Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs Pinecone comparison

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 2025

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB and Pinecone are prominent players in the database solutions category, focusing on scalability, flexibility, and integration. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB holds the upper hand thanks to its extensive global distribution capabilities and strong integration within the Microsoft ecosystem, while Pinecone excels with its user-friendly interface and managed service aspect.

Features: Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB offers extensive scalability, multi-model support, and seamless integration with Microsoft products, featuring TTL and multi-master configuration. Pinecone is distinguished by its managed service, supported APIs, and robust semantic search capabilities, providing flexibility for various use cases.

Room for Improvement: Azure Cosmos DB users encounter a steep learning curve, unclear pricing, and complex integrations within Microsoft's ecosystem, alongside a need for better documentation. Pinecone can be expensive, lacks feedback for vector deletions, and users desire improved search speeds with metadata tags.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB offers easy integration within the Azure stack and generally responsive technical support, although some users report delays. Pinecone provides deployment on both public cloud and on-premises, with feedback indicating general satisfaction; however, its reliance on documentation is notable.

Pricing and ROI: Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB's consumption-based pricing with its RU system may seem costly, though features like auto-scaling help manage expenses. Users report challenges in optimizing costs. Pinecone employs a pay-as-you-go model, seen as relatively affordable but can still be expensive compared to other vector databases.

To learn more, read our detailed Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Pinecone Report (Updated: June 2025).

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Pinecone

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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

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Database as a Service (DBaaS) (6th), NoSQL Databases (5th), Managed NoSQL Databases (1st)

Pinecone

Ranking in Vector Databases

7th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Vector Databases category, the mindshare of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is 4.0%. The mindshare of Pinecone is 7.7%, down from 9.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Vector Databases

Featured Reviews

MichaelJohn

Director | Data & AI at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Very efficient for application-facing scenarios

There are several areas for improvement. Firstly, having a local development emulator or simulator for Azure Cosmos DB would be beneficial. It would be very handy to have a Docker container that developers can use locally. Although, I know there is a free tier and so on and so forth, having a local environment would be nice. For example, SQL Server is very portable. You can even install it on your machine. That is the number one thing that is missing in Azure Cosmos DB. The second improvement area is the IDE of choice. That means how you interact with Azure Cosmos DB. For example, with SQL Server, you have SQL Server Management Studio. I know there is a little bit of support for Azure Cosmos DB in Azure Data Studio, but it is not heavily advertised or it does not feel like first-class citizen support. Developer experience or developer tooling is missing in terms of interacting with the database. Better developer tools or an IDE for interacting with Azure Cosmos DB would enhance the developer experience. Lastly, there is some mixed messaging about what Azure Cosmos DB is, given its multiple APIs. There are so many Azure Cosmos DB APIs available. There is NoSQL. There are MongoDB, Gremlin, and others. There is still some mixed messaging for others who are new to Azure Cosmos DB about what Azure Cosmos DB is. Is this like MongoDB, but then there is also MongoDB in Azure Cosmos DB? I know it well, and I know that the default one is just NoSQL, but others I have interacted with over the last ten years or so get confused.

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Aakash Kushwaha

SDE at Alphablocks

Helps retrieve data, relatively cheaper, and provides useful documentation

Suppose I want to delete a vector from Pinecone or a multi-vector from a single document. Pinecone does not provide feedback on whether a document is deleted or not. In SQL and NoSQL databases, if we delete something, we get a response that it is deleted. The tool does not confirm whether a file is deleted or not. I have raised the issue with support. If we have 10,000 vectors in our index and do not use a metadata tag, it will take one to three seconds to complete a search. When I try to search using a metadata tag, the speed is still the same. The search speed must be much faster because I specify which vectors I need the data from.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Its wide support to the ecosystem is valuable. We can use this database with a lot of use cases, and that's one of the reasons why we prefer it. We have a lot of vendors, databases, and use cases, and wherever possible, we are trying to standardize databases. It is also secure."

"Cosmos is preferred because of its speed, robustness, and utilization. We have all the merchandising information in Cosmos DB, which provides concrete and optimized data when searching for new products on the site. It is faster than other relational databases."

"Cosmos is preferred because of its speed, robustness, and utilization."

"Change feed is a pretty amazing feature. Once you make the changes, they are quickly read for you, and then you also have geo-replication. You can do a lot of things in your region, and the same regions can be replicated all over the world."

"Azure Cosmos DB's graph queries are its most valuable feature. Although I have not yet explored vector search, it's coming to Cosmos DB, and I plan to look into it. Having data in a flat file format in a document database speeds up processes, which is the primary purpose. Additionally, Cosmos DB's use of the Mongo platform makes it intuitive and cost-effective."

"The best features of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB are the way it maintains the data in partitions and its retention policies."

"The best features of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB include the speed to query data; as long as you index properly, retrieving data is fast and lightweight."

"I appreciate Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB's robust document management and consistent availability."

More Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB pros

"The semantic search capability is very good."

"We chose Pinecone because it covers most of the use cases."

"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 most valuable feature of Pinecone is its managed service aspect. There are many vector databases available, but Pinecone stands out in the market. It is very flexible, allowing us to input any kind of data dimensions into the platform. This makes it easy to use for both technical and non-technical users."

