ClickHouse vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB comparison

ClickHouse and Microsoft are both solutions in the Vector Databases category. ClickHouse is ranked #11 with an average rating of 8.9, while Microsoft is ranked #4 with an average rating of 8.2. ClickHouse holds a 2.5% mindshare in VD, compared to Microsoft’s 1.6% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of ClickHouse users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

ClickHouse

Read 9 ClickHouse reviews

631 Views
498 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Read 81 Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB reviews

818 Views
307 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

ClickHouse

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 5, 2025

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB and ClickHouse compete in the database services category. Azure Cosmos DB has the upper hand in scalability and integration with Azure services, while ClickHouse leads in real-time query performance and cost efficiency.

Features: Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB offers features like TTL, autoscaling, and a multi-model NoSQL structure supporting SQL, MongoDB, and Cassandra APIs. ClickHouse is known for real-time query performance, data compression, and speed, which makes it cost-efficient and adaptable for startups.

Room for Improvement: Azure Cosmos DB can improve integration options, documentation, and reduce complexity in querying and API compatibility. Its costs and vendor lock-in are concerns, along with more intuitive indexing and cross-container data handling. ClickHouse needs better integration with third-party tools and SQL syntax compatibility, and improvements in Kubernetes deployment documentation.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Azure Cosmos DB is primarily used on the public cloud with mixed feedback on technical support quality. ClickHouse, available on hybrid, on-premises, and private clouds, usually receives positive support feedback, with users relying on community resources and in-house expertise.

Pricing and ROI: Azure Cosmos DB uses a subscription model that can be costly without optimization. It charges based on resource units, while ClickHouse offers straightforward pricing and is appealing for its open-source, low-cost self-hosted versions, making it attractive for cost-sensitive projects and ensuring efficient ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed ClickHouse vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

ClickHouse vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

January 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 832,138 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

ClickHouse

Ranking in Vector Databases

11th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Open Source Databases (8th)

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Ranking in Vector Databases

4th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Database as a Service (DBaaS) (6th), NoSQL Databases (3rd), Managed NoSQL Databases (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Vector Databases category, the mindshare of ClickHouse is 2.5%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is 1.6%. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Vector Databases

Featured Reviews

Dmitriy Yugin

Senior Data/Web Analyst at Raiffeisen Bank

Can set it up on computer and run queries without depending on the cloud

The tool is open-source, so you don't need to pay for the software itself. However, you need to consider hardware costs and maintenance. A small company can install it on a company computer. For larger companies, you might need to hire a team for maintenance and consider data safety and privacy issues. Integrating ClickHouse with other tools in our data stack was easy. It has native connections to many tools, such as Google and Amazon cloud solutions, and can easily connect with other databases. For beginners, the ease of use depends on your background. If you're familiar with relational databases, it's easy. If not, you might need to read the documentation or ask for support.

Read full review

MichaelJohn

Director | Data & AI at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Very efficient for application-facing scenarios

There are several areas for improvement. Firstly, having a local development emulator or simulator for Azure Cosmos DB would be beneficial. It would be very handy to have a Docker container that developers can use locally. Although, I know there is a free tier and so on and so forth, having a local environment would be nice. For example, SQL Server is very portable. You can even install it on your machine. That is the number one thing that is missing in Azure Cosmos DB. The second improvement area is the IDE of choice. That means how you interact with Azure Cosmos DB. For example, with SQL Server, you have SQL Server Management Studio. I know there is a little bit of support for Azure Cosmos DB in Azure Data Studio, but it is not heavily advertised or it does not feel like first-class citizen support. Developer experience or developer tooling is missing in terms of interacting with the database. Better developer tools or an IDE for interacting with Azure Cosmos DB would enhance the developer experience. Lastly, there is some mixed messaging about what Azure Cosmos DB is, given its multiple APIs. There are so many Azure Cosmos DB APIs available. There is NoSQL. There are MongoDB, Gremlin, and others. There is still some mixed messaging for others who are new to Azure Cosmos DB about what Azure Cosmos DB is. Is this like MongoDB, but then there is also MongoDB in Azure Cosmos DB? I know it well, and I know that the default one is just NoSQL, but others I have interacted with over the last ten years or so get confused.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

"The main feature of ClickHouse is the optimizer because we had too many records to deduplicate, and the optimizer took this task by itself."

"The tool is column-based and infinitely scalable."

More ClickHouse pros

"The latency and availability of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB are fantastic."

"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is its ability to handle concurrency and consistency."

"Cosmos DB is a pretty stable solution. I would rate it a ten out of ten."

"Azure Cosmos DB helped improve the quality of our search results."

"It is one of the simpler databases to work with in terms of code management, tracking, and debugging due to its straightforward data storage and retrieval mechanisms."

"Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB's most valuable feature is latency."

"It is a cloud-based solution that is easy to deploy, easy to access, and provides users with more features compared to other clouds like AWS and GCP."

"It works reasonably fast. You can retain the original format of the document as received by the third-party system."

More Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB pros

Cons

"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."

"One issue is that you need persistent volumes. Otherwise, if one system goes down, you lose data in that cluster."

"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."

"ClickHouse has its own concept of database triggers and doesn't support traditional database triggers."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

More ClickHouse cons

"The challenge for us is always scale."

"There aren't any specific areas that need improvement, but if there were a way to achieve the right cosine similarity score without extensive testing, that would be very beneficial."

