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Cassandra vs ClickHouse comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 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

Cassandra
Ranking in Vector Databases
14th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
NoSQL Databases (6th)
ClickHouse
Ranking in Vector Databases
11th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Open Source Databases (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Vector Databases category, the mindshare of Cassandra is 1.8%, up from 1.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ClickHouse is 4.0%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Vector Databases
 

Featured Reviews

Himanshu Amodwala - PeerSpot reviewer
Well-equipped to handle a massive influx of data and billions of requests
The use of Cassandra in real-time data analytics has been pivotal for our e-commerce platform. As our platform operates 24/7, providing services to sellers and customers alike, the need for real-time updates is paramount. For instance, when a customer leaves comments or feedback on an image, they anticipate an immediate reflection of these changes on the portal. Similarly, sellers altering product attributes or updating images expect instant visibility of these modifications. Handling large data volumes with Cassandra has been an excellent experience. Despite challenges related to the influx, these were not attributed to Cassandra itself but rather to middle-layer issues. Generally, it demonstrated scalability with workloads, thanks to its horizontal scaling capabilities. We could easily add new nodes to the system as needed, ensuring the platform coped well with increasing loads. The tool's most beneficial feature for scalability is its entire architecture. The absence of a single point of failure or a leader within the ecosystem contributes to its robust scalability. This key aspect influenced our decision to opt for the Cassandra ecosystem. In terms of performance, it demonstrated the ability to handle approximately 1.6 billion requests per day. This was achieved on AWS using EC2 instances, and it was during a period about four to five years ago.
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We can add almost one million columns to the solution."
"Cassandra has some features that are more useful for specific use cases where you have time series where you have huge amounts of writes. That should be quick, but not specifically the reads. We needed to have quicker reads and writes and this is why we are using Cassandra right now."
"I am getting much better performance than relational databases."
"The time series data was one of the best features along with auto publishing."
"The most valuable feature of Cassandra is its fast retrieval. Additionally, the solution can handle large amounts of data. It is the quickest application we use."
"The solution's database capabilities are very good."
"The use of Cassandra in real-time data analytics has been pivotal for our e-commerce platform. As our platform operates 24/7, providing services to sellers and customers alike, the need for real-time updates is paramount."
"The most valuable features of this solution are its speed and distributed nature."
"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."
"The tool is column-based and infinitely scalable."
"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."
"The tool's most valuable feature is a database. It supports portal APIs and offers good flexibility."
"ClickHouse is open source with no vendor lock-in, providing excellent freedom to choose any vendor without restrictions."
"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 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."
 

Cons

"The disc space is lacking. You need to free it up as you are working."
"Batching bulk data can cause performance issues."
"Fine-tuning was a bit of a challenge."
"Cassandra can improve by adding more built-in tools. For example, if you want to do some maintenance activities in the cluster, we have to depend on third-party tools. Having these tools build-in would be e benefit."
"It can be difficult to analyze what's going on inside of the database relative to other databases. It can also be difficult to troubleshoot sometimes."
"Maybe they can improve their performance in data fetching from a high volume of data sets."
"Interface is not user friendly."
"Doesn't support a solution that can give aggregation."
"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."
"We had a lot of troubles while deploying a whole cluster."
"ClickHouse has its own concept of database triggers and doesn't support traditional database triggers."
"The main issue is the lack of documentation. Many features are available but are not fully documented, which can make finding information challenging."
"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."
"I would like ClickHouse to work more on integration with third-party tools."
"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 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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There are licensing fees that must be paid, but I'm not sure if they are paid monthly or yearly."
"Cassandra is a free open source solution, but there is a commercial version available called DataStax Enterprise."
"I use the tool's open-source version."
"We pay for a license."
"We are using the open-source version of Cassandra, the solution is free."
"I don't have the specific numbers on pricing, but it was fairly priced."
"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."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Retailer
6%
Computer Software Company
22%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Educational Organization
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Cassandra?
The use of Cassandra in real-time data analytics has been pivotal for our e-commerce platform. As our platform operates 24/7, providing services to sellers and customers alike, the need for real-ti...
What needs improvement with Cassandra?
While Cassandra can handle NoSQL, I think there should be more flexibility for whole schema design when data is stored in wide columns. Additionally, I believe that eventual consistency should be e...
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...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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Find out what your peers are saying about Cassandra vs. ClickHouse and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
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