The Numbers
Vector database market: $3.73B in 2026, 23.5% annual growth. RAG is the primary driver. The ‘Gold Rush’ has settled — seven players dominate: Chroma, Pinecone, Weaviate, Faiss, Qdrant, Milvus, pgvector.
Enterprise Leaders
Pinecone is unbeatable for zero-ops enterprise reliability. Qdrant wins on raw performance (4ms p50) and cost at scale. Weaviate best for hybrid search (vector + BM25) native. Pricing: serverless consumption replaced per-pod — great for startups, dangerous for high-query enterprises.
CRM Fit
For most CRM use cases, Data Cloud’s native vector search suffices. When you hit limits — tuning, cost, multi-model — evaluate Pinecone for simplicity, Qdrant for performance, pgvector if you already run Postgres heavily.
Migration Path
Most CRM vector workloads don’t hit the scale that forces Milvus-tier choices. Start with native CRM search; migrate only when measurable. Premature optimization on vector DB choice costs more than it saves.