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ClickHouse vs PostgreSQL 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:
 

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
7.4
PostgreSQL offers cost-effective benefits with high ROI, thanks to its open source nature and improved performance for businesses.
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
 

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
6.7
PostgreSQL's global community offers robust support and documentation, though more detailed guidance for non-specialists is needed.
If more timely support could be provided during critical issues, situations could have been resolved much more quickly, saving considerable time.
Senior Data Engineer at a transportation company with 501-1,000 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
If PostgreSQL is hosted on cloud services such as Amazon RDS or Google Cloud SQL, the support is handled by the cloud provider, who provides automated backups, monitoring, infrastructure management, and technical support tickets.
Software developer at Student
 

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
7.5
PostgreSQL is a preferred scalable database solution, effectively handling large workloads and offering seamless cloud platform scalability.
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
 

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
8.0
PostgreSQL is stable and reliable when properly configured, outperforming alternatives, but requires best practices for optimal performance.
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
 

Room For Improvement

ClickHouse users seek improved documentation, integration enhancements, better cloud pricing, and solutions for operational complexity and SQL compatibility issues.
PostgreSQL needs improvements in user-friendliness, scalability, memory management, replication, integration, JSON, GUI, parallelism, and data handling.
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
Query optimization improves slow queries by using proper indexes, avoiding unnecessary joins, and using EXPLAIN ANALYZE to inspect query plans.
Software developer at Student
 

Setup Cost

ClickHouse offers flexible, cost-efficient pricing with open-source and cloud options, though lacks Windows support, balancing cost and performance.
PostgreSQL's open-source nature offers cost-effectiveness and high ROI, attractive for enterprises, with optional paid support available.
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
 

Valuable Features

ClickHouse provides fast, scalable data storage and retrieval with seamless integration, open-source flexibility, and strong community support.
PostgreSQL excels with features like robust indexing, scalability, geo-spatial support, and seamless integration, ensuring high performance and adaptability.
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.
Senior Data Engineer at a transportation company with 501-1,000 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
PostgreSQL improves reliability, performance, and scalability in production. Since it is ACID compliant, it ensures that database transactions are safe and consistent, preventing partial data updates, maintaining data integrity, and allowing multiple users to read or write data simultaneously using MVCC.
Software developer at Student
 

Categories and Ranking

ClickHouse
Ranking in Open Source Databases
3rd
Ranking in Vector Databases
7th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
PostgreSQL
Ranking in Open Source Databases
2nd
Ranking in Vector Databases
8th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
126
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Open Source Databases category, the mindshare of ClickHouse is 6.6%, up from 2.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PostgreSQL is 14.4%, down from 18.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Open Source Databases Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
PostgreSQL14.4%
ClickHouse6.6%
Other79.0%
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.
Ece Ece - PeerSpot reviewer
Software developer at Student
Reliable transactions and rich features have powered real time collaboration and faster development
PostgreSQL fully supports ACID transactions, including atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability, which are some of the best features it offers in my experience. It also supports multiple index types, such as B-tree, Gin, Gist, and BRIN, and provides JSON and JSONB support, which is used to query semi-structured data. PostgreSQL uses Multi-Version Concurrency Control, which allows multiple users to read and write simultaneously. For extensibility, PostgreSQL allows extensions such as PostGIS and pg_trgm, which are truly useful. PostgreSQL improves reliability, performance, and scalability in production. Since it is ACID compliant, it ensures that database transactions are safe and consistent, preventing partial data updates, maintaining data integrity, and allowing multiple users to read or write data simultaneously using MVCC. Features such as foreign keys, constraints, and triggers impact data consistency by preventing invalid data. It supports read replicas, partitioning, and horizontal scaling for scalability. PostgreSQL has been very stable in my experience, handling concurrent requests reliably while maintaining data consistency with ACID transactions and accommodating concurrent users with strong data integrity, making it mature and widely used in production systems. Using PostgreSQL with Prisma allows faster development because schema migrations are automated and type-safe queries reduce the time I spend fixing database bugs, allowing me to focus more on building features while improving collaboration between developers due to a well-defined relational schema. Migration tools keep everyone's database schema synchronized, which allows multiple developers to work on backend features without conflicts. It has a rich feature set, supporting advanced features such as window functions, common table expressions (CTEs), and full-text search, with the flexibility of supporting both JSON and relational data, meaning it can behave as both a relational database and a document database. Extensibility allows PostgreSQL to add new capabilities while maintaining a strong ecosystem that integrates easily with modern backend stacks such as Node.js, Docker, and Prisma.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Educational Organization
7%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
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 Business57
Midsize Enterprise27
Large Enterprise46
 

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...
How does Firebird SQL compare with PostgreSQL?
PostgreSQL was designed in a way that provides you with not only a high degree of flexibility but also offers you a cheap and easy-to-use solution. It gives you the ability to redesign and audit yo...
What do you like most about PostgreSQL?
It's a transactional database, so we use Postgres for most of our reporting. That's where it's helping.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PostgreSQL?
The tool is free of cost. For now, it's not about making money. But once we perfect it, we can offer it to customers willing to pay for support and other services. Most of my deployments are free.
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
1. Apple 2. Cisco 3. Fujitsu 4. Instagram 5. Netflix 6. Red Hat 7. Sony 8. Uber 9. Cisco Systems 10. Skype 11. LinkedIn 12. Etsy 13. Yelp 14. Reddit 15. Dropbox 16. Slack 17. Twitch 18. WhatsApp 19. Snapchat 20. Shazam 21. SoundCloud 22. The New York Times 23. Cisco WebEx 24. Atlassian 25. Cisco Meraki 26. Heroku 27. GitLab 28. Zalando 29. OpenTable 30. Trello 31. Square Enix 32. Bloomberg
Find out what your peers are saying about ClickHouse vs. PostgreSQL and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.