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ClickHouse vs Elastic Search comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 23, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
6.8
ClickHouse boosts productivity with cost and time savings, enhancing database performance and developer efficiency significantly despite unspecified savings.
Sentiment score
4.4
Elastic Search enhanced efficiency and performance, offering substantial time and cost savings, despite mixed opinions on return metrics.
I estimate we save four to five hours per person per week due to this efficiency, translating to around 20 to 25 hours saved monthly for each individual.
AIML engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
We could reduce the amount of employees needed when we migrated to ClickHouse Cloud.
Founder at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
With ClickHouse, we didn't need to spend much on resources, cutting costs by around 25 to 30%.
Associate software architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
We have not purchased any licensed products, and our use of Elastic Search is purely open-source, contributing positively to our ROI.
Software Engineer at Government of India
It is stable, and we do not encounter critical issues like server downtime, which could result in data loss.
SOC A2 at Innodata-ISOGEN
The main benefits observed from using Elastic Search include improvements in operational efficiency, along with cost, time, and resource savings.
Senior Devops Engineer at Ubique Digital LTD
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.6
ClickHouse offers knowledgeable support, with cloud users praising responsiveness, while community resources aid open-source user self-reliance.
Sentiment score
6.2
Elastic Search offers expert support and documentation, though response times and communication could improve for some users.
If more timely support could be provided during critical issues, situations could have been resolved much more quickly, saving considerable time.
Level 2 Software Engineer at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
When we faced any challenges, the ClickHouse support team provided helpful resolutions.
AIML engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
We utilize AVN ClickHouse, which is effectively managed by AVN, providing bug fixes and developing new functionalities along with architecture reviews.
Distinguished AI Leader at Walmart Global Tech at Walmart
The customer support for Elastic Search is one of the best I have ever tried.
Software Developer at a media company with 10,001+ employees
They have always been really responsible and responsive to my requests.
Security Lead at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees
It has been sufficient to visit conferences such as SCALE in Southern California Linux Expo, where Elastic Search has a booth to talk to their staff.
Principal Scientific Computing Software Engineer at a educational organization with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
ClickHouse is praised for its scalability, efficiently handling large data volumes in distributed systems with solutions like AWS and Kubernetes.
Sentiment score
7.3
Elastic Search is highly scalable, enabling efficient node addition, though sharding, replication, and storage demands require careful management.
The vertical scalability is impressive, with high insert throughput, allowing millions of rows per second with low latency.
AIML engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
ClickHouse is highly scalable.
Software Analyst at CLSA
The scalability of ClickHouse is great.
Senior Software Engineer at a wholesaler/distributor with 1,001-5,000 employees
I would rate its scalability a ten.
Backend Developer
Since we're on the cloud, whenever we need to upgrade or add resources, they handle everything.
Security Lead at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees
We haven't encountered any problems so far, and there is the potential for auto-scaling.
Head of Data Management at Zeno Health
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
ClickHouse offers stable, efficient performance for large data sets, with some concerns about memory use and development inconsistencies.
Sentiment score
7.7
Elastic Search is stable and reliable, despite some challenges, as proper management ensures performance under varying loads.
I can confidently say that it is very consistent and stable even when handling high volume loads and real-time streaming analytics across financial and operational domains.
AIML engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
ClickHouse handles large volumes of data efficiently.
Software Analyst at CLSA
ClickHouse is stable, as we did not encounter stability issues in production.
Software Development Engineer at a tech vendor with 201-500 employees
The data transfer sometimes exceeded the bandwidth limits without proper notification, which caused issues.
SOC A2 at Innodata-ISOGEN
The stability of Elasticsearch was very high.
Backend Developer
When you put one keyword, everything related to that keyword in your ecosystem will showcase all the results.
Chief Information Security Officer at CDSL Ventures Limited
 

Room For Improvement

ClickHouse users seek improved documentation, integration enhancements, better cloud pricing, and solutions for operational complexity and SQL compatibility issues.
Elastic Search needs better security, pricing, machine learning, scalability, ease of use, and support, facing significant user challenges.
Another challenge is the lack of robust support for transactional databases, which limits its use as a primary database.
Software Analyst at CLSA
ClickHouse should be able to import data from other types of sources like Parquet and Iceberg tables and all the new upcoming data formats.
Senior Software Engineer at Karvy Fintech
My experience with ClickHouse's documentation is that it needs improvement; I think it can be made more beginner-friendly, while the community support is really good.
Founder at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
From a technical point of view, there are no significant issues recalled as Elastic Search has been absolutely awesome for this use case and covers 100% of the needs.
Principal Scientific Computing Software Engineer at a educational organization with 1,001-5,000 employees
If I need to parse one million records saved into Elastic Search, it becomes a nightmare because I need to do the pagination, and it is very problematic in that regard.
Lead Engineer at Spidersilk
Observability features like search latency, indexing rate, and maybe rejected requests should be added to make the platform more reliable and accessible for everyone.
Senior System Engineer at EPAM Systems
 

