Cassandra vs ClickHouse comparison

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Cassandra

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 1, 2026

Apache Cassandra and ClickHouse are open-source database management systems. ClickHouse appears to have an advantage due to its superior analytical capabilities, although Cassandra offers excellent value and support.

Features: Cassandra provides peer-to-peer architecture, distributed scalability, and high availability. ClickHouse benefits from a columnar storage system, real-time queries, and efficient data compression.

Room for Improvement: Cassandra could improve in query performance and user interface friendliness, as well as providing more comprehensive query language support. ClickHouse could be enhanced in handling transactional workloads, simplifying integration with other systems, and better managing very high concurrency.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cassandra involves more complexity in setup and requires significant expertise, whereas ClickHouse benefits from simpler installation and a responsive community-driven support system, making deployment smoother.

Pricing and ROI: Cassandra is usually lower in initial costs and delivers high ROI with large datasets. ClickHouse may involve higher setup costs but offers significant performance benefits for analytical tasks, leading to a high return on analytical investments.

To learn more, read our detailed Cassandra vs. ClickHouse Report (Updated: September 2026).

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Cassandra vs. ClickHouse

September 2026

Helped 915,817 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Cassandra

Ranking in Vector Databases

12th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

NoSQL Databases (5th)

ClickHouse

Ranking in Vector Databases

8th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Open Source Databases (3rd)

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Vector Databases category, the mindshare of Cassandra is 4.0%, up from 2.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ClickHouse is 5.8%, up from 4.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Vector Databases Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
ClickHouse	5.8%
Cassandra	4.0%
Other	90.2%

Vector Databases

Featured Reviews

Monirul Islam Khan

Head, Data Integration & Management at a non-profit with 10,001+ employees

Has maintained secure document storage and efficient data distribution with peer-to-peer architecture

The functions or features in Cassandra that I have found most valuable are that it is a distributed system similar to Mongo. It's good enough for comparison with another SQL database, so it's smooth and organized for distributed database system. The peer-to-peer architecture in Cassandra is helpful for network decentralization, and I have already introduced that feature. Cassandra features in peer-to-peer as well as another monitoring, so basically, it's good enough for our service. The tunable consistency level in Cassandra is good, and we are using that feature already. In terms of built-in caching and lightweight transactions in Cassandra, the transaction level is good, and it's optimized, so there are no more issues in that database. Based on my experience, Cassandra is good for document management system, as well as distributed database system, and the automatic recovery process is there. Additionally, the database monitoring system or auditing system is well-comparable with other database systems, so we are actually happy to be using this Cassandra database.

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reviewer2785038

Senior Data Engineer at a transportation company with 501-1,000 employees

Data observability has enabled real‑time analytics and cost savings but needs smoother inserts and cleanup

ClickHouse could be improved concerning data insertion, especially given the high amount of data handled. Constant efforts are made to optimize the features on its own, but with merges and inserts, only a single insert query can be performed allowing for the input of only 100,000 rows per second. It would be beneficial to insert more data and have configurations that are less user-operated. Ideally, ClickHouse would optimize itself to handle these processes automatically, reducing the need to contact the ClickHouse support team for infrastructure optimization. Additionally, delays are experienced when trying to delete databases with corrupt data, taking too much time and causing major outages, which necessitate contacting multiple teams across continents for resolution. The community surrounding ClickHouse also seems limited, providing a reliance on documentation, and there is a scarcity of developers working with ClickHouse, which hinders growth. If ClickHouse were more user-friendly and technically feasible, it would likely see greater expansion in usage.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The use of Cassandra in real-time data analytics has been pivotal for our e-commerce platform. As our platform operates 24/7, providing services to sellers and customers alike, the need for real-time updates is paramount."

"It's used as our cloud based backend store as a temporary cache and for storing data that streams through our data pipe."

"The most valuable features of Cassandra are its scaling capabilities and its non-SQL nature capabilities."

"I'd rate the solution ten out of ten."

"Our primary use case for the solution is testing."

"The technical evaluation is very good."

"If you need availability and consistency, you can go with Cassandra."

"The most valuable features are the counter features and the NoSQL schema, and it also has good scalability because you can scale Cassandra to any infinite level."

More Cassandra pros

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

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

"ClickHouse has positively impacted my organization, as there was an entire exercise done on which database we were supposed to use for solving our problems, and we found ClickHouse was the one performing the best, which is when we adopted it."

"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."

"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."

"ClickHouse Cloud saves a lot of time for our DevOps engineers since there isn't much deployment involved and everything is served directly, leading to increased efficiency and productivity."

"The tool's most valuable feature is a database. It supports portal APIs and offers good flexibility."

"ClickHouse has reduced our storage cost and improved our 99th percentile latency by 40%."

More ClickHouse pros

Cons

"Depending upon our schema, we can't make ORDER BY or GROUP BY clauses in the product."

"The clustering needs to be better; it is getting there."

"The solution is not easy to use because it is a big database and you have to learn the interface. This is the case though in most of these solutions."

"While Cassandra can handle NoSQL, I think there should be more flexibility for whole schema design when data is stored in wide columns. Additionally, I believe that eventual consistency should be enhanced."

"Some issues arise from our vendors like Apache slowness and distribution or load balancing from HAProxy, which should better handle consumption for high-level concurrency."

"Row-level locking is not available; might be very helpful in update use cases."

"We have had stability issues including out of memory issues and crashes with earlier versions of the product."

"Cassandra could be more user-friendly like MongoDB."

