Every category where a model named Weaviate for a mid-market B2B company. Share is first choices across the direct, paraphrase, budget and scale prompts; rank is within every product named in that category.

Category	Function	Share	Rank	Negative rate	Labels	Quadrant
Vector databases	Data platform	6%	4 of 24	15%	61	accepted challenger

Movement

This is the first edition on this tier, so no move can be computed for Weaviate yet. From the next edition this section shows, per buyer segment, whether its share moved by more than the measured noise floor.

By model

How each model treated Weaviate across every prompt where it was named for a mid-market B2B company. Twelve models, six prompts per category.

Model	First choice	Alternative	Mention	Negative	Labels
Claude Haiku 4.5	0	2	1	1	4
GPT-5.4 mini	0	3	0	1	4
Gemini 3.5 Flash	0	5	0	1	6
Perplexity Sonar	0	2	1	1	4
Grok 4.1 Fast	0	2	2	2	6
Mistral Small	0	3	2	0	5
DeepSeek V4 Flash	1	1	3	1	6
Llama 4 Maverick	0	1	0	1	2
Qwen 3.7 Flash	1	2	2	0	5
Kimi K2	0	5	0	0	5
GLM 4.7 FlashX	0	5	2	1	8
MiniMax M2.5	1	3	2	0	6

By framing

Which of the six questions produced the naming. By model says how often; this says asked what. The first-choice count on the right carries the marks of the models that produced it.

FramingLabels by classFirst choices

Direct35 labels2

Paraphrase30 labels3

Comparative35 labels1not counted in share

Budget-constrained28 labels3

Scale-constrained26 labels1

Negative31 labelsNone

First choiceAlternativeMentionNegative185 labels in all, every segment counted; 9 of the 10 first choices count toward share, since the comparative and negative framings do not. The bar is one segment per label class, to scale within the framing.

What the models said for it

Verbatim evidence the judge attached to positive labels.

“Qdrant or Weaviate are generally recommended... Weaviate excels if you need hybrid search capabilities” MiniMax M2.5 · Vector databases · budget prompt · first choice

“I recommend starting with Pinecone or Weaviate.” Qwen 3.7 Flash · Vector databases · paraphrase prompt · first choice

“or Weaviate (best hybrid/multi-modal search)” DeepSeek V4 Flash · Vector databases · direct prompt · first choice

“look at Weaviate or Qdrant (both offer excellent cloud-managed options alongside self-hosting)” Gemini 3.5 Flash · Vector databases · negative prompt · alternative

And against it

Verbatim evidence attached to negative labels. A warning on a product with few labels is a warning; on a product with many, it is one voice among them.

“Avoid Initially: Pinecone/Weaviate Cloud (managed convenience costs $25-70/mo min after free tiers” Grok 4.1 Fast · Vector databases · budget prompt · hard negative

“operationally complex at scale: hot shards, shard-load skew, cross-machine scaling, and resource hunger (especially Weaviate)” DeepSeek V4 Flash · Vector databases · negative prompt · soft negative

“Weaviate, Milvus, Pinecone, and Qdrant are all losing adoption share to custom stacks and provider-native retrieval options.” Claude Haiku 4.5 · Vector databases · negative prompt · soft negative

“Vector-only DBs such as Pinecone, Weaviate, Qdrant, Milvus | When you also need SQL/JSON/transactions in the same system” Perplexity Sonar · Vector databases · negative prompt · soft negative

Named alongside

The products named in the same answers as Weaviate, over the 181 answers that named it. Took the first choice instead counts the answers where the other product was the first choice and Weaviate was named but was not.

ProductSame answerTook the first choice insteadHead to head

Pinecone174 of 18144Not in the top three

Qdrant162 of 18138Not in the top three

pgvector145 of 18164Not in the top three

Milvus107 of 1812Not in the top three

Chroma71 of 1817Not in the top three

Milvus / Zilliz Cloud30 of 1811Not in the top three

Zilliz Cloud26 of 1812Not in the top three

LanceDB23 of 1810Not in the top three

Redis23 of 1810Not in the top three

Elasticsearch22 of 1810Not in the top three

A head-to-head page exists where both products are in a category's top three. The other rows are the same fact without a page behind them, so they link to the product instead.

What carried it into the answer

The sites and pages cited by the answers that named Weaviate. A fact about retrieval, not a lever on the model.

Citations exist only for the models that return a source list, four of the twelve in this edition, so these counts come from 153 of the 181 answers that named Weaviate and are not a share of its labels.

Domains cited

firecrawl.dev96

encore.dev88

dev.to61

iternal.ai50

g2.com45

medium.com42

atlan.com39

marktechpost.com36

redis.io32

pinecone.io29

518 of the 518 domain citations in answers naming Weaviate came from somebody else's page.

Pages cited

firecrawl.dev/blog/best-vector-databases96

encore.dev/articles/best-vector-databases88

iternal.ai/insights/best-vector-databases-202650

g2.com/articles/best-vector-databases45

atlan.com/know/top-vector-databases-enterprise-ai38

dev.to/michaelaiglobal/beyond-pinecone-a-developers-deep-dive-into-the-top-10-vector-datab31

marktechpost.com/2026/05/10/best-vector-databases-in-2026-pricing-scale-limits-and-archite31

zenml.io/blog/vector-databases-for-rag29

Pages are listed as the models cited them.

Names read as Weaviate

What the judge wrote, as written, with how often. The vendor table decides that these count as Weaviate; a claim can dispute any of them.

Weaviate Cloud 3

Is this your product?

Claim this page

Claiming is free and changes nothing in the data. A claimed page shows a verified contact who is told when each edition publishes and when Weaviate's standing changes by more than the noise floor; the right to propose corrections to the vendor table, meaning names the judge wrote that should or should not read as Weaviate, applied by version and listed in the change log; and a one-line description supplied by the vendor and marked as such.

It does not get any change to labels, shares or verdicts, any preview, or any say over which quotes appear. A verification link goes to your work email; an address at weaviate.com is approved on the spot, any other address is reviewed by hand.

Your name and company appear on the claimed page, or the company alone if you ask below. A title and a LinkedIn address appear there too if you give them, and are left off if you do not. Your email address is never published.