Setup Cost

ClickHouse offers flexible, cost-efficient pricing with open-source and cloud options, though lacks Windows support, balancing cost and performance.
Elastic Search's open-source version is free, but enterprises face costs in skills, training, support, and premium features.
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing indicates that it is very expensive—ClickHouse is the most expensive option.
Founder at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
ClickHouse is open source with no hidden fees, offering cost-effective data management.
Software Analyst at CLSA
I found ClickHouse's pricing to be efficient in comparison to other services such as Redshift.
AIML engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
On the AWS side, it is very expensive because they charge based on query basis or how much data is transferred in and out, making it very expensive.
Lead Engineer at Spidersilk
Having the hosted solution and not having to pay for essentially a DevOps person on staff to manage makes it affordable.
CTO at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
You can host it on-premises, which would incur zero cost, or take it as a SaaS-based service, where the expenses remain minimal.
Senior Software Engineer at Agoda
 

Valuable Features

ClickHouse provides fast, scalable data storage and retrieval with seamless integration, open-source flexibility, and strong community support.
Elasticsearch offers real-time monitoring, scalability, and integration with Kibana, enhancing data retrieval, security, customization, and decision-making.
ClickHouse has reduced our storage cost and improved our 99th percentile latency by 40%.
Senior Software Engineer at Karvy Fintech
For cost optimization, after deploying the cluster on-premises and using S3 Express, approximately 5x cost savings were achieved on data storage.
Level 2 Software Engineer at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
ClickHouse positively impacted our organization by absorbing the whole logging system without hassle, storing logs for six months efficiently.
Associate software architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Elastic Search makes handling large data volumes efficient and supports complex search operations.
Software Engineer at Government of India
The most valuable feature of Elasticsearch was the quick search capability, allowing us to search by any criteria needed.
Backend Developer
The speed with which Elastic Search is able to search through all of the documents we place into it is quite remarkable, as we search through 65 billion documents in less than a second in most cases, on a constant consistent basis.
Director, Software Engineering at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Categories and Ranking

ClickHouse
Ranking in Vector Databases
7th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
Open Source Databases (4th)
Elastic Search
Ranking in Vector Databases
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
88
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (6th), Search as a Service (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Vector Databases category, the mindshare of ClickHouse is 4.7%, up from 2.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Search is 4.0%, down from 6.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Vector Databases Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Elastic Search4.0%
ClickHouse4.7%
Other91.3%
Vector Databases
 

Featured Reviews

Yush Mittal - PeerSpot reviewer
Level 2 Software Engineer at a computer software company with 201-500 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.
Vaibhav Shukla - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at Agoda
Search performance has transformed large-scale intent discovery and hybrid query handling
While Elastic Search is a good product, I see areas for improvement, particularly regarding the misconception that any amount of data can simply be dumped into Elastic Search. When creating an index, careful consideration of data massaging is essential. Elastic Search stores mappings for various data types, which must remain below a certain threshold to maintain functionality. Users need to throttle the number of fields for searching to avoid overloading the system and ensure that the design of the document is efficient for the Elastic Search index. Additionally, I suggest utilizing ILM periodically throughout the year to manage data shuffling between clusters, preventing hotspots in the distribution of requests across nodes.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business37
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise43
 

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 do you like most about ELK Elasticsearch?
Logsign provides us with the capability to execute multiple queries according to our requirements. The indexing is very high, making it effective for storing and retrieving logs. The real-time anal...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ELK Elasticsearch?
Elastic Search's pricing totally depends on the server. Managed services from AWS are used, and we have worked on a self-managed Elastic Search cluster. On the AWS side, it is very expensive becaus...
What needs improvement with ELK Elasticsearch?
To be honest, there is only one downside of Elastic Search that makes sense because we use a basic license, which is a free license. We do not have some features available because of the free licen...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Elastic Enterprise Search, Swiftype, Elastic Cloud
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
T-Mobile, Adobe, Booking.com, BMW, Telegraph Media Group, Cisco, Karbon, Deezer, NORBr, Labelbox, Fingerprint, Relativity, NHS Hospital, Met Office, Proximus, Go1, Mentat, Bluestone Analytics, Humanz, Hutch, Auchan, Sitecore, Linklaters, Socren, Infotrack, Pfizer, Engadget, Airbus, Grab, Vimeo, Ticketmaster, Asana, Twilio, Blizzard, Comcast, RWE and many others.
Find out what your peers are saying about ClickHouse vs. Elastic Search and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,114 professionals have used our research since 2012.