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ClickHouse pros and cons

Vendor: ClickHouse
4.3 out of 5
Badge Leader

Pros & Cons summary

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Prominent pros & cons

PROS

ClickHouse excels in real-time query performance, significantly outpacing traditional databases with its efficient column-row searching strategy.
Its compatibility with SQL standards and open-source nature provides great flexibility without vendor lock-in.
ClickHouse supports simultaneous data insertion and retrieval, further enhancing its utility for big data calculations.
Organizations benefit from ClickHouse’s cost efficiency and improved latency, which greatly enhance customer experience.
Its integration capabilities and rapid query responses have led many to switch from other databases, optimizing overall performance.

CONS

ClickHouse requires persistent volumes; otherwise, data is lost if a system goes down.
There are incompatibilities with SQL syntax when migrating from MySQL, making it difficult to identify issues.
Documentation for ClickHouse is lacking, making it challenging to find necessary information for features and troubleshooting.
It is not designed for frequent small writes, making it less scalable in write-intensive workloads and not ideal for transactional or streaming data use cases.
The open-source version of ClickHouse is not scalable for large-scale operations.
 

ClickHouse Pros review quotes

reviewer2785038 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Data Engineer at a transportation company with 501-1,000 employees
Dec 5, 2025
ClickHouse provides great query speeds because it is an OLAP database, so naturally, it provides higher speeds.
RN
AIML engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Dec 6, 2025
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.
AmitVerma4 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Developer at 8 Gallery India
Dec 7, 2025
ClickHouse provides responses within a few seconds, typically two to three seconds, which is impressive.
Learn what your peers think about ClickHouse. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: May 2026.
893,244 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Aswini Atibudhi - PeerSpot reviewer
Distinguished AI Leader at Walmart Global Tech at Walmart
May 8, 2025
ClickHouse is very easy to use; one of the good features is that it has joins, which were not present in Druid, and Druid was quite expensive, especially with our applications at Sam's Club utilizing ClickHouse very quickly.
reviewer2785122 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Dec 6, 2025
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.
AA
Associate software architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Dec 6, 2025
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.
Hitaish Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at Karvy Fintech
Dec 4, 2025
ClickHouse has reduced our storage cost and improved our 99th percentile latency by 40%.
reviewer2784735 - PeerSpot reviewer
Founder at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Dec 4, 2025
There is no better option than ClickHouse in all OLAP-based databases, so I think it is best to use ClickHouse in that regard.
reviewer2785134 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at a wholesaler/distributor with 1,001-5,000 employees
Dec 6, 2025
We moved away from Redshift to ClickHouse because of the integration and the flexibility that it provides, which best suited our use case.
reviewer2036529 - PeerSpot reviewer
Database Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
Dec 7, 2025
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.
 

ClickHouse Cons review quotes

reviewer2785038 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Data Engineer at a transportation company with 501-1,000 employees
Dec 5, 2025
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.
RN
AIML engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Dec 6, 2025
ClickHouse could be improved further in several areas.
AmitVerma4 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Developer at 8 Gallery India
Dec 7, 2025
Too many issues exist for beginners to set up ClickHouse. Many parameters must be configured, such as maximum scatter part settings that determine when writing to a table stops.
Learn what your peers think about ClickHouse. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: May 2026.
893,244 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Aswini Atibudhi - PeerSpot reviewer
Distinguished AI Leader at Walmart Global Tech at Walmart
May 8, 2025
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.
reviewer2785122 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Dec 6, 2025
In terms of needed improvements, some enhancements in documentation are necessary.
AA
Associate software architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Dec 6, 2025
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.
Hitaish Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at Karvy Fintech
Dec 4, 2025
The open-source version of ClickHouse is not very scalable.
reviewer2784735 - PeerSpot reviewer
Founder at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Dec 4, 2025
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing indicates that it is very expensive—ClickHouse is the most expensive option.
reviewer2785134 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at a wholesaler/distributor with 1,001-5,000 employees
Dec 6, 2025
ClickHouse could be improved with self-hosting capabilities and better documentation for how to host it at scale.
reviewer2036529 - PeerSpot reviewer
Database Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
Dec 7, 2025
ClickHouse can be improved, and the main challenge I see is its operational complexity.