Pinecone is closed source and only available as a SaaS service. Milvus and us have more overlap, we’re focused on the embeddings workflow like versioning and using embedding with other features. Milvus is entirely focused on nearest neighbor operations.
Faiss is solving the approximate nearest neighbor problem, not the storage problem. It’s not a database, it’s an index. We use a lightweight version of Faiss (HNSWLIB) to index embeddings in Embeddinghub.
The biggest difference, as cyrusthegreat pointed out, is that we're a fully managed service. You sign up, spin up a database service with a single API call[0], and go from there. There's no infrastructure to build and keep available, even as you scale to billions of items.
Pinecone also comes with features like metadata filtering[1] for better control over results, and hybrid storage for up to 10x lower compute costs. EmbeddingHub has a few features Pinecone doesn't yet have, like versioning -- though with our architecture it's straightforward to add if someone asks.
Hope that helps! And I'm glad to see more projects in this space, especially from the feature-store side.
cyrusthegreat|4 years ago
Faiss is solving the approximate nearest neighbor problem, not the storage problem. It’s not a database, it’s an index. We use a lightweight version of Faiss (HNSWLIB) to index embeddings in Embeddinghub.
gk1|4 years ago
The biggest difference, as cyrusthegreat pointed out, is that we're a fully managed service. You sign up, spin up a database service with a single API call[0], and go from there. There's no infrastructure to build and keep available, even as you scale to billions of items.
Pinecone also comes with features like metadata filtering[1] for better control over results, and hybrid storage for up to 10x lower compute costs. EmbeddingHub has a few features Pinecone doesn't yet have, like versioning -- though with our architecture it's straightforward to add if someone asks.
Hope that helps! And I'm glad to see more projects in this space, especially from the feature-store side.
[0] https://www.pinecone.io/docs/api/operation/create_index/
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5CsJ_S9_w4