ClickHouse
An open-source column-oriented database for fast real-time analytics, with a managed cloud service.
- Verified facts
- 5 of 5
- Alternatives ranked
- 5
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- 0
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About ClickHouse
ClickHouse is a column-oriented OLAP database built for running analytical SQL queries over very large tables with low latency. Teams use it for product and web analytics, observability data such as logs and traces, and data-warehouse style reporting where queries need to come back in milliseconds rather than minutes. Its compression and vectorised execution make it cheap to store and scan billions of rows. The core database is open source under Apache 2.0 and can be self-hosted on Linux servers or run locally, so there is no licence cost if you operate it yourself. ClickHouse Inc. also sells ClickHouse Cloud, a managed service on AWS, Google Cloud and Azure that bills compute and storage separately and scales idle services to zero, with a trial that includes credits. Compared with Snowflake or BigQuery it is faster for real-time dashboards but asks more of you on data modelling, and joins and updates are less forgiving than in a traditional warehouse.
Best for: Engineering teams building real-time dashboards, observability or analytics over billions of rows.
Pros and cons
What works
- Very fast aggregations over large tables, suited to live dashboards
- Apache 2.0 open source, so it can be self-hosted at no licence cost
- Strong compression keeps storage costs down
- Managed cloud option on AWS, Google Cloud and Azure
Why people leave
- Schema and table-engine choices need care to get good performance
- Updates, deletes and large joins are weaker than in general-purpose warehouses
- Self-hosting a cluster takes real operational work
Top ClickHouse alternatives
See all 5- 1
Snowflake66.5A fully managed warehouse with less tuning to do, better for broad BI and data sharing than sub-second dashboards.
- 2
Google BigQuery62.6Serverless with nothing to provision, and a monthly free query allowance for smaller workloads.
- 3
Databricks59.6A lakehouse platform that adds Spark, notebooks and ML tooling on top of SQL analytics.
- 4
Tiger Data51.2Keeps analytics inside Postgres, so teams already on PostgreSQL avoid learning a new database.
- 5
SingleStore38.6Handles transactional writes and analytics in one engine, with MySQL compatibility.
Why people left ClickHouse
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ClickHouse: common questions
Is ClickHouse free?
Yes. ClickHouse is free, open-source software.
Is ClickHouse open source?
No, ClickHouse is not open source. Open-source alternatives include Tiger Data.
What platforms does ClickHouse run on?
ClickHouse is available for Web, Linux, macOS and Self-hosted.
What are the best alternatives to ClickHouse?
The highest-ranked ClickHouse alternatives right now are Snowflake, Google BigQuery and Databricks. See the full ranked list for pricing, platforms and verified facts.