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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

"The solution's most valuable feature is its documentation, which allows new users to easily learn, deploy, and use it."
"It's very easy to set up and runs easily."
"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."
"ClickHouse has positively impacted my organization by replacing PostgreSQL, which required complex foreign tables for queries, and with ClickHouse we now have Cube.js for easier data visualization."
"ClickHouse has positively impacted my organization, as there was an entire exercise done on which database we were supposed to use for solving our problems, and we found ClickHouse was the one performing the best, which is when we adopted it."
"The tool's most valuable feature is a database. It supports portal APIs and offers good flexibility."
"ClickHouse provides great query speeds because it is an OLAP database, so naturally, it provides higher speeds."
"The main feature of ClickHouse is the optimizer because we had too many records to deduplicate, and the optimizer took this task by itself."
"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."
"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."
 

Cons

"I think Chroma doesn't have a ready-made containerized image available."
"The hybrid algorithm needs improvement."
"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."
"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."
"We had a lot of troubles while deploying a whole cluster."
"ClickHouse could be improved further in several areas."
"I chose nine out of ten because, as I mentioned, the improvement side and the ten thousand partition limit created issues that we were hitting quite frequently, but with some schema manipulations we did manage to find a workaround, although that could have been avoided had things been better documented on how we could have solved this problem in a different approach, which took some bandwidth."
"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."
"In terms of needed improvements, some enhancements in documentation are necessary."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The current version is an open-source."
"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."
"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 has an open-source version, which is free to use and has almost all the features."
"We used the free, community version of ClickHouse."
"The tool is open-source."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
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

Ask a question
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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.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.