ClickHouse vs CrateDB comparison

ClickHouse and CrateDB are both solutions in the Open Source Databases category. ClickHouse is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.6, while CrateDB is ranked #19 with an average rating of 7.7. ClickHouse holds a 6.5% mindshare in OSD, compared to CrateDB’s 1.0% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of ClickHouse users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of CrateDB users who would recommend it.

ClickHouse

Read 21 ClickHouse reviews

5,532 Views
2,711 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

CrateDB

Read 3 CrateDB reviews

583 Views
461 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

ClickHouse

CrateDB

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 1, 2026

ClickHouse and CrateDB are competing products in the realm of database management solutions. ClickHouse has a clear advantage in terms of speed and scalability, while CrateDB stands out with its SQL compatibility and flexibility.

Features: ClickHouse offers exceptional analytical capabilities with high-speed query processing and columnar storage, making it ideal for real-time data analytics. CrateDB provides robust SQL support and real-time analytics, catering to applications requiring frequent data updates. The primary difference lies in ClickHouse's emphasis on read performance versus CrateDB's flexibility in dealing with complex data types.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: ClickHouse is recognized for its straightforward deployment process, optimizing for performance with minimal server resources. CrateDB provides comprehensive documentation and community support, facilitating smoother deployment experiences. ClickHouse's edge lies in its simplicity, whereas CrateDB provides a more adaptable deployment experience with extensive support options.

Pricing and ROI: ClickHouse presents a cost-effective solution with lower initial setup costs, ensuring rapid ROI through its efficient use of resources. CrateDB, while typically requiring higher upfront investment, promises significant returns through its flexible architecture and scalable infrastructure. The key difference is ClickHouse’s affordability and efficiency compared to CrateDB's higher initial costs offset by enhanced scalability and customizability.

To learn more, read our detailed ClickHouse vs. CrateDB Report (Updated: April 2026).

Buyer's Guide

ClickHouse vs. CrateDB

April 2026

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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 Open Source Databases

3rd

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Vector Databases (7th)

CrateDB

Ranking in Open Source Databases

19th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

5.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Open Source Databases category, the mindshare of ClickHouse is 6.5%, up from 3.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of CrateDB is 1.0%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Open Source Databases Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
ClickHouse	6.5%
CrateDB	1.0%
Other	92.5%

Open Source Databases

Featured Reviews

reviewer2785038

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.

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FranciscoCampos

product owner at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Data platform has delivered real-time casino gameplay insights but still needs broader expertise

The best features CrateDB offers in my experience include many functionalities that allow you to purge data, maintain data, keep the database clean and essentially updated. CrateDB also allows us to store many records, and I think the performance is very strong compared to other databases or technologies. CrateDB's performance stood out for me as it allowed me to query results in less than seconds, which was optimal and enabled real-time analytics. I found it to be a very distributed SQL engine, which was beneficial considering our specific requirements. It supports multi-model and flexible schemas for structured and semi-structured data, JSON, time series for loads, and BLOBs, along with integrated performance improvements and faster ingestion than what I recall from other databases, plus better query optimizations. CrateDB has positively impacted my organization by allowing us to store several years of gameplay from our Asian customers, which involves millions and millions of records generated every day. Positively, we did not experience significant downtimes or outages, meaning the gameplay was not affected at all during these two years.

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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

"There is no better option than ClickHouse in all OLAP-based databases, so I think it is best to use ClickHouse in that regard."

"The tool's most valuable feature is a database. It supports portal APIs and offers good flexibility."

"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 is open source with no vendor lock-in, providing excellent freedom to choose any vendor without restrictions."

"ClickHouse Cloud saves a lot of time for our DevOps engineers since there isn't much deployment involved and everything is served directly, leading to increased efficiency and productivity."

"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."

"ClickHouse provides great query speeds because it is an OLAP database, so naturally, it provides higher speeds."

"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."

More ClickHouse pros

"CrateDB has positively impacted my organization by allowing us to store several years of gameplay from our Asian customers, which involves millions and millions of records generated every day, and we did not experience significant downtimes or outages, meaning the gameplay was not affected at all during these two years."

"CrateDB positively impacted my organization by reducing the time needed for processes, and its impressive scalability made it easy to start with one server and then horizontally scale to multiple nodes to retrieve data, which helped my company gain more customers."

"CrateDB fit into my project very well as it was an excellent database that allowed me to query analyses I did not think I would be able to perform."

Cons

"The open-source version of ClickHouse is not very scalable."

"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."

"Too many issues exist for beginners to set up ClickHouse. Many parameters must be configured, such as maximum scatter part settings that determine when writing to a table stops."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"ClickHouse could be improved with self-hosting capabilities and better documentation for how to host it at scale."

More ClickHouse cons

"CrateDB was good regarding scalability, though not excellent."

"One area for improvement in CrateDB could be the command line interface, as sometimes it was not very easy to understand."

"CrateDB can be improved as it is not very popular, which means there are not many people dedicated or experienced with this particular technology, making it less usable or suitable for many companies."

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

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

"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."

"The tool is free."

"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."

Information not available

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

14%

Outsourcing Company

Comms Service Provider

University

22%

Computer Software Company

17%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	13
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	8

No data available

Questions from the Community

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...

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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 ...

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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...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CrateDB?

CrateDB was free when I used it, so there was no pricing associated with it, as we used the free version.

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What needs improvement with CrateDB?

I wanted to use CrateDB for visualization as well, but it did not provide what I needed, so we had to opt for Grafana for the visualization instead. Regarding needed improvements, I was quite able ...

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What is your primary use case for CrateDB?

I used CrateDB for a one-off project from April to August in 2025. My main use case was a digital twin project designed to create a FIWARE-based application with a focus on optimizing the data mana...

See all answers

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ClickHouse

May 2026

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Buyer's Guide

CrateDB

May 2026

Download CrateDB product report

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

CrateDB is a highly scalable SQL database designed for real-time analytics on machine data, capable of handling structured and unstructured data with ease.

CrateDB provides a unique approach to database management by combining SQL accessibility with NoSQL flexibility. It offers horizontal scaling and distributed SQL queries, enabling users to perform time-series data analysis and geospatial queries effectively. Known for its ability to handle large data volumes, CrateDB is ideal for industries that require fast ingestion and querying capabilities. It supports full-text search, making it versatile for applications that demand quick search operations within large datasets. Users appreciate its open-source model and robust performance, though improvements can be made in areas like documentation and integration with other tools.

What are the most important features of CrateDB?

SQL Interface: Allows easy data manipulation and query with a familiar language.
Horizontal Scalability: Supports dynamic and flexible expansion of resources.
Geospatial Queries: Enables processing location-based data efficiently.
Full-Text Search: Offers advanced search capabilities within datasets.

What are the key benefits and ROI of using CrateDB?

Cost Efficiency: Reduces overhead by optimizing data ingestion and storage.
Performance: High-speed data processing boosts operational efficiency.
Scalability: Easily manages increasing data loads without significant performance drops.

In industries like IoT and telecommunications, CrateDB is deployed for real-time monitoring and analysis of sensor data, providing insights that drive decision-making processes. Its applicability in smart city projects also showcases its power in managing vast amounts of real-time data efficiently. The intuitive nature of SQL coupled with robust data handling capabilities makes CrateDB a choice for businesses looking to innovate big data processes without compromising on performance or scalability.

CrateDB

Buyer's Guide

ClickHouse vs. CrateDB

April 2026

Free Report: ClickHouse vs. CrateDB

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