Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

ClickHouse vs InfluxDB 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
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Vector Databases (11th)
InfluxDB
Ranking in Open Source Databases
9th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Non-Relational Databases (2nd), Network Monitoring Software (23rd), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (26th), NoSQL Databases (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Open Source Databases category, the mindshare of ClickHouse is 5.3%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of InfluxDB is 4.3%, up from 2.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Open Source Databases Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
ClickHouse5.3%
InfluxDB4.3%
Other90.4%
Open Source Databases
 

Featured Reviews

Aswini Atibudhi - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides real-time data insights with high flexibility and responsive support
The basic challenge for ClickHouse is the documentation, which isn't ideal, but it's mature and stable with more columnar storage, compression, and parallel processing, making it the best for OLAP. 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.
DeepakR - PeerSpot reviewer
An open-source database that can be used to insert data
InfluxDB is generally stable, but we've encountered issues with the configuration file in our ticket stack. For instance, a mistake in one of the metrics out of a hundred KPIs can disrupt data collection for all KPIs. This happens because the agent stops working if there's an issue with any configuration part. To address this, it is essential to ensure that all configurations are part of the agent's EXE file when provided. This makes it easier to package the agent for server installation and ensures all KPIs are available from the server. Additionally, the agent cannot encrypt and decrypt passwords for authentication, which can be problematic when monitoring URLs or requiring authentication tokens. This requires additional scripting and can prolong service restart times.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"ClickHouse is a user-friendly solution that tries to be compatible with SQL standards."
"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."
"It's easier to work with big data and calculations using the product."
"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."
"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 open source with no vendor lock-in, providing excellent freedom to choose any vendor without restrictions."
"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 most valuable features are aggregating the data and integration with Graphana for monitoring."
"InfluxDB's best feature is that it's a cloud offering. Other good features include its time-series DB, fast time-bulk queries, and window operations."
"The platform operates very quickly. It is easy to configure, connect, and query and integrates seamlessly with Grafana."
"The user interface is well-designed and easy to use. It provides a clear overview of the data, making it simple to understand the information at hand."
"InfluxDB works as expected with excellent scalability and stability, which is critical for our application."
"While I would rate InfluxDB a ten on a scale of one to ten, users should be thoughtful about matching the engine to their specific needs."
"In our case, it started with a necessity to fill the gap that we had in monitoring. We had very reactive monitoring without trend analysis and without some advanced features. We were able to implement them by using a time series database. We are able to have all the data from applications, logs, and systems, and we can use a simple query language to correlate all the data and make things happen, especially with monitoring. We could more proactively monitor our systems and our players' trends."
"InfluxDB works as expected with excellent scalability and stability, which is critical for our application."
 

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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I would like ClickHouse to work more on integration with third-party tools."
"We had a lot of troubles while deploying a whole cluster."
"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."
"In terms of features that I would like to see or have, in the community version, some features are not available. I would like to have clustering and authentication in the community version."
"One area for improvement is the querying language. InfluxDB deprecated FluxQL, which was intuitive since developers are already familiar with standard querying."
"InfluxDB is generally stable, but we've encountered issues with the configuration file in our ticket stack. For instance, a mistake in one of the metrics out of a hundred KPIs can disrupt data collection for all KPIs. This happens because the agent stops working if there's an issue with any configuration part. To address this, it is essential to ensure that all configurations are part of the agent's EXE file when provided. This makes it easier to package the agent for server installation and ensures all KPIs are available from the server. Additionally, the agent cannot encrypt and decrypt passwords for authentication, which can be problematic when monitoring URLs or requiring authentication tokens. This requires additional scripting and can prolong service restart times."
"It is challenging to get long-running backups while running InfluxDB in a Microsoft Azure Kubernetes cluster."
"InfluxDB cannot be used for high-cardinality data. It's also difficult and time-consuming to write queries, and there are some issues with bulk API."
"I've tried both on-premises and cloud-based deployments, and each has its limitations."
"InfluxDB can improve by including new metrics on other technologies. They had some changes recently to pool data from endpoints but the functionality is not good enough in the industry."
"The solution's UI can be more user-friendly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool is open-source."
"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."
"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."
"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 are using the open-source version of InfluxDB."
"The tool is an open-source product."
"InfluxDB is open-source, but there are additional costs for scaling."
"InfluxDB recently increased its price. It is very expensive now."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Open Source Databases solutions are best for your needs.
867,349 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
21%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Educational Organization
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Large Enterprise5
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise5
 

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?
The basic challenge for ClickHouse is the documentation, which isn't ideal, but it's mature and stable with more columnar storage, compression, and parallel processing, making it the best for OLAP....
What is your primary use case for ClickHouse?
I have experience in ClickHouse ( /products/clickhouse-reviews ), and we also use Apache Druid ( /products/druid-reviews ), which has corporate support from Druid ( /products/druid-reviews ), along...
What do you like most about InfluxDB?
InfluxDB is a database where you can insert data. However, it would be best if you had different components for alerting, data sending, and visualization. You need to install tools to collect data ...
What needs improvement with InfluxDB?
It is challenging to get long-running backups while running InfluxDB in a Microsoft Azure Kubernetes cluster. Replicating data for on-prem development and testing is difficult. Having a SQL abstrac...
What is your primary use case for InfluxDB?
InfluxDB is the main component in our large enterprise-scale streaming data application for maritime vessels. We collect position data from vessels around the coast once per second, put it on a Kaf...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
ebay, AXA, Mozilla, DiDi, LeTV, Siminars, Cognito, ProcessOut, Recommend, CATS, Smarsh, Row 44, Clustree, Bleemeo
Find out what your peers are saying about ClickHouse vs. InfluxDB and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
867,349 professionals have used our research since 2012.