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ClickHouse vs Milvus comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 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
6th
Ranking in Vector Databases
10th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Milvus
Ranking in Open Source Databases
9th
Ranking in Vector Databases
6th
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 2025, in the Open Source Databases category, the mindshare of ClickHouse is 2.7%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Milvus is 5.9%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Open Source Databases
 

Featured Reviews

ArpitShah - PeerSpot reviewer
Open-source freedom with efficient data handling and room for documentation growth
A significant area for improvement is the documentation, which is not comprehensive and lacks centralized resources, making it difficult to find information. Additionally, ClickHouse lacks robust support for transactional data, which limits its use as a primary database. My developer experience could be enhanced through better-organized documentation, perhaps by offering a cheat sheet or centralized guide for common setup and usage scenarios.
Sameer Bhangale - PeerSpot reviewer
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

"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."
"ClickHouse is a user-friendly solution that tries to be compatible with SQL standards."
"The main feature of ClickHouse is the optimizer because we had too many records to deduplicate, and the optimizer took this task by itself."
"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."
"It's easier to work with big data and calculations using the product."
"The tool's most valuable feature is a database. It supports portal APIs and offers good flexibility."
"ClickHouse is open source with no vendor lock-in, providing excellent freedom to choose any vendor without restrictions."
"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."
"Milvus has good accuracy and performance."
"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."
"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."
 

Cons

"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 has its own concept of database triggers and doesn't support traditional database triggers."
"I would like ClickHouse to work more on integration with third-party tools."
"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."
"We had a lot of troubles while deploying a whole cluster."
"The main issue is the lack of documentation. Many features are available but are not fully documented, which can make finding information challenging."
"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."
"One issue is that you need persistent volumes. Otherwise, if one system goes down, you lose data in that cluster."
"Milvus could make it simpler. Simplifying the requirements and making it more accessible. It could be more user-friendly."
"Milvus' documentation is not very user-friendly and doesn't help me get started quickly."
"I've heard that when we store too much data in Milvus, it becomes slow and does not work properly."
"Milvus has higher resource consumption, which introduces complexity in implementation."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool is free."
"The tool is open-source."
"If you have an in-house deployment on Kubernetes or something, it's going to be very cheap since you'll be managing everything."
"ClickHouse has an open-source version, which is free to use and has almost all the features."
"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."
"We used the free, community version of ClickHouse."
"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
Computer Software Company
27%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Educational Organization
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
21%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
University
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ClickHouse?
ClickHouse is open source without direct fees, unlike other databases that have hidden fees or restrict hosting to their platforms. The open-source nature of ClickHouse allows for complete flexibil...
What needs improvement with ClickHouse?
A significant area for improvement is the documentation, which is not comprehensive and lacks centralized resources, making it difficult to find information. Additionally, ClickHouse lacks robust s...
What is your primary use case for ClickHouse?
The main use case for ClickHouse is as a data warehouse for handling large volumes of data that exceed the capabilities of traditional databases like Postgres. I use it for creating dashboards and ...
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: February 2025.
842,388 professionals have used our research since 2012.