service) is the difficulty in getting it to run and scale reliably. For this reason, it may take considerable time and engineering effort to make Weaviate-based applications production-ready.

Pinecone

Pinecone is a production-ready, fully managed vector database that makes it easy to build high-performance vector search applications. Users love the developer experience and not having to set up and manage infrastructure.

Pinecone does not host or run embeddings models. You need to run your embedding models and perform your transformations outside of Pinecone, and only then you can upload your embeddings into Pinecone.

Pinecone is cost-effective and provides great performance at scale. However, customers say developer experience is the biggest reason they chose Pinecone. The simple API, web console, and documentation make it easy and quick to deploy and manage the vector database.