ClickHouse vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB comparison

ClickHouse and Microsoft are both solutions in the Vector Databases category. ClickHouse is ranked #10 with an average rating of 8.8, while Microsoft is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.2. ClickHouse holds a 3.6% mindshare in VD, compared to Microsoft’s 3.0% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of ClickHouse users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

ClickHouse

Read 10 ClickHouse reviews

849 Views
639 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Read 89 Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB reviews

1,166 Views
444 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

ClickHouse

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 2025

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB and ClickHouse compete in the database solutions category. Cosmos DB appears to have an advantage due to its scalability and extensive integration, whereas ClickHouse excels in performance and cost-effectiveness.

Features: Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB offers flexibility in database models, multi-region scalability, and strong integration with Microsoft's ecosystem. It provides support for various APIs and is beneficial for applications needing global distribution. ClickHouse stands out for its high-speed real-time query performance, efficient data compression, and capability to handle big data, making it ideal for startups.

Room for Improvement: Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB could improve in pricing management, clearer documentation, and enhanced query capabilities. Users seek better cross-container joins and support for analytics. ClickHouse faces challenges in documentation clarity, third-party integration, and reducing setup complexity. Addressing these can enhance its user-friendliness.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is mainly deployed in public cloud environments and offers flexibility with technical support, although some find quality inconsistent. ClickHouse provides both cloud and on-premises deployment, with positive customer service experiences reported, benefitting from responsive support.

Pricing and ROI: Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB's subscription model is seen as costly but justified by features like reliability and scalability. Its pricing complexity can be challenging for small businesses. ClickHouse, being open-source, is cost-effective with no licensing fees, offering significant ROI especially in self-hosted formats due to its performance and scalability efficiency.

To learn more, read our detailed ClickHouse vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

ClickHouse vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

April 2025

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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 Vector Databases

10th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Open Source Databases (6th)

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Ranking in Vector Databases

3rd

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Database as a Service (DBaaS) (6th), NoSQL Databases (3rd), Managed NoSQL Databases (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Vector Databases category, the mindshare of ClickHouse is 3.6%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is 3.0%. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Vector Databases

Featured Reviews

ArpitShah

Software Analyst at CLSA

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.

Read full review

MichaelJohn

Director | Data & AI at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Very efficient for application-facing scenarios

There are several areas for improvement. Firstly, having a local development emulator or simulator for Azure Cosmos DB would be beneficial. It would be very handy to have a Docker container that developers can use locally. Although, I know there is a free tier and so on and so forth, having a local environment would be nice. For example, SQL Server is very portable. You can even install it on your machine. That is the number one thing that is missing in Azure Cosmos DB. The second improvement area is the IDE of choice. That means how you interact with Azure Cosmos DB. For example, with SQL Server, you have SQL Server Management Studio. I know there is a little bit of support for Azure Cosmos DB in Azure Data Studio, but it is not heavily advertised or it does not feel like first-class citizen support. Developer experience or developer tooling is missing in terms of interacting with the database. Better developer tools or an IDE for interacting with Azure Cosmos DB would enhance the developer experience. Lastly, there is some mixed messaging about what Azure Cosmos DB is, given its multiple APIs. There are so many Azure Cosmos DB APIs available. There is NoSQL. There are MongoDB, Gremlin, and others. There is still some mixed messaging for others who are new to Azure Cosmos DB about what Azure Cosmos DB is. Is this like MongoDB, but then there is also MongoDB in Azure Cosmos DB? I know it well, and I know that the default one is just NoSQL, but others I have interacted with over the last ten years or so get confused.

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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."

"The main feature of ClickHouse is the optimizer because we had too many records to deduplicate, and the optimizer took this task by itself."

"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."

"We faced a challenge with deploying ClickHouse onto Kubernetes. Recently, we've been using ClickHouse Cloud, and the main issue is the high cost of the cloud service. The pricing isn't very competitive, especially for startups. I would instead buy a server and self-host if I have enough disk space. Besides that, ClickHouse has done very well, with clear goals and effective execution."

"The tool is column-based and infinitely scalable."

"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."

More ClickHouse pros

"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is its ability to handle concurrency and consistency."

"The querying language and the SDKs they've provided over the years have been phenomenal, giving us a significant advantage."

"Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is very fast."

"The solution is extremely user-friendly and easy to navigate."

"Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is very fast. Data retrieval and data storage are very quick."

"We chose Azure Cosmos DB initially because of the type of data that we needed to store. We have a schema that is very nondeterministic and flexible. It is always changing based on whatever data we need to acquire from different devices, so we needed a document store with a flexible schema."

"It is integral to our business because it helps manage schema and metadata for all our documents and customers. The AI insights we glean based on Azure OpenAI also end up in Cosmos DB. We need a NoSQL store because the schema is dynamic and flexible, so Cosmos DB is a great fit. It has four nines or possibly five nines availability, excellent geo-distribution, and auto-scaling."

"It works reasonably fast. You can retain the original format of the document as received by the third-party system."

More Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB pros

Cons

"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."

"The main issue is the lack of documentation. Many features are available but are not fully documented, which can make finding information challenging."

"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."

"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."

"We had a lot of troubles while deploying a whole cluster."

"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."

"One issue is that you need persistent volumes. Otherwise, if one system goes down, you lose data in that cluster."

More ClickHouse cons

"The biggest problem is the learning curve and other database services like RDS."

"Better documentation on how to integrate with other components would be helpful because I was struggling with this."

"I would like to see Cosmos DB introduce a feature that would convert machine language to human-readable queries."

