ClickHouse is an open-source, column-oriented OLAP database system enabling real-time analytical reports using SQL queries. With linear scalability, it handles trillions of rows and petabytes of data. ClickHouse Cloud offers a scalable serverless solution for real-time analytics.
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Elasticsearch
Score 8.4 out of 10
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Elasticsearch is an enterprise search tool from Elastic in Mountain View, California.
$16
per month
Pricing
ClickHouse
Elasticsearch
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Standard
$16.00
per month
Gold
$19.00
per month
Platinum
$22.00
per month
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ClickHouse
Elasticsearch
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
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Additional Details
Pay for what is used:
It automatically scales up and down compute resources based on the user's workload
It scales storage and compute separately
It automatically scales unused resources down to zero so that users don’t pay for idle services
The most important thing when using ClickHouse is to be clear that the scenarios in which you want to use it really are the right ones. Many users think that when a database is very fast for a specific use case, it can be extrapolated to other contexts (most of the time different) in which a previous analysis has not been carried out.
ClickHouse is an analytical database, as such, it should be used for such purposes, where the information is stored correctly, the data volumes are really large and the queries to be performed are not the typical traditional queries on several columns with multiple aggregations. ClickHouse is not the solution for this.
On the other hand, if your case is not one of the above, it is quite possible that ClickHouse can help you. Where ClickHouse shines is when you are looking for aggregation over a particular column in large volumes of data.
Elasticsearch is a really scalable solution that can fit a lot of needs, but the bigger and/or those needs become, the more understanding & infrastructure you will need for your instance to be running correctly. Elasticsearch is not problem-free - you can get yourself in a lot of trouble if you are not following good practices and/or if are not managing the cluster correctly. Licensing is a big decision point here as Elasticsearch is a middleware component - be sure to read the licensing agreement of the version you want to try before you commit to it. Same goes for long-term support - be sure to keep yourself in the know for this aspect you may end up stuck with an unpatched version for years.
As I mentioned before, Elasticsearch's flexible data model is unparalleled. You can nest fields as deeply as you want, have as many fields as you want, but whatever you want in those fields (as long as it stays the same type), and all of it will be searchable and you don't need to even declare a schema beforehand!
Elastic, the company behind Elasticsearch, is super strong financially and they have a great team of devs and product managers working on Elasticsearch. When I first started using ES 3 years ago, I was 90% impressed and knew it would be a good fit. 3 years later, I am 200% impressed and blown away by how far it has come and gotten even better. If there are features that are missing or you don't think it's fast enough right now, I bet it'll be suitable next year because the team behind it is so dang fast!
Elasticsearch is really, really stable. It takes a lot to bring down a cluster. It's self-balancing algorithms, leader-election system, self-healing properties are state of the art. We've never seen network failures or hard-drive corruption or CPU bugs bring down an ES cluster.
To get started with Elasticsearch, you don't have to get very involved in configuring what really is an incredibly complex system under the hood. You simply install the package, run the service, and you're immediately able to begin using it. You don't need to learn any sort of query language to add data to Elasticsearch or perform some basic searching. If you're used to any sort of RESTful API, getting started with Elasticsearch is a breeze. If you've never interacted with a RESTful API directly, the journey may be a little more bumpy. Overall, though, it's incredibly simple to use for what it's doing under the covers.
We've only used it as an opensource tooling. We did not purchase any additional support to roll out the elasticsearch software. When rolling out the application on our platform we've used the documentation which was available online. During our test phases we did not experience any bugs or issues so we did not rely on support at all.
ClickHouse was not compared to them as a competitor but as the ideal partner to complete an information analysis system, providing users with the most complete and efficient tools. Therefore, in this case it was considered that it would be the ideal candidate due to its characteristics compared to the other competitors.
As far as we are concerned, Elasticsearch is the gold standard and we have barely evaluated any alternatives. You could consider it an alternative to a relational or NoSQL database, so in cases where those suffice, you don't need Elasticsearch. But if you want powerful text-based search capabilities across large data sets, Elasticsearch is the way to go.
We have had great luck with implementing Elasticsearch for our search and analytics use cases.
While the operational burden is not minimal, operating a cluster of servers, using a custom query language, writing Elasticsearch-specific bulk insert code, the performance and the relative operational ease of Elasticsearch are unparalleled.
We've easily saved hundreds of thousands of dollars implementing Elasticsearch vs. RDBMS vs. other no-SQL solutions for our specific set of problems.
