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ClickHouse vs MariaDB 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)
MariaDB
Ranking in Open Source Databases
4th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
59
Ranking in other categories
Relational Databases Tools (4th)
 

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 MariaDB is 6.8%, down from 8.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Open Source Databases Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
MariaDB6.8%
ClickHouse5.3%
Other87.9%
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.
KumarManish - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to deploy, cost-effective, and integrates seamlessly with other products
We had planned for an RDBMS version and not NoSQL. We use MariaDB Galera Cluster. It's a good product. It is cheap, scalable, performs well, and is efficient. We use GCP’s BigQuery for machine learning. We must follow the best practices of the tool. We missed some best practices like the storage engine and InnoDB. It was very difficult to identify why we were having performance issues. Then, we realized that some of our tables were still on MyISAM, the default storage engine. When we switched it back to the InnoDB, it was very smooth. InnoDB is the recommended one. We must follow the best practices given in the documentation during the initial setup. Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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 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."
"The tool is column-based and infinitely scalable."
"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."
"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."
"ClickHouse is open source with no vendor lock-in, providing excellent freedom to choose any vendor without restrictions."
"Visual Studio offers unit testing integration and extensive searching capabilities."
"The solution's high availability is its most valuable aspect."
"MariaDB is scalable."
"Easy to use and available in most environments."
"For non-production purposes. I'm just using it for my personal project, so it works quite well. I haven't faced any errors yet."
"It's easy to set up."
"It's a very easy product to set up."
"I like the global transaction IDs (GTIDs) feature. It's quite reliable for replication between a master and a replica server, and it's a feature that MySQL also has but implemented differently."
 

Cons

"ClickHouse has its own concept of database triggers and doesn't support traditional database triggers."
"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 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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"It doesn't have the same level of maturity metrics as Postgres."
"MariaDB could improve by adding support for non-relational structures and new data types."
"The performance could be a bit better."
"I’m not sure if it can scale."
"Replication could be better, and it's not so simple. It would be better if they had a replication server. It would make things a lot easier. You need to have that replication server, but not in the same server farm. Then there will be a bit of latency between both because you should have one in one city and another one in a different city. That kind of solution should be more baked into every single database today. Mirroring the database in a live environment where any record written on the production server replicates instantly across the fiber on the other server wasn't easy. Many people don't even bother with that, and they just run one server."
"Data continuity could be improved."
"I am editing."
"I'd like to see improved materialized views, like the ability to save select queries. This feature is missing in MariaDB compared to other relational databases like Oracle and SQL Server."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 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."
"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."
"ClickHouse has an open-source version, which is free to use and has almost all the features."
"MariaDB is a free-to-use solution."
"The price of this solution represents a very good compromise between the cost and what it offers."
"The tool is open-source."
"I rate the product's price a three on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price, and ten is high price since there are some support costs involved, even though it isn't an open-source solution."
"The cost is quite good. You can have the open source, free version, which has adequate capacity."
"We pay for a yearly license."
"The licensing cost is approximately $4000.00 per year and the licensing is based on the software and the number of posts that you make."
"It is free of charge."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
21%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Educational Organization
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Large Enterprise5
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business26
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise25
 

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 MariaDB?
The integration with other products is seamless.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for MariaDB?
I have found the price of commercial MariaDB to be pretty steep, although not as high as Oracle. Customers often prefer the Community Edition because it's free.
What needs improvement with MariaDB?
The only potential area for improvement could be the pricing model, which might benefit from being more flexible or a bit cheaper.
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Google, Wikipedia, Tencent, Verizon, DBS Bank, Deutsche Bank, Telefónica, Huatai Securities
Find out what your peers are saying about ClickHouse vs. MariaDB and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
867,349 professionals have used our research since 2012.