"Azure Cosmos DB is generally a costly resource compared to other Azure resources. It comes with a high cost."

"The size of the continuation token in Azure Cosmos DB should be static rather than increasing with more data, as it can lead to application crashes. They should use a static key size."

"The current data analytics of Cosmos DB is inefficient for large-scale queries due to its transactional design."

"A better description and more guidance would help because the first time I created it, I didn't understand that a container is similar to a table in SQL."

"The cost can sometimes be high, especially during cross-partition queries with large data amounts."

More Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool is open-source."

"ClickHouse has an open-source version, which is free to use and has almost all the features."

"We used the free, community version of ClickHouse."

"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 free."

"ClickHouse Cloud is not expensive compared to other databases, costing a few dollars per month while providing fast performance."

"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."

"I would rate Cosmos DB's cost at seven out of ten, with ten being the highest."

"Because of the lack of understanding about RUs, the costs become unpredictable. It sometimes goes over the budget."

"The pricing is perceived as being on the higher side. However, if you have large data operations, it might reduce costs due to performance efficiencies."

"The pricing and licensing model was initially difficult to understand, but as soon as I learned what was going on and how it was priced, it was pretty easy."

"The pricing model of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is a bit complex."

"It seems to have helped significantly. We were using a different database system previously, and one of the reasons for acquiring Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB was cost."

"The RU's use case determines our license fees."

"It is expensive. The moment you have high availability options and they are mixed with the type of multitenant architecture you use, the pricing is on the higher end."

More Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

26%

Financial Services Firm

16%

Educational Organization

12%

Manufacturing Company

Legal Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

11%

Comms Service Provider

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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...

See all answers

What needs improvement with ClickHouse?

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

What do you like most about Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?

The initial setup is simple and straightforward. You can set up a Cosmos DB in a day, even configuring things like availability zones around the world.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?

Its cost is transparent. Pricing depends on the transaction and data size, but overall, it is cheaper compared to hosting it on your corporate network due to other factors like power consumption. C...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?

I had a challenging experience implementing the emulator with a Mac. I had to install the emulator in a Docker container because it is not natively compatible. A significant amount of time was spen...

See all answers

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ClickHouse

April 2025

Download ClickHouse product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

April 2025

Download Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB product report

Also Known As

No data available

Microsoft Azure DocumentDB, MS Azure Cosmos DB

Overview

ClickHouse is renowned for its speed, scalability, and real-time query performance. Its compatibility with SQL standards enhances flexibility while enabling integration with popular tools.

ClickHouse leverages a column-based architecture for efficient data compression and real-time analytics. It seamlessly integrates with tools like Kafka and Tableau and is effective in handling large datasets due to its cost-efficient aggregation capabilities. With robust data deduplication and strong community backing, users can access comprehensive documentation and up-to-date functionality. However, improvements in third-party integration, cloud deployment, and handling of SQL syntax differences are noted, impacting ease-of-use and migration from other databases.

What features make ClickHouse outstanding?

Speed and Scalability: Enables rapid deployment and scalability, particularly on Kubernetes.
SQL Compatibility: Aligns with SQL standards for flexible database management.
Column-based Structure: Offers efficient data compression and quick query performance.
Integration Support: Works with Kafka, Tableau, and other popular platforms.
Data Deduplication: Manages complex data duplication efficiently.

What benefits should users consider?

Cost-Efficiency: Reduces expenses while managing large datasets effectively.
Real-Time Analytics: Provides fast data processing for real-time insights.
Flexibility: Offers multiple integration points and compatibility options.
Robust Documentation: Backed by an active development community, ensuring comprehensive support.

ClickHouse is deployed in sectors like telecommunications for passive monitoring and is beneficial for data analytics, logging Clickstream data, and as an ETL engine. Organizations harness it for machine learning applications when combined with GPT. With the ability to be installed independently, it's an attractive option for avoiding cloud service costs.

ClickHouse

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is a globally distributed, multi-model database service providing scalability, user-friendliness, and seamless integration, suitable for managing large volumes of structured and unstructured data across diverse applications.

Azure Cosmos DB is renowned for its scalability, stability, and ease of integration, offering robust support for multiple data models and APIs. Its capacity for handling unstructured data efficiently and providing real-time analytics makes it ideal for applications requiring high performance and global distribution. With features like automatic failover and integration with Microsoft products, users benefit from cost optimization and secure data handling. Enhancement opportunities include simplifying queries, improving documentation, and expanding backup and analytics functionalities.

What are the most important features of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?

Scalability and Autoscaling: Efficiently handles growing data and user demands.
Multi-Model Support: Adapts to different data models seamlessly.
Global Distribution: Provides low-latency access across multiple regions.
Automatic Failover: Ensures high availability and reliability.
Integration with Microsoft Products: Offers seamless connectivity with Azure services.

What benefits should users look for in Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB reviews?

Performance and Speed: Exceptionally fast processing for real-time data analytics.
Cost Optimization: Tools for managing expenses effectively.
Secure Data Handling: Implements strong data security measures.
Flexible Data Ingestion: Supports diverse data ingestion methods.

Azure Cosmos DB is frequently used in sectors like web, mobile, IoT, and analytics. It supports applications as a key-value store, processes real-time data, and enables global scalability with low-latency access. Its big data management capabilities and integration with Azure services enhance its utility across industries.

Microsoft

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

TomTom, KPMG Australia, Bosch, ASOS, Mercedes Benz, NBA, Zero Friction, Nederlandse Spoorwegen, Kinectify

Buyer's Guide

ClickHouse vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

April 2025

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