Migrate from Pinecone to Qdrant

What You Need from Pinecone

• API key — from the Pinecone console
• Index name — the name of the index to migrate
• Index host URL — the host endpoint shown in your index dashboard

Concept Mapping

Run the Migration

docker run --net=host --rm -it registry.cloud.qdrant.io/library/qdrant-migration pinecone \
    --pinecone.index-host 'https://your-index-host.pinecone.io' \
    --pinecone.index-name 'your-index' \
    --pinecone.api-key 'pcsk_...' \
    --qdrant.url 'https://your-instance.cloud.qdrant.io:6334' \
    --qdrant.api-key 'your-qdrant-api-key' \
    --qdrant.collection 'your-collection'

Migrating a Specific Namespace

docker run --net=host --rm -it registry.cloud.qdrant.io/library/qdrant-migration pinecone \
    --pinecone.index-host 'https://your-index-host.pinecone.io' \
    --pinecone.index-name 'your-index' \
    --pinecone.api-key 'pcsk_...' \
    --pinecone.namespace 'my-namespace' \
    --qdrant.url 'https://your-instance.cloud.qdrant.io:6334' \
    --qdrant.api-key 'your-qdrant-api-key' \
    --qdrant.collection 'your-collection'

All Pinecone-Specific Flags

Qdrant-Side Options

Gotchas

• Score scaling: Pinecone cosine similarity returns values in [0, 1] (rescaled). Qdrant returns [-1, 1]. Rankings are identical, but raw scores won’t match.
• Metadata size limits: Pinecone limits metadata to 40KB per vector. Qdrant has no per-payload size limit, so data is preserved as-is.
• Namespace strategy: If you have multiple namespaces, decide upfront whether to merge them into a single Qdrant collection (using a namespace payload field for filtering) or create separate collections.

Next Steps

After migration, verify your data arrived correctly with the Migration Verification Guide.