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ClickHouse pros and cons

Vendor: ClickHouse
4.3 out of 5
Badge Leader

Pros & Cons summary

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Prominent pros & cons

PROS

ClickHouse excels in real-time query performance, significantly outpacing traditional databases with its efficient column-row searching strategy.
Its compatibility with SQL standards and open-source nature provides great flexibility without vendor lock-in.
ClickHouse supports simultaneous data insertion and retrieval, further enhancing its utility for big data calculations.
Organizations benefit from ClickHouse’s cost efficiency and improved latency, which greatly enhance customer experience.
Its integration capabilities and rapid query responses have led many to switch from other databases, optimizing overall performance.

CONS

ClickHouse requires persistent volumes; otherwise, data is lost if a system goes down.
There are incompatibilities with SQL syntax when migrating from MySQL, making it difficult to identify issues.
Documentation for ClickHouse is lacking, making it challenging to find necessary information for features and troubleshooting.
It is not designed for frequent small writes, making it less scalable in write-intensive workloads and not ideal for transactional or streaming data use cases.
The open-source version of ClickHouse is not scalable for large-scale operations.
 

ClickHouse Pros review quotes

reviewer2403399 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Development Engineer II at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
May 21, 2024
If you have a real-time basis, you should take a look at ClickHouse because it works on a vector database, and the querying is super fast compared to traditional databases.
TD
ClickHouse DBA at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
Jun 11, 2024
The tool's most valuable feature is a database. It supports portal APIs and offers good flexibility.
Andrei Kochemirovskii - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Data Engineer at Omni Verse
Jun 16, 2024
ClickHouse is a user-friendly solution that tries to be compatible with SQL standards.
Learn what your peers think about ClickHouse. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2026.
879,711 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Parveen Yadav - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at Activant Solutions Pvt Ltd, Jaipur
Jun 13, 2024
ClickHouse is much faster than traditional databases like MySQL and MongoDB. Its column-row searching strategy makes it very efficient. With ClickHouse, we can manage multiple databases, automatically insert data from other databases and delete data as needed. It supports real-time query performance, allowing simultaneous data insertion and retrieval. ClickHouse has improved significantly over the past two years, adding more functions and queries, as well as top functionality.
Eden Chen - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Jun 21, 2024
We faced a challenge with deploying ClickHouse onto Kubernetes. Recently, we've been using ClickHouse Cloud, and the main issue is the high cost of the cloud service. The pricing isn't very competitive, especially for startups. I would instead buy a server and self-host if I have enough disk space. Besides that, ClickHouse has done very well, with clear goals and effective execution.
AP
Senior Data Engineer at Brightika, Inc.
Jun 21, 2024
It's easier to work with big data and calculations using the product.
Dmitriy Yugin - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Data/Web Analyst at Raiffeisen Bank
Jul 8, 2024
The best thing about the tool is that I can set it up on my computer and run queries without depending on the cloud. This is why I use it every day.
Spyros Almpanis - PeerSpot reviewer
Backend Software Engineer at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees
Jul 12, 2024
The tool is column-based and infinitely scalable.
Ayham Al-Adm - PeerSpot reviewer
Full-stack Web Developer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Jul 28, 2024
The main feature of ClickHouse is the optimizer because we had too many records to deduplicate, and the optimizer took this task by itself.
ArpitShah - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Analyst at CLSA
Feb 12, 2025
ClickHouse is open source with no vendor lock-in, providing excellent freedom to choose any vendor without restrictions.
 

ClickHouse Cons review quotes

reviewer2403399 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Development Engineer II at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
May 21, 2024
One issue is that you need persistent volumes. Otherwise, if one system goes down, you lose data in that cluster.
TD
ClickHouse DBA at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
Jun 11, 2024
If you join our team, it should be easy for you to use ClickHouse, especially if you are a developer. However, you need to read the documentation and understand the problems you are trying to solve.
Andrei Kochemirovskii - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Data Engineer at Omni Verse
Jun 16, 2024
I would like ClickHouse to work more on integration with third-party tools.
Learn what your peers think about ClickHouse. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2026.
879,711 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Parveen Yadav - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at Activant Solutions Pvt Ltd, Jaipur
Jun 13, 2024
Initially, I faced challenges integrating ClickHouse, particularly with inserting data from ActiveMQ, which caused duplicates. However, after adjusting the ClickHouse settings, the issue was resolved and there were no more duplicates.
Eden Chen - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Jun 21, 2024
The aggregation capability is a valuable feature. It's highly efficient, allowing us to review entire transaction histories and user activities in the market. We've tried MongoDB, Postgres, MariaDB, and BigQuery, but ClickHouse is the most cost-efficient solution for collecting data at high speeds with minimal cost. We even used ClickHouse Cloud for a month, and it proved to be a great setup, especially for startups looking to handle big data. For example, if there is a need for 2-4 terabytes of data and around 40 billion rows with reasonable computing speed and latency, ClickHouse is ideal. Regarding the real-time query performance of ClickHouse, when using an API server to query it, I achieved query results in less than twenty milliseconds in some of my experiments with one billion rows. However, it depends on the scenario since ClickHouse has limitations in handling mutations. Additionally, one of ClickHouse's strengths is its compression capability. Our experimental server has only four terabytes, and ClickHouse effectively compresses data, allowing us to store large amounts of data at high speed. This compression efficiency is a significant advantage of using ClickHouse.
AP
Senior Data Engineer at Brightika, Inc.
Jun 21, 2024
We had a lot of troubles while deploying a whole cluster.
Dmitriy Yugin - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Data/Web Analyst at Raiffeisen Bank
Jul 8, 2024
There aren't too many improvements I'd suggest for ClickHouse as it covers all my needs. There are just a few technical issues. For example, sometimes, when you want to get unique values and use certain tables, they don't work as expected. But it's not a major problem.
Spyros Almpanis - PeerSpot reviewer
Backend Software Engineer at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees
Jul 12, 2024
There are some areas where ClickHouse could improve. Specifically, we encountered incompatibilities with its SQL syntax when migrating queries from MySQL or SQL to ClickHouse. This difference in details made it challenging to figure out the exact issues. Additionally, we faced difficulties due to the lack of a proper Django driver for ClickHouse, unlike MySQL, which Django supports out of the box.
Ayham Al-Adm - PeerSpot reviewer
Full-stack Web Developer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Jul 28, 2024
ClickHouse has its own concept of database triggers and doesn't support traditional database triggers.
ArpitShah - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Analyst at CLSA
Feb 12, 2025
The main issue is the lack of documentation. Many features are available but are not fully documented, which can make finding information challenging.