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ClickHouse pros and cons

Vendor: ClickHouse

4.4 out of 5

10 reviews
100% willing to recommend

Pros & Cons summary

ClickHouse operates on a vector database, offering faster querying over traditional databases and SQL compatibility for user-friendly and efficient data management. It supports portal APIs, allowing flexibility and scalability with excellent big data processing capabilities. Despite these strengths, challenges include necessary persistent volumes, lack of detailed documentation, third-party tool integration, and SQL syntax incompatibilities, which complicate migration from MySQL or standard SQL, emphasizing the need for user education.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

ClickHouse is highly efficient for real-time querying and significantly faster than traditional databases like MySQL and MongoDB.

Its column-row searching strategy enhances performance, making it ideal for managing multiple databases and real-time data queries.

ClickHouse supports portal APIs, providing flexibility and scalability, and is compatible with SQL standards.

The tool is open source without vendor lock-in, allowing users freedom in vendor selection.

ClickHouse's optimizer efficiently handles tasks like deduplication, improving functionality and efficiency.

CONS

You need persistent volumes; otherwise, data can be lost if a system failure occurs.

Integration with third-party tools needs improvement.

There are some SQL syntax incompatibilities when migrating queries from MySQL or SQL.

There is a lack of documentation, which makes finding information challenging.

ClickHouse doesn't support traditional database triggers.

ClickHouse Pros review quotes

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.

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Software Engineer [Data] at a educational organization 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.

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reviewer2403399

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.

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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.

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AP

Senior Data Engineer at Brightika, Inc.

Jun 21, 2024

It's easier to work with big data and calculations using the product.

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Andrei Kochemirovskii

Lead Data Engineer at Omni Verse

Jun 16, 2024

ClickHouse is a user-friendly solution that tries to be compatible with SQL standards.

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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.

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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.

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Spyros Almpanis

Backend Software Engineer at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees

Jul 12, 2024

The tool is column-based and infinitely scalable.

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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.

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ClickHouse Cons review quotes

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.

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Software Engineer [Data] at a educational organization 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.

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reviewer2403399

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.

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Free Report: ClickHouse Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about ClickHouse. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2025.

842,592 professionals have used our research since 2012.

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.

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AP

Senior Data Engineer at Brightika, Inc.

Jun 21, 2024

We had a lot of troubles while deploying a whole cluster.

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Andrei Kochemirovskii

Lead Data Engineer at Omni Verse

Jun 16, 2024

I would like ClickHouse to work more on integration with third-party tools.

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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.

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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.

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Spyros Almpanis

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.

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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.

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Product Categories

Product Categories

Open Source Databases

Vector Databases

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Product Categories

Product Categories

Open Source Databases

Vector Databases

Popular Comparisons

Popular Comparisons

MariaDB vs ClickHouse

PostgreSQL vs ClickHouse

MongoDB vs ClickHouse

InfluxDB vs ClickHouse

Faiss vs ClickHouse

OpenSearch vs ClickHouse

Milvus vs ClickHouse

SQLite vs ClickHouse

Qdrant vs ClickHouse

See all alternatives

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