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ClickHouse vs CrateDB comparison

 

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

ClickHouse
Ranking in Open Source Databases
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
Vector Databases (8th)
CrateDB
Ranking in Open Source Databases
20th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.0
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Open Source Databases category, the mindshare of ClickHouse is 6.4%, up from 5.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of CrateDB is 1.1%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Open Source Databases Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
ClickHouse6.4%
CrateDB1.1%
Other92.5%
Open Source Databases
 

Featured Reviews

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.
FC
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"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."
"There is no better option than ClickHouse in all OLAP-based databases, so I think it is best to use ClickHouse in that regard."
"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."
"ClickHouse is a user-friendly solution that tries to be compatible with SQL standards."
"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."
"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

"I would like ClickHouse to work more on integration with third-party tools."
"We would like to have fuzzy search capabilities in ClickHouse like we had with Kibana because there are scenarios where we cannot search keywords fuzzily in ClickHouse, whereas Elasticsearch allows that, and in such cases, Elasticsearch outperforms ClickHouse."
"ClickHouse has its own concept of database triggers and doesn't support traditional database triggers."
"In terms of needed improvements, some enhancements in documentation are necessary."
"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."
"ClickHouse could be improved further in several areas."
"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."
"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."
"One area for improvement in CrateDB could be the command line interface, as sometimes it was not very easy to understand."
"CrateDB was good regarding scalability, though not excellent."
 

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."
"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."
"ClickHouse has an open-source version, which is free to use and has almost all the features."
"ClickHouse Cloud is not expensive compared to other databases, costing a few dollars per month while providing fast performance."
"The tool is open-source."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
12%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
University
20%
Computer Software Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business12
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise8
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...
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...
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.
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 ...
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...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

Find out what your peers are saying about ClickHouse vs. CrateDB and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
908,834 professionals have used our research since 2012.