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BigID Next vs Pinecone comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 22, 2026

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

BigID Next
Ranking in AI Data Analysis
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Data Loss Prevention (DLP) (7th), Data Governance (6th), Data Privacy Management Software (2nd), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (4th)
Pinecone
Ranking in AI Data Analysis
14th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Vector Databases (6th), AI Content Creation (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the AI Data Analysis category, the mindshare of BigID Next is 2.7%, down from 16.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pinecone is 0.6%, down from 6.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
AI Data Analysis Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
BigID2.7%
Pinecone0.6%
Other96.7%
AI Data Analysis
 

Featured Reviews

Aniruddha Nath - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Security Consultant at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
Data discovery has transformed compliance workflows and automation now speeds up requests and remediation
The best feature that BigID offers is data discovery and classification, which is the most powerful engine. It allows connecting to many different data sources, ranging from cloud to on-premises to structured to unstructured data. If there is no connector available, you can build your own classifiers as well. Regarding the custom classifier option, you can build custom classifiers using regular expressions, and I have done that if you know how to create regular expressions. Custom connectors are something you create to connect to a database where the connector is not available. BigID has positively impacted my organization as it's a very powerful tool, especially with the increasing regulatory compliances for different countries such as GDPR, CCPA, and India's recent DPDPA act. Having these tools in place greatly helps organizations avoid any penal charges for not being compliant with the regulatory compliances. For example, regarding compliance or reduced risks for my clients, the DSAR process I was talking about allows organizations to respond quickly to user data deletion requests under GDPR law, which traditionally has a 30-day or 60-day timeline. In larger organizations, when the number of requests is high, it becomes tedious. However, using DSAR automation with BigID, it's almost instantaneous; instead of 30 days, you can respond in just one day to what users have requested.
Pradeep Gudipati - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Technology Advisor at Kovaad technologies Pvt Ltd
Faced challenges with metadata filtering but have achieved reliable long-term memory for chat applications
We were looking at multiple options for a vector database, and we found Pinecone to be the easiest to integrate into our solution. Plus, it has a very generous free tier, which helps us as a startup. The best features Pinecone offers are quick setup and good indexing for us. The retrieval mechanisms are fast, and the integration with Python as with JavaScript and TypeScript libraries that Pinecone provides are very robust. Authentication is also very good. The namespaces feature allows us to break down or store data for each user separately, reducing interference and maintaining privacy as an important feature. Pinecone has positively impacted our organization by enhancing efficiency for the team, and the long-term effect has been that the chats have become much more personalized due to the memory added through a vector database. We are seeing that the trainees getting trained on the platform are more satisfied with the results or messages generated by AI.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"BigID's scanning feature is its most valuable component."
"The most valuable feature of BigID is its large number of classifiers, which allow us to scan for specific data such as SSN numbers."
"My experience with BigID has been very positive and memorable, as BigID is simple, straightforward, and reliable when it comes to data discovery and data scanning exercises."
"The most valuable feature of BigID is its large number of classifiers, which allow us to scan for specific data such as SSN numbers."
"BigID offers different scan types for data discovery. The most powerful one is the full scan, which scans both data and metadata. However, the metadata scan is faster in comparison."
"BigID has one of the best technical support teams."
"The best feature that BigID offers is data discovery and classification, which is the most powerful engine, allowing connection to many different data sources ranging from cloud to on-premises and from structured to unstructured data, with the ability to build your own classifiers if no connector is available."
"It provides a unified view across different databases and supports a wide range of data source types, including cloud and on-premises systems."
"We chose Pinecone because it covers most of the use cases."
"The product's setup phase was easy."
"The semantic search capability is very good."
"The most valuable features of the solution are similarity search and maximal marginal relevance search for retrieval purposes."
"The best thing about Pinecone is its private local host feature. It displays all the maintenance parameters and lets us view the data sent to the database. We can also see the status of the CD and which application it corresponds to."
"Pinecone has positively impacted our organization by enhancing efficiency for the team, and the long-term effect has been that the chats have become much more personalized due to the memory added through a vector database."
"Pinecone has positively impacted my organization by helping people in needle-in-a-haystack situations, as previously they had to grind through PDF documents, PowerPoint documents, and websites, but now with Pinecone, they can ask questions and receive references to documents along with the page numbers where that information exists, so they can use it as a reference or backtrack, especially for things such as FDA approvals where they can quote the exact page number from PDF documents, eliminating hallucination and providing real-time data that relies on an external vector database with enough guardrails to ensure it won't provide information not in the vector database, confining it to the information present in the indexes."
"Pinecone has positively impacted our organization by enhancing efficiency for the team, and the long-term effect has been that the chats have become much more personalized due to the memory added through a vector database."
 

