Is Elastic Cloud or Pinecone cheaper?

Pinecone has the lower entry price — Elastic Cloud starts at $24/mo and Pinecone at $0/mo.

Does Elastic Cloud or Pinecone support HIPAA?

HIPAA support — Elastic Cloud: Yes; Pinecone: Yes. Confirm current scope with the vendor.

Elastic Cloud vs Pinecone

A sourced, side-by-side comparison for search api. Pinecone has the lower entry price. Every figure links to the vendor's own page and the date we captured it.

Pinecone has the lower entry price — Elastic Cloud starts at $24/mo, Pinecone at $0/mo. Free tier: Elastic Cloud No, Pinecone Yes. HIPAA: Elastic Cloud Yes, Pinecone Yes.

As of 2026-06-14 · figures link to their source below

Side by side

Elastic Cloud

$24/mo entry

Entry price$24/mo (Serverless (Search))

Free tierNo

HIPAA (BAA)Yes

SOC 2Yes

GDPRYes

Best forObservability, logging, and SIEM at enterprise scale

Pinecone

$0/mo entry

Entry price$0/mo (Starter)

Free tierYes

HIPAA (BAA)Yes

SOC 2Yes

GDPRYes

Best forRAG pipelines and AI agent memory stores

Sources — Elastic Cloud: elastic.co (verified 2026-06-14) · Pinecone: pinecone.io (verified 2026-06-14)

Key features

Elastic Cloud: Full-text and vector (ANN) search on a single distributed engine; ELSER and e5 semantic search models (Platinum+); ML anomaly detection and forecasting; SIEM and security analytics (EQL); Cross-cluster replication and searchable snapshots; 400+ data source integrations via Beats/Logstash; Serverless Search tier with per-VCU billing; FedRAMP High and Moderate authorization

Pinecone: Purpose-built serverless vector database; Hybrid search: dense vector + sparse keyword + metadata filtering; Proprietary Rust-based ANN algorithms for sub-100ms queries at billion scale; Storage-compute separation for automatic scaling; Reranking and embedding model integrations; RBAC and SAML SSO (Standard+); BYOC deployment into customer cloud; MCP server for AI agent integration

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