ClickHouse
Open-source columnar OLAP database powering real-time analytics and AI workloads.
About
ClickHouse is an open-source column-oriented database built for online analytical processing, known for scanning billions of rows in milliseconds. It started as an internal project at Yandex in 2009, was open-sourced in 2016, and is now run by ClickHouse Inc. as both the Apache-2.0-licensed engine and the ClickHouse Cloud managed service.
The company has become central to the AI data stack: it raised a $400M Series D in January 2026 at a reported ~$15B valuation (following a $350M Series C in May 2025), passed $250M ARR with 4,000+ customers by mid-2026, and launched Claude-powered ClickHouse Agents for agentic analytics. It acquired Langfuse in January 2026 for agent observability and added managed Postgres, full-text search, and vector-search-adjacent workloads to its platform.
Limitations to note: funding and ARR figures are company-reported; ClickHouse Agents is new and unproven at scale; and as an OLAP engine it complements rather than replaces transactional databases, which is why the company now ships managed Postgres alongside it.
What it can do
- Sub-second analytical queries over billions of rows
- Managed cloud with Claude-powered agentic analytics
- AI observability via managed ClickStack and acquired Langfuse
- Full-text search and high-concurrency query handling
Setup
Self-host the open-source engine via Docker or packages, or sign up for ClickHouse Cloud with a free trial.
Prerequisites
SQL familiarity; a ClickHouse Cloud account or your own servers for self-hosting.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 9/10
Scored 9/10 (verified tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: Verified via vendor site/docs/GitHub and reputable coverage, wave 83; Trending score 94/100 from researcher assessment.
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.