Skip to content
Agents tracked: 378 Downloads (7d): 242M down 5.8% GitHub stars: 8.3M VS Code installs: 151M Releases (7d): 389 Agent status: 1 with issues Updated Oct 10, 2026

Azure AI Search by Microsoft

Managed search service for vector, keyword and hybrid retrieval with semantic ranking for RAG and agents.

Vector databases Official MCP server

Price
Free plan
then from $0.101/hour
Free tier
Yes
Free tier: 50 MB storage, 3 indexes per service;...
SDK downloads
—
npm @azure/search-documents · PyPI azure-search-documents
Status
—

Pricing

Free tierFree tier: 50 MB storage, 3 indexes per service; semantic ranker first 1k requests free per month
Cheapest paid plan—
Usage priceEast US: Basic $0.101/hour, Standard S1 $0.336/hour, S2 $1.344/hour, S3 $2.688/hour; semantic ranker $1 per 1K queries
Good to knowBilled hourly per search unit and varies by region; hourly rates taken from Microsoft's Azure Retail Prices API (prices.azure.com) because the pricing page renders prices client-side.

From the official pricing page, checked Oct 10, 2026. Prices change: confirm before you buy.

Use it from an agent

MCP serverOfficial: @azure/mcp
npmnpm install @azure/search-documents
PyPIpip install azure-search-documents

Alternatives to Azure AI Search

All vector databases

APIFreePrice SDK downloads / wkGitHub starsMCP
Supabase (pgvector)
Hosted Postgres with the pgvector extension, plus auth, storage and APIs.
Free: 500 MB database, shared CPU, 2 active... Free plan · paid from $25/mo 37M 111K MCP
Qdrant Cloud
Managed clusters of the open-source Qdrant vector search engine.
Free forever single-node cluster: 0.5 vCPU,... Free plan 3.9M 35K MCP
turbopuffer
Serverless vector and full-text search engine built on object storage.
— from $16/mo 2.1M 174
Chroma Cloud
Serverless hosted version of the open-source Chroma vector, full-text and metadata search database.
Starter $0/month + $5 in free credits Free plan · paid from $250/mo 1.9M 29.5K MCP
Pinecone
Fully managed serverless vector database with dense, sparse and full-text indexes.
Starter: up to 2 GB storage, 2M write units... Free plan · paid from $20/mo 1.8M 453 MCP
Weaviate Cloud
Managed Weaviate, an open-source vector database with hybrid search and built-in embeddings.
Free forever: 100,000 objects, 1 GB memory,... Free plan · paid from $45/mo 1.7M 16.9K MCP
Is Azure AI Search right for you? Ask AgentGid →