ClickHouse vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB comparison

ClickHouse and Microsoft are both solutions in the Vector Databases category. ClickHouse is ranked #11 with an average rating of 8.8, while Microsoft is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.2. ClickHouse holds a 3.8% mindshare in VD, compared to Microsoft’s 4.0% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of ClickHouse users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

ClickHouse

Read 11 ClickHouse reviews

1,068 Views
51 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Read 98 Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB reviews

1,911 Views
330 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

ClickHouse

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 2025

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB and ClickHouse compete in the database solutions category. Cosmos DB appears to have an advantage due to its scalability and extensive integration, whereas ClickHouse excels in performance and cost-effectiveness.

Features: Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB offers flexibility in database models, multi-region scalability, and strong integration with Microsoft's ecosystem. It provides support for various APIs and is beneficial for applications needing global distribution. ClickHouse stands out for its high-speed real-time query performance, efficient data compression, and capability to handle big data, making it ideal for startups.

Room for Improvement: Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB could improve in pricing management, clearer documentation, and enhanced query capabilities. Users seek better cross-container joins and support for analytics. ClickHouse faces challenges in documentation clarity, third-party integration, and reducing setup complexity. Addressing these can enhance its user-friendliness.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is mainly deployed in public cloud environments and offers flexibility with technical support, although some find quality inconsistent. ClickHouse provides both cloud and on-premises deployment, with positive customer service experiences reported, benefitting from responsive support.

Pricing and ROI: Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB's subscription model is seen as costly but justified by features like reliability and scalability. Its pricing complexity can be challenging for small businesses. ClickHouse, being open-source, is cost-effective with no licensing fees, offering significant ROI especially in self-hosted formats due to its performance and scalability efficiency.

To learn more, read our detailed ClickHouse vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

ClickHouse vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

June 2025

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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 Vector Databases

11th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Open Source Databases (6th)

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Ranking in Vector Databases

1st

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Database as a Service (DBaaS) (6th), NoSQL Databases (5th), Managed NoSQL Databases (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Vector Databases category, the mindshare of ClickHouse is 3.8%, up from 1.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is 4.0%. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Vector Databases

Featured Reviews

Aswini Atibudhi

Distinguished AI Leader at Walmart Global Tech at Walmart

Provides real-time data insights with high flexibility and responsive support

The basic challenge for ClickHouse is the documentation, which isn't ideal, but it's mature and stable with more columnar storage, compression, and parallel processing, making it the best for OLAP. 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.

Read full review

MichaelJohn

Director | Data & AI at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Very efficient for application-facing scenarios

There are several areas for improvement. Firstly, having a local development emulator or simulator for Azure Cosmos DB would be beneficial. It would be very handy to have a Docker container that developers can use locally. Although, I know there is a free tier and so on and so forth, having a local environment would be nice. For example, SQL Server is very portable. You can even install it on your machine. That is the number one thing that is missing in Azure Cosmos DB. The second improvement area is the IDE of choice. That means how you interact with Azure Cosmos DB. For example, with SQL Server, you have SQL Server Management Studio. I know there is a little bit of support for Azure Cosmos DB in Azure Data Studio, but it is not heavily advertised or it does not feel like first-class citizen support. Developer experience or developer tooling is missing in terms of interacting with the database. Better developer tools or an IDE for interacting with Azure Cosmos DB would enhance the developer experience. Lastly, there is some mixed messaging about what Azure Cosmos DB is, given its multiple APIs. There are so many Azure Cosmos DB APIs available. There is NoSQL. There are MongoDB, Gremlin, and others. There is still some mixed messaging for others who are new to Azure Cosmos DB about what Azure Cosmos DB is. Is this like MongoDB, but then there is also MongoDB in Azure Cosmos DB? I know it well, and I know that the default one is just NoSQL, but others I have interacted with over the last ten years or so get confused.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The main feature of ClickHouse is the optimizer because we had too many records to deduplicate, and the optimizer took this task by itself."

"The tool is column-based and infinitely scalable."

More ClickHouse pros

"In Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB, one valuable feature is its ability to store data in multiple regions. If one region fails, it automatically switches to a healthy region, ensuring minimal latency and disaster recovery without impacting data latency in applications."

"The global synchronization feature of Azure Cosmos DB stands out as the most valuable for me."

"The most valuable aspect of Cosmos DB is its performance."

"Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB's most valuable feature is latency."

"The high speed of Azure Cosmos DB compared to other competitors is remarkable."

"The best feature is the velocity to make a query."

"The solution's read capacity and write access functions are very fast so users don't have to wait when fetching or displaying data on a screen."

