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ClickHouse vs Elastic Search 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

ClickHouse
Ranking in Vector Databases
10th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Open Source Databases (6th)
Elastic Search
Ranking in Vector Databases
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
67
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (9th), Search as a Service (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Vector Databases category, the mindshare of ClickHouse is 3.2%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Search is 5.8%, down from 7.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Vector Databases
 

Featured Reviews

ArpitShah - PeerSpot reviewer
Open-source freedom with efficient data handling and room for documentation growth
A significant area for improvement is the documentation, which is not comprehensive and lacks centralized resources, making it difficult to find information. Additionally, ClickHouse lacks robust support for transactional data, which limits its use as a primary database. My developer experience could be enhanced through better-organized documentation, perhaps by offering a cheat sheet or centralized guide for common setup and usage scenarios.
Anand_Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
Captures data from all other sources and becomes a MOM aka monitoring of monitors
Scalability and ROI are the areas they have to improve. Their license terms are based on the number of cores. If you increase the number of cores, it becomes very difficult to manage at a large scale. For example, if I have a $3 million project, I won't sell it because if we're dealing with a 10 TB or 50 TB system, there are a lot of systems and applications to monitor, and I have to make an MOM (Mean of Max) for everything. This is because of the cost impact. Also, when you have horizontal scaling, it's like a multi-story building with only one elevator. You have to run around, and it's not efficient. Even the smallest task becomes difficult. That's the problem with horizontal scaling. They need to improve this because if they increase the cores and adjust the licensing accordingly, it would make more sense.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"ClickHouse is open source with no vendor lock-in, providing excellent freedom to choose any vendor without restrictions."
"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."
"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 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's most valuable feature is a database. It supports portal APIs and offers good flexibility."
"It's easier to work with big data and calculations using the product."
"The main feature of ClickHouse is the optimizer because we had too many records to deduplicate, and the optimizer took this task by itself."
"ClickHouse is a user-friendly solution that tries to be compatible with SQL standards."
"The most valuable features of Elastic Enterprise Search are it's cloud-ready and we do a lot of infrastructure as code. By using ELK, we're able to deploy the solution as part of our ISC deployment."
"The initial installation and setup were straightforward."
"You have dashboards, it is visual, there are maps, you can create canvases. It's more visual than anything that I've ever used."
"The products comes with REST APIs."
"I really like the visualization that you can do within it. That's really handy. Product-wise, it is a very good and stable product."
"A good use case is saving metadata of your systems for data cataloging. Various systems, like those opened in metadata and similar applications, use Elasticsearch to store their text data."
"The most valuable feature for us is the analytics that we can configure and view using Kibana."
"Elastic Enterprise Search is scalable. On a scale of one to 10, with one being not scalable and 10 being very scalable, I give Elastic Enterprise Search a 10."
 

Cons

"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."
"The main issue is the lack of documentation. Many features are available but are not fully documented, which can make finding information challenging."
"ClickHouse has its own concept of database triggers and doesn't support traditional database triggers."
"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 would like ClickHouse to work more on integration with third-party tools."
"We had a lot of troubles while deploying a whole cluster."
"If you join our team, it should be easy for you to use ClickHouse, especially if you are a developer. However, you need to read the documentation and understand the problems you are trying to solve."
"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."
"Could have more open source tools and testing."
"Elastic Search needs to improve authentication. It also needs to work on the Kibana visualization dashboard."
"I would rate the stability a seven out of ten. We faced a few issues."
"Technical support should be faster."
"Ratio aggregation is not supported in this solution."
"Elastic Enterprise Search could improve its SSL integration easier. We should not need to go to the back-end servers to do configuration, we should be able to do it on the GUI."
"The documentation regarding customization could be better."
"There is another solution I'm testing which has a 500 record limit when you do a search on Elastic Enterprise Search. That's the only area in which I'm not sure whether it's a limitation on our end in terms of knowledge or a technical limitation from Elastic Enterprise Search. There is another solution we are looking at that rides on Elastic Enterprise Search. And the limit is for any sort of records that you're doing or data analysis you're trying to do, you can only extract 500 records at a time. I know the open-source nature has a lot of limitations, Otherwise, Elastic Enterprise Search is a fantastic solution and I'd recommend it to anyone."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool is open-source."
"If you have an in-house deployment on Kubernetes or something, it's going to be very cheap since you'll be managing everything."
"We used the free, community version of ClickHouse."
"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."
"ClickHouse Cloud is not expensive compared to other databases, costing a few dollars per month while providing fast performance."
"The tool is free."
"ClickHouse has an open-source version, which is free to use and has almost all the features."
"The solution is free."
"The solution is affordable."
"The basic license is free, but it comes with a lot of features that aren't free. With a gold license, we get active directory integration. With a platinum license, we get alerting."
"​The pricing and license model are clear: node-based model."
"The solution is less expensive than Stackdriver and Grafana."
"The tool is an open-source product."
"The cost varies based on factors like usage volume, network load, data storage size, and service utilization. If your usage isn't too extensive, the cost will be lower."
"An X-Pack license is more affordable than Splunk."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
27%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Educational Organization
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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?
A significant area for improvement is the documentation, which is not comprehensive and lacks centralized resources, making it difficult to find information. Additionally, ClickHouse lacks robust s...
What is your primary use case for ClickHouse?
The main use case for ClickHouse is as a data warehouse for handling large volumes of data that exceed the capabilities of traditional databases like Postgres. I use it for creating dashboards and ...
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?
I don't know about pricing. That is dealt with by the sales team and our account team. I was not involved with that.
What needs improvement with ELK Elasticsearch?
I found an issue with Elasticsearch in terms of aggregation. They are good, yet the rules written for this are not really good. There is a maximum of 10,000 entries, so the limitation means that if...
 

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: March 2025.
848,716 professionals have used our research since 2012.