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Chroma vs Pinecone

Chroma or Pinecone? Their plans monthly and yearly, the capabilities their makers state, security and latest updates, side by side — read from the makers' own pages.

In short

  • Both: Choice of models, Self-hosted, API, Builds agents and workflows, Search over your data
  • Only Chroma states: Knows the whole codebase, Command line, Official SDKs
  • Only Pinecone states: Runs models for you

Chroma

Open-source infrastructure for storing, indexing, and searching data for AI applications.

Plans

Starter

Free

  • 10 databases
  • 10 team members
  • Community Slack

Team

  • $250 /month
  • 100 databases
  • 30 team members
  • Slack support
  • SOC II
  • Volume-based discounts

Enterprise

Price on request

  • Unlimited databases
  • Unlimited team members
  • Dedicated support
  • Single tenant clusters
  • BYOC clusters
  • SLAs

Prices checked 2026-09-25 on the maker’s page.

Capabilities

  • Knows the whole codebase — “Index codebases to power coding agents using AST-aware chunking.” source
  • Command line — “Command-line tools for development” source
  • Choice of models — “Use any embedding model. OpenAI, Cohere, Hugging Face, sentence-transformers, and more.” source
  • Self-hosted — “Run it locally, self-host, or use Chroma Cloud for a managed, serverless experience.” source
  • API — “Schema() and Search() APIs” source
  • Official SDKs — “Create a self-hosted or cloud database and add data to it using the Chroma SDK.” source
  • Builds agents and workflows — “Build agents that iteratively search and refine results for complex queries.” source
  • Search over your data — “store embeddings with metadata, search with dense and sparse vectors, filter by metadata, and retrieve across text, images, and more.” source

Security

  • SOC 2 Type II — “Our security program has been independently assessed through a SOC 2 Type II examination, validating the design of our security controls.” source
  • SOC 2 — “Our security program has been independently assessed through a SOC 2 Type II examination, validating the design of our security controls.” source
About Chroma

Pinecone

Pinecone is a managed vector database for semantic search, recommendations, RAG, and AI agent retrieval.

Plans

Starter

Free

  • Pinecone Database On-Demand
  • Pinecone Inference
  • Pinecone Assistant
  • Dense, Sparse, and Full-Text Indexes
  • Console Metrics
  • Community Support via Discord

Builder

  • $20/month flat
  • Everything in Starter
  • Increased usage limits
  • Choose your cloud and region
  • Multiple projects and users
  • Prometheus and Datadog monitoring
  • Includes Free support

Standard

  • $50/month min. usage
  • Everything in Builder
  • Pay-as-you-go for Database On-Demand, Inference, and Assistant Usage
  • Choose your cloud and region
  • Dedicated Read Nodes (DRN)
  • Import from object storage
  • Backup and Restore

Enterprise

  • $500/month min. usage
  • Everything in Standard
  • 99.95% Uptime SLA
  • Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC)
  • Private Endpoints
  • Customer Managed Encryption Keys
  • Audit Logs

Bring your own cloud

Price on request

  • Pinecone in your cloud account
  • Zero-access operations – no SSH, VPN, or inbound access required
  • Outbound-only operations with an auditable trail
  • Pro support included

Prices checked 2026-09-24 on the maker’s page.

Capabilities

  • Choice of models — “All available models” source
  • Self-hosted — “Bring-your-own-cloud (BYOC) runs Pinecone in your cloud account and VPC.” source
  • API — “Install the plugin in your agent, or call the API directly.” source
  • Runs models for you — “Pinecone Inference” source
  • Builds agents and workflows — “Build production-grade agent-based apps” source
  • Search over your data — “Search, upsert, and rerank from the same index.” source

Security

  • SOC 2 Type II — “Pinecone is SOC2 Type II certified, HIPAA compliant (with BAA available upon request), and GDPR-ready.” source
  • SOC 2 — “Pinecone is SOC2 Type II certified, HIPAA compliant (with BAA available upon request), and GDPR-ready.” source
  • HIPAA — “Pinecone is SOC2 Type II certified, HIPAA compliant (with BAA available upon request), and GDPR-ready.” source
  • Not trained on your data — “Your data remains isolated and protected, and is only used for servicing API calls.” source

Latest updates

About Pinecone