Extensive testing and comparison showed that ClickHouse outperformed other solutions like Elasticsearch in three key areas: performance, compatibility, and cost-efficiency for large-scale operations.
The fastest open-source analytical database
Open-source. Column-orientated. Built for blazingly fast analytics with SQL.
Applied to data warehousing, real-time analytics, observability and ML/GenAI workloads.
Start using ClickHouse in seconds
Install ClickHouse for macOS, Linux, and FreeBSD
$curl https://clickhouse.com/ | sh
Or install for Windows, Docker or see other install options. Or try without installing in our playground.
Watch this getting started video to learn more about ClickHouse.
Choosing ClickHouse
The leading OSS analytics database
ClickHouse is an open-source, column-oriented SQL database built for speed and scale - running anywhere from a laptop to hundreds of servers at true petabyte scale. With a single binary, it unifies application analytics, warehousing, observability, and GenAI workloads in one blazing-fast engine.
Migrating from Apache Druid: Find out more
Migrating from Apache Druid
Optimize your performance and cut infrastructure costs with ClickHouse.
We needed something to slice and dice real-time data, like rides and driver hours across cities and regions where Lyft runs. Using ClickHouse resulted into a lot of performance benefits for us with huge cost savings for the org.
Migrating from Snowflake: Find out more
Migrating from Snowflake
Cut costs and improve latency with true high concurrency - no tier gated features or pricing models that penalize interactivity.
It's a lot faster. The data is consistent. We have to do less work. It's just way, way better for us. Anything we're doing in Snowflake now that we can do cheaper or faster in ClickHouse, we want to do that.
Migrating from BigQuery: Find out more
Migrating from BigQuery
Run highly-concurrency queries without second-long latency, CSP lock-in or run away costs due to per query pricing.
We needed a solution that could scale, but also provide end-user facing analytics capabilities with low latency and high throughput.
Migrating from Redshift: Find out more
Migrating from Redshift
Run faster cold queries, tap into broader integrations, and avoid CSP lock-in.
As data size grew, we faced performance and cost challenges with AWS Redshift. Switching to ClickHouse improved our query performance by 20 times and greatly cut costs.
Migrating from Apache Pinot: Find out more
Migrating from Apache Pinot
Simplify your open-source stack and enjoy faster queries, richer aggregation functions, and full SQL compliance.
With ClickHouse, our performance is 10 times faster
Frequent releases for everyone
ClickHouse feature development moves as fast as it queries. We ship monthly releases packed with new features, performance improvements, and bug fixes - shared openly in our community release webinars.
Sep 2025
Aug 2025
Jul 2025
From your laptop to quadrillion scale and beyond
Scale the same engine on your laptop to billions, expand to trillions on a server, and then out to hundreds of nodes for quadrillions.
So what makes ClickHouse fast?
Learn what makes ClickHouse so fast from isolated inserts and queries, efficient data pruning, and high compression to a state-of-the-art query engine and, above all, meticulous attention to detail.
Powerful ClickHouse features
Full JOIN support
ClickHouse fully supports all standard join types and adds powerful non-equality capabilities such as ASOF join.
Continuous improvements to join algorithms deliver market leading performance, allowing users to query across normalized datasets without extra preprocessing - keeping analytics flexible and removing the need for forced denormalization.
Built for high concurrency
Cloud-native architecture enables effective data tiering and scaling, resulting in the leading price / performance ratio on the market.
Lightweight data changes
ClickHouse delivers fast, reliable handling of updates and deletes through lightweight mutations that modify only the affected rows rather than rewriting entire datasets.
Patched parts allow efficient, fine-grained changes while preserving performance, making it practical to support evolving data, late arriving events, and workloads that require correction of historical records.
Flexible schema-on-write
with JSON
ClickHouse lets you ingest semi-structured data without schema explosion, combining JSON flexibility with the full performance of a columnar database.
What's different about ClickHouse?
Open-source. Column-oriented. Built for blazingly fast analytics with SQL.
01
Query
Sparse primary index in memory
ClickHouse uses a sparse primary index - just a few megabytes per terabyte - scaling effortlessly while pruning data quickly. Query caches, advanced skip indices accelerating performance further. Inserts are equally fast, streamed row by row or in batches, with writes optimized through part sorting and separation of reads and writes, delivering throughput without slowing queries.
A parallelized, vectorized engine filters and aggregates data at speed across a single server or hundreds of nodes thanks to partial states, support for sharding and shared processing across replicas.
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All proven by benchmarks that can be reproduced by anyone.
At ClickHouse, we measure performance relentlessly - believing every millisecond matters. We continually push to make queries faster.
We back up our claims with public, reproducible benchmarks like ClickBench and JSONBench. You can explore our results directly and compare ClickHouse against other technologies before deciding how to power your analytics.
Built for innovation, open by design
Inviting experimentation and contribution
Our academic paper shows how ClickHouse serves not only as a high performance database, but also as a platform for advancing the state of the art and is the best way to learn how its internals work. For deeper insights, explore our in-depth articles and blogs.
Start using ClickHouse in seconds
Install ClickHouse for MacOS, Linux, and FreeBSD.
$curl https://clickhouse.com/ | sh
Or install for Windows, Docker or see other install options. Or try without installing in our playground.
Watch this getting started video to learn more about ClickHouse.