"The most valuable features of the solution are similarity search and maximal marginal relevance search for retrieval purposes."

"The product's setup phase was easy."

Cons

"The cost is a concern. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB did not decrease our total cost of ownership. From the standpoint of the old way of doing DBA operations, it did, but our cloud cost increased significantly."

"The UI needs enhancement. Unlike SQL, Cosmos DB's UI is not as straightforward, making it a bit challenging to use efficiently."

"What is missing in Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is definitely cold storage. We know it's coming, but that's currently what is missing—the possibility to park older data in a cold tier."

"Cosmos DB should continue evolving in AI features. We expect Cosmos DB to lead on that. There is potential for improved security features, which is important for data storage, especially for Dell Technologies. We must ensure data security remains the top priority."

"The main area of improvement is the cost, as the expense is high. Also, when writing processes into Cosmos, sometimes the threshold is met, which can be a problem if developers have not written the code properly, limiting calls to five thousand. These aspects need addressing."

"The solution’s pricing could be improved."

"Cosmos DB is expensive, and the RU-based pricing model is confusing."

"Continuing to educate customers on how they can take better advantage of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB without having to completely rewrite their entire application paradigm would be beneficial."

More Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB cons

"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."

"Pinecone can be made more budget-friendly."

"The product fails to offer a serverless type of storage capacity."

"For testing purposes, the product should offer support locally as it is one area where the tool has shortcomings."

"Onboarding could be better and smoother."

"The tool does not confirm whether a file is deleted or not."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing for Cosmos DB has improved, particularly with the new pricing for Autoscale."

"Cosmos DB is a PaaS, so there are no upfront costs for infrastructure. There are only subscriptions you pay for Azure and things like that. But it's a PaaS, so it's a subscription service. The license isn't perpetual, and the cost might seem expensive on its face, but you have to look at the upkeep for infrastructure and what you're saving."

"It seems to have helped significantly. We were using a different database system previously, and one of the reasons for acquiring Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB was cost."

"There is a licensing fee."

"Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB pricing is based on RUs. Reading 1 KB document costs one RU, whereas writing one document costs five RUs. Pricing for querying depends on the complexity of the query. If you increase the document size, it will automatically increase the RU cost."

"Cosmos DB is expensive compared to any virtual machine based on conventional RDBMS like MySQL or PostgreSQL."

"Cosmos DB is cost-effective when starting but requires careful management."

"The pricing and licensing model was initially difficult to understand, but as soon as I learned what was going on and how it was priced, it was pretty easy."

More Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB pricing and cost advice

"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 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."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Legal Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

10%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

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?

We are not consuming so much yet since we are at the beginning of using this solution. I would rate the pricing of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB a six out of ten.

What needs improvement with Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?

We are at the beginning of production, and everything is working very well. The price can always be lower, but currently, it's not a problem.

What do you like most about Pinecone?

We chose Pinecone because it covers most of the use cases.

What needs improvement with Pinecone?

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.

What is your primary use case for Pinecone?

I've used Pinecone to streamline token generation for my chatbot's functionality. Specifically, I used it for the OpenNeeam Building.

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Product Reports

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

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Also Known As

Microsoft Azure DocumentDB, MS Azure Cosmos DB

No data available

Overview

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is a globally distributed, multi-model database service providing scalability, user-friendliness, and seamless integration, suitable for managing large volumes of structured and unstructured data across diverse applications.

Azure Cosmos DB is renowned for its scalability, stability, and ease of integration, offering robust support for multiple data models and APIs. Its capacity for handling unstructured data efficiently and providing real-time analytics makes it ideal for applications requiring high performance and global distribution. With features like automatic failover and integration with Microsoft products, users benefit from cost optimization and secure data handling. Enhancement opportunities include simplifying queries, improving documentation, and expanding backup and analytics functionalities.

What are the most important features of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?

Scalability and Autoscaling: Efficiently handles growing data and user demands.
Multi-Model Support: Adapts to different data models seamlessly.
Global Distribution: Provides low-latency access across multiple regions.
Automatic Failover: Ensures high availability and reliability.
Integration with Microsoft Products: Offers seamless connectivity with Azure services.

What benefits should users look for in Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB reviews?

Performance and Speed: Exceptionally fast processing for real-time data analytics.
Cost Optimization: Tools for managing expenses effectively.
Secure Data Handling: Implements strong data security measures.
Flexible Data Ingestion: Supports diverse data ingestion methods.

Azure Cosmos DB is frequently used in sectors like web, mobile, IoT, and analytics. It supports applications as a key-value store, processes real-time data, and enables global scalability with low-latency access. Its big data management capabilities and integration with Azure services enhance its utility across industries.

Microsoft

Pinecone is a powerful tool for efficiently storing and retrieving vector embeddings. It is highly praised for its scalability, speed, and ease of integration with existing workflows.

Users find it particularly useful for similarity search, recommendation systems, and natural language processing.

Its efficient search capabilities, seamless integration with existing systems, and ability to handle large-scale datasets make it a valuable tool for data analysis and retrieval.

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

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Pinecone