hi @othrif — it depends on what you want to do. Pinecone is a dedicated vector DB — built from the ground up for vec search. The vec DB for Opensearch is not and so has some limitations on performance. If you’re looking for large datasets (more than a few million) with fast response times (<100ms) you will need a dedicated vector DB.
Some quick comparisons that may be helpful:
- Pinecone can scale to billions of vectors thanks to approximate search algorithms, Opensearch uses exhaustive search — meaning they calculate the similarity between your query and every single indexed record — with this, you can reach a few million (if you’re lucky, and patient).
- Pinecone supports hybrid search, including native support for sparse vectors produced by models like SPLADE. Opensearch afaict does not have the same level of support for hybrid.
- Pinecone has near-instant index updates (p1 and s1 pods), you can write 1M records to the DB and query 0.05 secs later and retrieve those results. Opensearch cannot do this afaik.
I’m also aware of a few customers assessing whether to use Pinecone or Opensearch who found Pinecone to be a fair bit cheaper — but again, that may depend on your use-case and requirements.