The Pinecone Alternative Built for Your Data Platform
Evaluating Pinecone? Worried about long-term cost, data ownership, or index size? LanceDB stores vectors in the open Lance format on your S3 or object storage. Your data stays portable.
Tomorrow's AI is being built on LanceDB today
Why teams switch
Compute-storage separation
Storage on your object storage (S3/GCS). Compute scales independently. No capacity units.
One table, not six systems
Embeddings and metadata in Lance tables on your storage. No double storage.
Schema evolution without rebuilds
Add embeddings without re-ingest. No big migration projects.
Full-text + hybrid search, native
Vector, full-text, and SQL queries in one system. Pinecone is vector-only.
Comparison
| Pinecone | LanceDB | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Capacity-based pricing. Storage in vendor environment. | Object storage in your account. Up to 100x savings. |
| Scale | Managed scale within capacity tiers. | 20 PB largest table. 20K+ QPS. Billions of vectors. |
| Search | Vector search only. No native full-text. | Native vector, full-text, and SQL hybrid search in one query. |
| Data model | Embeddings in Pinecone. Raw data elsewhere. | Raw data, embeddings, and features in one table. |
| Purpose | Managed vector search service. | Vector database that fits your data platform. |
| Best for | Simple managed vector search. | Data ownership and cost control at scale. |
The Power of the Lance Format
Vector Search
- Fast scans and random access from the same table — no tradeoff
- Zero-copy access for high throughput without serialization overhead
Multi-Modal
- Raw data, embeddings, and metadata in one table — not pointers to blob storage
- No separate metadata store to keep in sync
Enterprise-Grade Requirements
Security
Granular RBAC, SSO integration, and VPC deployment options.
Governance
Data versioning and time-travel capabilities for auditability.
Support
Dedicated technical account management and guaranteed SLAs.
Talk to Engineering
Or try LanceDB OSS — same code, scales to Cloud.