"I have been a devoted Microsoft fan, but Redis DB's memory caching capabilities are really making progress. Even if Cosmos DB is continuously improving and is quite advanced in the field of internal memory optimization, I would still recommend Redis DB to a customer."

"Slight enhancements in integration interfaces, expanded dashboard functionalities, and broader use-case support would be beneficial."

"The query is a little complex. SQL server should have more options. But the query should be better."

"It would be nice to have more options to ingest the data, for example, more file options or more search options. Currently, you can use JSON, but if there were other file types you can use for data ingestion, that would be nice."

"The API compatibility has room for improvement, particularly integration with MongoDB. You have to connect to a specific flavor of MongoDB. We'd also like a richer query capability in line with the latest Mongo features. That is one thing on our wish list. The current version is good enough for our use case, but it could be improved."

"The initial setup was difficult."

More Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"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."

"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."

"The tool is open-source."

"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."

"The pricing and licensing model was initially difficult to understand, but as soon as I learned what was going on and how it was priced, it was pretty easy."

"Its pricing is higher compared to solutions like Aerospike. However, it is justified because of the out-of-the-box features that are provided. The availability and resiliency that we have make it worth the price."

"Cosmos DB gave us three accounts for $400. We pay according to the usage."

"Cost isn’t a big hurdle for us right now. The solution is not costly."

"Pricing, at times, is not super clear because they use the request unit (RU) model. To manage not just Azure Cosmos DB but what you are receiving for the dollars paid is not easy. It is very abstract. They could do a better job of connecting Azure Cosmos DB with the value or some variation of that."

"It is expensive. The moment you have high availability options and they are mixed with the type of multitenant architecture you use, the pricing is on the higher end."

"Azure Cosmos DB's pricing is competitive, though there is a need for more personalized pricing models to accommodate small applications without incurring high charges. A suggestion is to implement dynamically adjustable pricing that accounts for various user needs."

"The solution is a bit on the expensive side."

More Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Vector Databases solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

832,138 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

25%

Educational Organization

17%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

14%

Comms Service Provider

12%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Retailer

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ClickHouse?

The tool is open-source.

See all answers

What needs improvement with ClickHouse?

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 ce...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for ClickHouse?

I used ClickHouse to collect data, put it in the database, and then analyze it to find insights. The main advantage is that I can install it on my computer instead of using cloud-based solutions, s...

See all answers

What do you like most about Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?

The initial setup is simple and straightforward. You can set up a Cosmos DB in a day, even configuring things like availability zones around the world.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?

Azure Cosmos DB's pricing is competitive, though there is a need for more personalized pricing models to accommodate small applications without incurring high charges. A suggestion is to implement ...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?

For streaming platforms, Azure Cosmos DB could improve efficiency in data storage. Indexing can also be better. Enhanced capabilities are necessary to manage increased data amounts more effectively...

See all answers

Comparisons

OpenSearch vs ClickHouse

Compared 19% of the time

InfluxDB vs ClickHouse

Compared 15% of the time

SingleStore vs ClickHouse

Compared 13% of the time

Milvus vs ClickHouse

Compared 12% of the time

More ClickHouse Competitors

Chroma vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Compared 14% of the time

Amazon Neptune vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Compared 12% of the time

Pinecone vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Compared 10% of the time

Amazon DynamoDB vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Compared 8% of the time

Neo4j AuraDB vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Compared 7% of the time

More Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ClickHouse

February 2025

Download ClickHouse product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

January 2025

Download Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB product report

Also Known As

No data available

Microsoft Azure DocumentDB, MS Azure Cosmos DB

Overview

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.

ClickHouse

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is a globally distributed, multi-model database service providing scalability, user-friendliness, and seamless integration, suitable for managing large volumes of structured and unstructured data across diverse applications.

Azure Cosmos DB is renowned for its scalability, stability, and ease of integration, offering robust support for multiple data models and APIs. Its capacity for handling unstructured data efficiently and providing real-time analytics makes it ideal for applications requiring high performance and global distribution. With features like automatic failover and integration with Microsoft products, users benefit from cost optimization and secure data handling. Enhancement opportunities include simplifying queries, improving documentation, and expanding backup and analytics functionalities.

What are the most important features of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?

Scalability and Autoscaling: Efficiently handles growing data and user demands.
Multi-Model Support: Adapts to different data models seamlessly.
Global Distribution: Provides low-latency access across multiple regions.
Automatic Failover: Ensures high availability and reliability.
Integration with Microsoft Products: Offers seamless connectivity with Azure services.

What benefits should users look for in Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB reviews?

Performance and Speed: Exceptionally fast processing for real-time data analytics.
Cost Optimization: Tools for managing expenses effectively.
Secure Data Handling: Implements strong data security measures.
Flexible Data Ingestion: Supports diverse data ingestion methods.

Azure Cosmos DB is frequently used in sectors like web, mobile, IoT, and analytics. It supports applications as a key-value store, processes real-time data, and enables global scalability with low-latency access. Its big data management capabilities and integration with Azure services enhance its utility across industries.

Microsoft

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

TomTom, KPMG Australia, Bosch, ASOS, Mercedes Benz, NBA, Zero Friction, Nederlandse Spoorwegen, Kinectify

Buyer's Guide

ClickHouse vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

January 2025

Free Report: ClickHouse vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Find out what your peers are saying about ClickHouse vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

832,138 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our ClickHouse vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB report.

See our list of best Vector Databases vendors.

We monitor all Vector Databases reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.