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Chroma vs ClickHouse comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 1, 2026

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

Chroma
Ranking in Vector Databases
17th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.6
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
ClickHouse
Ranking in Vector Databases
8th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
Open Source Databases (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Vector Databases category, the mindshare of Chroma is 5.6%, down from 10.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ClickHouse is 5.6%, up from 4.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Vector Databases Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
ClickHouse5.6%
Chroma5.6%
Other88.8%
Vector Databases
 

Featured Reviews

GagandeepSingh1 - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Science Manager at Zykrr
A simple and easy to use solution that can run on a two-course CPU
We collect customer's feedback, and then we present it to the clients It's very easy to set up and runs easily. It doesn't require great hardware and can run on a two-course CPU with four gigs. The hybrid algorithm needs improvement. I have been using Chroma for one year.  I had some trouble…
reviewer2785038 - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It's very easy to set up and runs easily."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its documentation, which allows new users to easily learn, deploy, and use it."
"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 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."
"ClickHouse provides responses within a few seconds, typically two to three seconds, which is impressive."
"ClickHouse provides great query speeds because it is an OLAP database, so naturally, it provides higher speeds."
"<p>We moved away from Redshift to ClickHouse because of the integration and the flexibility that it provides, which best suited our use case.</p>"
"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."
"There is no better option than ClickHouse in all OLAP-based databases, so I think it is best to use ClickHouse in that regard."
 

Cons

"I think Chroma doesn't have a ready-made containerized image available."
"The hybrid algorithm needs improvement."
"ClickHouse can be improved, and the main challenge I see is its operational complexity."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The current version is an open-source."
"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."
"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 Cloud is not expensive compared to other databases, costing a few dollars per month while providing fast performance."
"We used the free, community version of ClickHouse."
"The tool is free."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business12
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise8
 

Questions from the Community

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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...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

1. Google 2. Netflix 3. Amazon 4. Facebook 5. Microsoft 6. Apple 7. Twitter 8. Spotify 9. Adobe 10. Uber 11. Airbnb 12. LinkedIn 13. Pinterest 14. Snapchat 15. Dropbox 16. Salesforce 17. IBM 18. Intel 19. Oracle 20. Cisco 21. HP 22. Dell 23. Samsung 24. Sony 25. LG 26. Panasonic 27. Philips 28. Toshiba 29. Nokia 30. Motorola 31. Xiaomi 32. Huawei
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Find out what your peers are saying about Chroma vs. ClickHouse and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
920,929 professionals have used our research since 2012.