Cons

"One improvement I would suggest is addressing the intermittent failures of BigID scans, as there are times when some errors occur."
"BigID is making some forays into the GRC space, and that's a natural progression. I'd like to see that improve so that data governance is better, data risk is identified, and the ability to control and mitigate it."
"I want them to focus on data mapping, assessment, automation workflow, and privacy incident management."
"BigID needs improvement in terms of automation."
"One concern I have with BigID is regarding certain scans, like the multi-scan. The issue is that we can stop and retrieve these scans, but once they start, they go through an enumeration process."
"BigID is expensive. I prefer McAfee."
"Some users find catalog navigation challenging due to the lack of a search-by-column feature, which makes it difficult to locate specific data quickly."
"I want them to focus on data mapping, assessment, automation workflow, and privacy incident management. The privacy tools have not been widely used, and they have not invested much in privacy code privacy tools."
"One major issue I have noticed with Pinecone is that it does not allow me to search based on metadata."
"Pinecone can be made more budget-friendly."
"One major issue I have noticed with Pinecone is that it does not allow me to search based on metadata."
"Onboarding could be better and smoother."
"The product fails to offer a serverless type of storage capacity."
"Pinecone is good as it is, but had it been on AWS infrastructure, we wouldn't experience some network lags because it's outside AWS."
"If Pinecone gave us RAG as a service, we'd be more than happy to use that."
"I want to suggest that Pinecone requires a login and API key, but I would prefer not to have a login system and to use the environment directly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is not licensed per user but rather based on capacity. For instance, organizations with large amounts of data, such as 50 GB or more, are the ones that typically qualify for BigID."
"The product is expensive, but so are all competitor tools"
"The solution is expensive."
"I think that BigID's pricing is very reasonable."
"The pricing depends. If you have thousands of data sources to connect and manage, and you struggled with an MDM package in the past, you'll find BigID valuable and even cheap. But if you're a small business, it's probably not the right tool for you."
"I think Pinecone is cheaper to use than other options I've explored. However, I also remember that they offer a paid version."
"The solution is relatively cheaper than other vector DBs in the market."
"I have experience with the tool's free version."
"Pinecone is not cheap; it's actually quite expensive. We find that using Pinecone can raise our budget significantly. On the other hand, using open-source options is more budget-friendly."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
22%
Insurance Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Large Enterprise11
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise3
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about BigID?
I like BigID's in-depth discovery and scanning capabilities, especially for unstructured data. This feature is a standout compared to competitors. The tool's data classification capabilities are i...
What needs improvement with BigID?
One improvement I would suggest is addressing the intermittent failures of BigID scans, as there are times when some errors occur. I think the BigID team is aware of this and works on resolving iss...
What is your primary use case for BigID?
BigID's main use case is connecting to various data sources to perform the data discovery process, classify the data within those systems, and identify sensitive information across various structur...
What do you like most about Pinecone?
We chose Pinecone because it covers most of the use cases.
What needs improvement with Pinecone?
I give Pinecone a nine out of ten because I hope it provides an end-to-end agentic solution, but currently, it doesn't have those agentic capabilities, meaning I have to create a Streamlit applicat...
What is your primary use case for Pinecone?
My main use case for Pinecone is creating vector indexes for GenAI applications. A specific example of how I use Pinecone in one of my projects is utilizing a RAG pipeline where I take text from PD...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Home Depot, Grant Thornton LLP, Cimpress, Fidelity Investments
1. Airbnb 2. DoorDash 3. Instacart 4. Lyft 5. Pinterest 6. Reddit 7. Slack 8. Snapchat 9. Spotify 10. TikTok 11. Twitter 12. Uber 13. Zoom 14. Adobe 15. Amazon 16. Apple 17. Facebook 18. Google 19. IBM 20. Microsoft 21. Netflix 22. Salesforce 23. Shopify 24. Square 25. Tesla 26. TikTok 27. Twitch 28. Uber Eats 29. WhatsApp 30. Yelp 31. Zillow 32. Zynga
Find out what your peers are saying about BigID Next vs. Pinecone and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,114 professionals have used our research since 2012.