"The solution is used because we get faster response times with large data sets than with SQL. It's essential for us because we have half a billion rows, and we need to return them quickly."

More Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB pros

Cons

"I would like ClickHouse to work more on integration with third-party tools."

"ClickHouse has its own concept of database triggers and doesn't support traditional database triggers."

"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."

"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."

"We had a lot of troubles while deploying a whole cluster."

"The main issue is the lack of documentation. Many features are available but are not fully documented, which can make finding information challenging."

"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."

"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."

More ClickHouse cons

"The customer service is lacking. We have a premier support agreement, but support is hit and miss."

"What is missing in Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is definitely cold storage. We know it's coming, but that's currently what is missing—the possibility to park older data in a cold tier."

"There are no particular factors that need improvement. There is a little bit of a learning curve with scaling workloads, but it works smoothly."

"Sometimes, the solution's access request takes time, which should be improved."

"The cost is a concern. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB did not decrease our total cost of ownership. From the standpoint of the old way of doing DBA operations, it did, but our cloud cost increased significantly."

"There should be a simpler way for data migration."

"It would be beneficial if Cosmos supported batch and real-time use cases to make the system more seamless."

"The query is a little complex. SQL server should have more options. But the query should be better."

More Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"If you have an in-house deployment on Kubernetes or something, it's going to be very cheap since you'll be managing everything."

"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."

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

"The tool is open-source."

"We used the free, community version of ClickHouse."

"Cost isn’t a big hurdle for us right now. The solution is not costly."

"The solution is very expensive."

"Cosmos DB is expensive compared to any virtual machine based on conventional RDBMS like MySQL or PostgreSQL."

"Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB's licensing costs are monthly."

"Its price is in the middle, neither too low nor too high."

"There is a licensing fee."

"Cosmos DB is cost-effective when starting but requires careful management."

"The Cosmos DB pricing model, initially quite complicated, became clear after consulting with Azure Advisor, allowing us to proceed with confidence."

More Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

24%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Educational Organization

11%

Manufacturing Company

Legal Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

10%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

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...

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What needs improvement with ClickHouse?

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What is your primary use case for ClickHouse?

I have experience in ClickHouse ( /products/clickhouse-reviews ), and we also use Apache Druid ( /products/druid-reviews ), which has corporate support from Druid ( /products/druid-reviews ), along...

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What do you like most about Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?

The initial setup is simple and straightforward. You can set up a Cosmos DB in a day, even configuring things like availability zones around the world.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?

We are not consuming so much yet since we are at the beginning of using this solution. I would rate the pricing of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB a six out of ten.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?

We are at the beginning of production, and everything is working very well. The price can always be lower, but currently, it's not a problem.

See all answers

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Compared 2% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ClickHouse

June 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

June 2025

Download Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB product report

Also Known As

No data available

Microsoft Azure DocumentDB, MS Azure Cosmos DB

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

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is a globally distributed, multi-model database service providing scalability, user-friendliness, and seamless integration, suitable for managing large volumes of structured and unstructured data across diverse applications.

Azure Cosmos DB is renowned for its scalability, stability, and ease of integration, offering robust support for multiple data models and APIs. Its capacity for handling unstructured data efficiently and providing real-time analytics makes it ideal for applications requiring high performance and global distribution. With features like automatic failover and integration with Microsoft products, users benefit from cost optimization and secure data handling. Enhancement opportunities include simplifying queries, improving documentation, and expanding backup and analytics functionalities.

What are the most important features of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?

Scalability and Autoscaling: Efficiently handles growing data and user demands.
Multi-Model Support: Adapts to different data models seamlessly.
Global Distribution: Provides low-latency access across multiple regions.
Automatic Failover: Ensures high availability and reliability.
Integration with Microsoft Products: Offers seamless connectivity with Azure services.

What benefits should users look for in Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB reviews?

Performance and Speed: Exceptionally fast processing for real-time data analytics.
Cost Optimization: Tools for managing expenses effectively.
Secure Data Handling: Implements strong data security measures.
Flexible Data Ingestion: Supports diverse data ingestion methods.

Azure Cosmos DB is frequently used in sectors like web, mobile, IoT, and analytics. It supports applications as a key-value store, processes real-time data, and enables global scalability with low-latency access. Its big data management capabilities and integration with Azure services enhance its utility across industries.

Microsoft

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

TomTom, KPMG Australia, Bosch, ASOS, Mercedes Benz, NBA, Zero Friction, Nederlandse Spoorwegen, Kinectify

Buyer's Guide

ClickHouse vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

June 2025

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