More Cassandra cons

"We would like to have fuzzy search capabilities in ClickHouse like we had with Kibana because there are scenarios where we cannot search keywords fuzzily in ClickHouse, whereas Elasticsearch allows that, and in such cases, Elasticsearch outperforms ClickHouse."

"The open-source version of ClickHouse is not very scalable."

"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."

"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."

"ClickHouse can be improved, and the main challenge I see is its operational complexity."

"ClickHouse could be improved with self-hosting capabilities and better documentation for how to host it at scale."

"I chose nine out of ten because, as I mentioned, the improvement side and the ten thousand partition limit created issues that we were hitting quite frequently, but with some schema manipulations we did manage to find a workaround, although that could have been avoided had things been better documented on how we could have solved this problem in a different approach, which took some bandwidth."

"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."

More ClickHouse cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cassandra is a free open source solution, but there is a commercial version available called DataStax Enterprise."

"There are licensing fees that must be paid, but I'm not sure if they are paid monthly or yearly."

"I don't have the specific numbers on pricing, but it was fairly priced."

"We are using the open-source version of Cassandra, the solution is free."

"We pay for a license."

"I use the tool's open-source version."

"We used the free, community version of ClickHouse."

"ClickHouse has an open-source version, which is free to use and has almost all the features."

"ClickHouse Cloud is not expensive compared to other databases, costing a few dollars per month while providing fast performance."

"The tool is open-source."

"The tool is free."

"If you have an in-house deployment on Kubernetes or something, it's going to be very cheap since you'll be managing everything."

"For pricing, if you use the self-hosted version, it would be free. Cloud services pricing would be an eight out of ten. I try to minimize costs but still have to monitor usage."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

15%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Construction Company

Outsourcing Company

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

11%

Outsourcing Company

10%

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	9
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	14

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	12
Midsize Enterprise	5
Large Enterprise	8

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cassandra?

The pricing for Cassandra is a little bit high, so it would be better for our community services if they consider community pricing for any non-profit organization like an NGO or other things. It w...

What needs improvement with Cassandra?

Regarding areas of improvement for Cassandra, currently, we are not facing significant issues. Some issues arise from our vendors like Apache slowness and distribution or load balancing from HAProx...

What is your primary use case for Cassandra?

My use case for Cassandra is for a document and other unstructured data management system as well as structured data for ultra-poor member community edition, community members' PII information, so ...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ClickHouse?

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was such that the setup costs were just my own bandwidth, while licensing and pricing were done by other members of the team so it was abstract...

What needs improvement with ClickHouse?

ClickHouse can be improved on the documentation side, and there is one small constraint that is mentioned in ClickHouse documentation, which is a partition limit of ten thousand that we hit, so if ...

What is your primary use case for ClickHouse?

My main use case for ClickHouse is data ingestion and for its OLAP properties, as we had use cases where database locks were slowing us down and because ClickHouse does not have that, we chose to u...

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Compared 6% of the time

InfluxDB vs ClickHouse

Compared 6% of the time

MySQL vs ClickHouse

Compared 6% of the time

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Product Reports

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Cassandra

October 2026

Download ClickHouse product report

October 2026

Overview

Cassandra is a distributed and scalable database management system used for real-time data processing.

It is highly valued for its ability to handle large amounts of data, scalability, high availability, fault tolerance, and flexible data model.

It is commonly used in finance, e-commerce, and social media industries.

Apache

ClickHouse is renowned for its speed, scalability, and real-time query performance. Its compatibility with SQL standards enhances flexibility while enabling integration with popular tools.

ClickHouse leverages a column-based architecture for efficient data compression and real-time analytics. It seamlessly integrates with tools like Kafka and Tableau and is effective in handling large datasets due to its cost-efficient aggregation capabilities. With robust data deduplication and strong community backing, users can access comprehensive documentation and up-to-date functionality. However, improvements in third-party integration, cloud deployment, and handling of SQL syntax differences are noted, impacting ease-of-use and migration from other databases.

What features make ClickHouse outstanding?

Speed and Scalability: Enables rapid deployment and scalability, particularly on Kubernetes.
SQL Compatibility: Aligns with SQL standards for flexible database management.
Column-based Structure: Offers efficient data compression and quick query performance.
Integration Support: Works with Kafka, Tableau, and other popular platforms.
Data Deduplication: Manages complex data duplication efficiently.

What benefits should users consider?

Cost-Efficiency: Reduces expenses while managing large datasets effectively.
Real-Time Analytics: Provides fast data processing for real-time insights.
Flexibility: Offers multiple integration points and compatibility options.
Robust Documentation: Backed by an active development community, ensuring comprehensive support.

ClickHouse is deployed in sectors like telecommunications for passive monitoring and is beneficial for data analytics, logging Clickstream data, and as an ETL engine. Organizations harness it for machine learning applications when combined with GPT. With the ability to be installed independently, it's an attractive option for avoiding cloud service costs.

Sample Customers

1. Apple 2. Netflix 3. Facebook 4. Instagram 5. Twitter 6. eBay 7. Spotify 8. Uber 9. Airbnb 10. Adobe 11. Cisco 12. IBM 13. Microsoft 14. Yahoo 15. Reddit 16. Pinterest 17. Salesforce 18. LinkedIn 19. Hulu 20. Airbnb 21. Walmart 22. Target 23. Sony 24. Intel 25. Cisco 26. HP 27. Oracle 28. SAP 29. GE 30. Siemens 31. Volkswagen 32. Toyota

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