ClickHouse is an open-source columnar database for real-time analytics. Compare self-hosted vs ClickHouse Cloud pricing, features, and use cases.
ClickHouse's technology traces back to 2009, when Alexey Milovidov and collaborators began building it to power Yandex.Metrica's web analytics at massive scale; it first went into production in 2012 and was released as open source in 2016. ClickHouse Inc. was incorporated in San Francisco in September 2021 to commercialize the open-source database, with a European subsidiary, ClickHouse B.V., based in Amsterdam.
The database is a column-oriented OLAP system, optimized for running analytical SQL queries over very large datasets with low latency, and has been adopted by companies including Uber, Comcast, eBay, and Cisco for observability, product analytics, and real-time reporting workloads.
ClickHouse's columnar storage engine is built specifically for read-heavy analytical queries over billions of rows, supporting standard SQL along with extensions for time-series and analytical functions. It supports high compression ratios, real-time data ingestion, and distributed, sharded deployments for horizontal scale.
The self-hosted, open-source edition can be deployed on any infrastructure with no licensing cost, while ClickHouse Cloud, the company's managed offering, adds serverless auto-scaling, automated backups, and built-in high availability without requiring a team to operate the underlying cluster themselves.
The core ClickHouse database is free and open source for self-hosted use, with no licensing fees regardless of scale. ClickHouse Cloud, the managed serverless offering, separates billing into compute (metered per minute, roughly $0.22-$0.39 per compute unit-hour depending on tier) and storage (a flat rate of about $25 per terabyte-month across all tiers).
ClickHouse Cloud has three tiers: Basic for experimentation and small workloads, Scale starting around $499/month for production workloads needing replica and shard scaling, and Enterprise for organizations needing compliance features like HIPAA/PCI support, SAML/SSO, and customer-managed encryption keys. New accounts get a 30-day trial with $300 in credit before choosing a paid plan or self-hosting.
The core ClickHouse database is free and open source and can be self-hosted on any infrastructure with no licensing cost. ClickHouse Cloud, the managed serverless offering, is billed separately for compute and storage.
ClickHouse is used for real-time analytics, observability, and reporting workloads that require running SQL queries over very large datasets with low latency, such as web analytics, log analysis, and business intelligence dashboards.
ClickHouse Cloud pricing separates compute (roughly $0.22-$0.39 per compute unit-hour depending on tier) and storage (about $25/TB-month flat). The Basic tier can run in the range of $66-190/month depending on usage, the Scale tier starts around $499/month, and Enterprise pricing depends on configuration.
The technology originated in 2009 when Alexey Milovidov and collaborators began building it to power Yandex.Metrica; it was open-sourced in 2016, and ClickHouse Inc. was incorporated in San Francisco in September 2021 to commercialize it.
No. ClickHouse is optimized for analytical (OLAP) workloads over large datasets, not for typical transactional application databases; row-oriented databases like PostgreSQL are generally a better fit for OLTP use cases.
Companies including Uber, Comcast, eBay, and Cisco use ClickHouse for high-volume analytics, observability, and reporting workloads.