DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. Citus vs. ClickHouse vs. CrateDB vs. IBM Cloudant

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. Citus vs. ClickHouse vs. CrateDB vs. IBM Cloudant

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Hosted, scalable database service by Amazon with the data stored in Amazons cloud

Scalable hybrid operational and analytics RDBMS for big data use cases based on PostgreSQL

A high-performance, column-oriented SQL DBMS for online analytical processing (OLAP) that uses all available system resources to their full potential to process each analytical query as fast as possible. It is available as both an open-source software and a cloud offering.

Distributed Database based on Lucene

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Relational DBMS

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Search engine
Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

Document store

Secondary database models

Document store

Time Series DBMS

Relational DBMS

DB-Engines Ranking measures the popularity of database management systems
Trend Chart

Score	74.07
Rank	#17	Overall
	#3	Document stores
	#2	Key-value stores

Score	2.21
Rank	#118	Overall
	#56	Relational DBMS

Score	16.34
Rank	#38	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	0.73
Rank	#224	Overall
	#37	Document stores
	#5	Spatial DBMS
	#16	Search engines
	#19	Time Series DBMS
	#8	Vector DBMS

Score	2.68
Rank	#106	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

www.citusdata.com

clickhouse.com

cratedb.com

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

docs.citusdata.com

clickhouse.com/docs

cratedb.com/docs

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

Developer

Amazon

Clickhouse Inc.

Crate

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Initial release

2012

2010

2016

2013

2010

Current release

8.1, December 2018

v24.4.1.2088-stable, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

Open Source

AGPL, commercial license also available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

DoubleCloud: Fully managed ClickHouse alongside best-in-class managed open-source services to build analytics at scale.
ClickHouse Cloud: Get the performance you love from open source ClickHouse in a serverless offering that takes care of the details so you can spend more time getting insight out of the fastest database on earth.
Aiven for Clickhouse: Managed cloud data warehousing with high-speed analytics.

CrateDB Cloud: a distributed SQL database that spreads data and processing across an elastic cluster of shared nothing nodes. CrateDB Cloud enables data insights at scale on Microsoft Azure, AWS and Google Cloud Platform.

Implementation language

C++

Java

Erlang

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

All Operating Systems, including Kubernetes with CrateDB Kubernetes Operator support

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

Flexible Schema (defined schema, partial schema, schema free)

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

XML support

Some form of processing data in XML format, e.g. support for XML data structures, and/or support for XPath, XQuery or XSLT.

yes

specific XML type available, but no XML query functionality

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

standard, with numerous extensions

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

yes, but no triggers and constraints, and PostgreSQL compatibility

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

gRPC
HTTP REST
JDBC
MySQL wire protocol
ODBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol
Proprietary protocol

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol
Prometheus Remote Read/Write
RESTful HTTP API

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

3rd party library
C++
Elixir

3rd party library
Go

3rd party library
Java

3rd party library
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party library
Kotlin

3rd party library
Nim

3rd party library
Perl

3rd party library
PHP

3rd party library
Python

3rd party library
R

3rd party library
Ruby

3rd party library
Rust
Scala

3rd party library

.NET
Erlang
Go

community maintained client
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)

community maintained client
Perl

community maintained client
PHP
Python
R
Ruby

community maintained client
Scala

community maintained client

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

realized in proprietary language PL/pgSQL or with common languages like Perl, Python, Tcl etc.

yes

user defined functions (Javascript)

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

key based and custom

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

Asynchronous and synchronous physical replication; geographically distributed replicas; support for object storages.

Configurable replication on table/partition-level

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

may be implemented via Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR)

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be specified for read operations

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Read-after-write consistency on record level

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data

ACID

ACID across one or more tables within a single AWS account and region

ACID

unique row identifiers can be used for implementing an optimistic concurrency control strategy

atomic operations within a document possible

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users and roles can be defined via the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access rights for users and roles. Column and row based policies. Quotas and resource limits. Pluggable authentication with LDAP and Kerberos. Password based, X.509 certificate, and SSH key authentication.

rights management via user accounts

Access rights for users can be defined per database

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

The enterprise database for time series, documents, and vectors. Distributed - Native...
» more

Competitive advantages

Response time in milliseconds: e ven for complex ad-hoc queries. Massive scaling...
» more

Typical application scenarios

IoT: accelerate your IIoT projects with CrateDB, delivering real-time analytics...
» more

Key customers

Across all continents, CrateDB is used by companies of all sizes to meet the most...
» more

Market metrics

The CrateDB open source project was started in 2013 Honorable Mention in 2021 Gartner®...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

See CrateDB pricing >
» more

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