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Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs Pinecone comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 19, 2025

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

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB
Ranking in Vector Databases
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
109
Ranking in other categories
Database as a Service (DBaaS) (4th), NoSQL Databases (2nd), Managed NoSQL Databases (1st)
Pinecone
Ranking in Vector Databases
6th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
AI Data Analysis (12th), AI Content Creation (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2025, in the Vector Databases category, the mindshare of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is 5.6%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pinecone is 7.3%, down from 8.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Vector Databases Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB5.6%
Pinecone7.3%
Other87.1%
Vector Databases
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2724105 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Director of Product Management at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
Provides super sharp latency, excellent availability, and the ability to effectively manage costs across different tenants
For integrating Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB with other Azure products or other products, there are a couple of challenges with the current system. Right now, the vectors are stored as floating-point numbers within the NoSQL document, which makes them inefficiently large. This leads to increased storage space requirements, and searching through a vast number of documents in the vector database becomes quite costly in terms of RUs. While the integration works well, the expense associated with it is relatively high. I would really like to see a reduction in costs for their vector search, as it is currently on the expensive side. The areas for improvement in Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB are vector pricing and vector indexing patterns, which are unintuitive and not well described. I would also like to see the parameters of Fleet Spaces made more powerful, as currently, it's somewhat lightweight. I believe they've made those changes intentionally to better understand the cost model. However, we would like to take a more aggressive approach in using it. One of the most frustrating aspects of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB right now is that you can only store one vector per document. Additionally, you must specify the configuration of that vector when you create an instance of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB. Once the database is set up, you can't change the vector configuration, which is incredibly limiting for experimentation. You want the ability to try different settings and see how they perform, as there are numerous use cases for storing more than one vector in a document. While interoperability within the vector database is acceptable—for example, I can search for vectors—I still desire a richer set of configuration options.
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

"We doubled our productivity with this small application."
"Our customer is very satisfied with it."
"I would rate it a ten out of ten for stability."
"I like the scalability. There aren't any constraints for posting in the geolocation. I also like the SQL architecture."
"Cosmos DB is effective at handling large queries."
"Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB simplifies the process of saving and retrieving data."
"As a NoSQL database, it offers schema flexibility which simplifies design and reduces initial engineering overhead."
"What I appreciate most are the latency and the access, which are guaranteed by the tool, which is really impressive."
"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."
"The most valuable features of the solution are similarity search and maximal marginal relevance search for retrieval purposes."
"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."
"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."
"The product's setup phase was easy."
"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 chose Pinecone because it covers most of the use cases."
"The semantic search capability is very good."
 

Cons

"It would be beneficial if Cosmos supported batch and real-time use cases to make the system more seamless."
"The API compatibility has room for improvement, particularly integration with MongoDB. You have to connect to a specific flavor of MongoDB. We'd also like a richer query capability in line with the latest Mongo features. That is one thing on our wish list. The current version is good enough for our use case, but it could be improved."
"A better description and more guidance would help because the first time I created it, I didn't understand that a container is similar to a table in SQL."
"The integration with other solutions needs to improve because Cosmos DB's interoperability is lacking in some scenarios. For example, I'm currently implementing Fabric. That involves migrating from environments without apps, processing data and users, and taking them to Fabric."
"Microsoft's support services are inadequate, especially during critical incidents."
"Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB's performance could be better. In large volumes of documents, the querying process becomes slow and complicated."
"The only area Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB can improve on is its documentation; while it is solid and very useful, enhancements in the indexing documentation would help users save costs and make it more cost-effective."
"I have been a devoted Microsoft fan, but Redis DB's memory caching capabilities are really making progress. Even if Cosmos DB is continuously improving and is quite advanced in the field of internal memory optimization, I would still recommend Redis DB to a customer."
"For testing purposes, the product should offer support locally as it is one area where the tool has shortcomings."
"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."
"Onboarding could be better and smoother."
"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."
"The tool does not confirm whether a file is deleted or not."
"Pinecone can be made more budget-friendly."
"The product fails to offer a serverless type of storage capacity."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is perceived as being on the higher side. However, if you have large data operations, it might reduce costs due to performance efficiencies."
"Its price is very good for the basic stuff. When you go to a more complicated use case, especially when you need replication and availability zones, it gets a little costly."
"Everything could always be cheaper. I like that Cosmos DB allows us to auto-scale instead of pre-provisioning a certain capacity. It automatically scales to the demand, so we only pay for what we consume."
"For the cloud, we don't pay for the license, but for the on-prem versions, we do pay."
"I would rate Cosmos DB's cost at seven out of ten, with ten being the highest."
"The Cosmos DB pricing model, initially quite complicated, became clear after consulting with Azure Advisor, allowing us to proceed with confidence."
"The price of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB could be a bit lower."
"The RU's use case determines our license fees."
"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."
"I have experience with the tool's free version."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Legal Firm
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
University
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business33
Midsize Enterprise21
Large Enterprise58
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise3
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?
The initial setup is simple and straightforward. You can set up a Cosmos DB in a day, even configuring things like availability zones around the world.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?
Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB's pricing model has aligned with my budget expectations because I can tune the RU as I need to, which helps a lot. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB's dynamic auto-scale or server...
What needs improvement with Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?
I have not utilized Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB multi-model support for handling diverse data types. I'm not in the position to decide if clients will use Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB or any other datab...
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...
 

Also Known As

Microsoft Azure DocumentDB, MS Azure Cosmos DB
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

TomTom, KPMG Australia, Bosch, ASOS, Mercedes Benz, NBA, Zero Friction, Nederlandse Spoorwegen, Kinectify
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 Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Pinecone and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
879,259 professionals have used our research since 2012.