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ClickHouse vs Milvus comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 23, 2025

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 Open Source Databases
3rd
Ranking in Vector Databases
7th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Milvus
Ranking in Open Source Databases
9th
Ranking in Vector Databases
13th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Open Source Databases category, the mindshare of ClickHouse is 6.6%, up from 2.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Milvus is 5.1%, down from 5.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Open Source Databases Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
ClickHouse6.6%
Milvus5.1%
Other88.3%
Open Source Databases
 

Featured Reviews

Yush Mittal - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at a computer software company with 201-500 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.
Sameer Bhangale - PeerSpot reviewer
Leader, Data Science Practice at a computer software company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Provides quick and easy containerization, but documentation is not very user-friendly
Milvus' documentation is not very user-friendly and doesn't help me get started quickly. Chroma DB provides super user-friendly documentation, enabling new users to get started quickly. Chroma DB's setup doesn't have many dependencies, whereas Milvus usually comes with some dependencies because of the way it needs to be deployed. Unlike Milvus, it's very easy to do POCs with Chroma DB.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"ClickHouse has positively impacted my organization by replacing PostgreSQL, which required complex foreign tables for queries, and with ClickHouse we now have Cube.js for easier data visualization."
"There is no better option than ClickHouse in all OLAP-based databases, so I think it is best to use ClickHouse in that regard."
"ClickHouse is a user-friendly solution that tries to be compatible with SQL standards."
"With ClickHouse, since data is stored in a columnar way, we get aggregation functions that are much faster than transactional databases, such as SQL Server, and the cost efficiency is also much reduced compared to Cosmos DB since we use it on-premises, the cost is nearly cut, which is very useful for us."
"ClickHouse has reduced our storage cost and improved our 99th percentile latency by 40%."
"The tool's most valuable feature is a database. It supports portal APIs and offers good flexibility."
"Regarding performance, we tried multiple solutions when Kibana was failing, including PostgreSQL, MySQL, and even MongoDB for log ingestion of huge volumes, but ClickHouse outperformed all databases we tested, leading us to choose it for further use cases."
"ClickHouse provides great query speeds because it is an OLAP database, so naturally, it provides higher speeds."
"I like the accuracy and usability."
"The solution is well containerized, and since containerization is quick and easy for me, I can scale it up quickly."
"The best feature of Milvus was finding the closest chunk from a huge amount of data."
"Milvus offers multiple methods for calculating similarities or distances between vectors, such as L2 norm and cosine similarity. These methods help in comparing different vectors based on specific use cases. For instance, in our use case, we find that the L2 distance works best, but you can experiment with different methods to find the most suitable one for your needs."
"Milvus has good accuracy and performance."
 

Cons

"In terms of improvements, it's not designed for very frequent small writes, making it less scalable in write-intensive workloads, and it's not flourishing in transactional use cases or when ingesting streaming data, such as batching or buffering, which is something ClickHouse will improve."
"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."
"ClickHouse can be improved, and the main challenge I see is its operational complexity."
"The main issue is the lack of documentation. Many features are available but are not fully documented, which can make finding information challenging."
"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."
"My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing indicates that it is very expensive—ClickHouse is the most expensive option."
"In terms of needed improvements, some enhancements in documentation are necessary."
"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."
"I've heard that when we store too much data in Milvus, it becomes slow and does not work properly."
"Milvus could make it simpler. Simplifying the requirements and making it more accessible. It could be more user-friendly."
"Milvus has higher resource consumption, which introduces complexity in implementation."
"Milvus' documentation is not very user-friendly and doesn't help me get started quickly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We used the free, community version of ClickHouse."
"If you have an in-house deployment on Kubernetes or something, it's going to be very cheap since you'll be managing everything."
"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."
"ClickHouse has an open-source version, which is free to use and has almost all the features."
"The tool is free."
"ClickHouse Cloud is not expensive compared to other databases, costing a few dollars per month while providing fast performance."
"Milvus is an open-source solution."
"Milvus is an open-source solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Educational Organization
7%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise8
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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...
What do you like most about Milvus?
I like the accuracy and usability.
What needs improvement with Milvus?
Milvus could be improved how it could automatically generate insights from the data it holds. Milvus maintains embedding information and knows the relationships between data points. It would be use...
What is your primary use case for Milvus?
Milvus is primarily used in RAG, which involves retrieving relevant documents or data to augment the generation of new content. Milvus helps convert text and other data into a vector space, and the...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
1. Alibaba Group 2. Tencent 3. Baidu 4. JD.com 5. Meituan 6. Xiaomi 7. Didi Chuxing 8. ByteDance 9. Huawei 10. ZTE 11. Lenovo 12. Haier 13. China Mobile 14. China Telecom 15. China Unicom 16. Ping An Insurance 17. China Life Insurance 18. Industrial and Commercial Bank of China 19. Bank of China 20. Agricultural Bank of China 21. China Construction Bank 22. PetroChina 23. Sinopec 24. China National Offshore Oil Corporation 25. China Southern Airlines 26. Air China 27. China Eastern Airlines 28. China Railway Group 29. China Railway Construction Corporation 30. China Communications Construction Company 31. China Merchants Group 32. China Evergrande Group
Find out what your peers are saying about ClickHouse vs. Milvus and other solutions. Updated: January 2026.
883,011 professionals have used our research since 2012.