DBMS > Citus vs. ClickHouse vs. DuckDB

System Properties Comparison Citus vs. ClickHouse vs. DuckDB

Please select another system to include it in the comparison.

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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.

An embeddable, in-process, column-oriented SQL OLAP RDBMS

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store

Time Series DBMS

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

Score	1.91
Rank	#121	Overall
	#57	Relational DBMS

Score	18.77
Rank	#31	Overall
	#19	Relational DBMS

Score	7.44
Rank	#44	Overall
	#27	Relational DBMS

Website

www.citusdata.com

clickhouse.com

duckdb.org

Technical documentation

docs.citusdata.com

clickhouse.com/docs

duckdb.org/docs

Developer

Clickhouse Inc.

Initial release

2010

2016

2018

Current release

8.1, December 2018

v24.6.2.17-stable, July 2024

1.0.0, June 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

AGPL, commercial license also available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

MIT License

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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

Implementation language

C++

Server operating systems

Linux

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

server-less

Data scheme

yes

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

APIs and other access methods

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

Arrow Database Connectivity (ADBC)
CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

.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

C
C#

3rd party driver
C++
Crystal

3rd party driver
Go

3rd party driver
Java
Lisp

3rd party driver
Python
R
Ruby

3rd party driver
Rust
Swift
Zig

3rd party driver

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

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

yes

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

key based and custom

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

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

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

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

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.

More information provided by the system vendor

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.

Related products and services

We invite representatives of vendors of related products to contact us for presenting information about their offerings here.

More resources

DB-Engines blog posts

DB-Engines shares Q1 2025 database industry rankings and top climbers: Snowflake and PostgreSQL trending
1 May 2025, DB-Engines

show all

DB-Engines shares Q1 2025 database industry rankings and top climbers: Snowflake and PostgreSQL trending
1 May 2025, DB-Engines

show all

Recent citations in the news

Microsoft acquires Citus Data, re-affirming its commitment to Open Source and accelerating Azure PostgreSQL performance and scale
24 January 2019, The Official Microsoft Blog

Microsoft acquires Citus Data, creators of a cloud-friendly version of the PostgreSQL database
24 January 2019, GeekWire

Citus Data Announces Citus Cloud Database Support for HIPAA and SOC 2 Type 2 Compliance
13 November 2018, Business Wire

Microsoft acquires Citus Data
24 January 2019, TechCrunch

Microsoft acquires another open-source company, Citus Data
24 January 2019, CNBC

provided by Google News

Snowflake Challenger ClickHouse Targets $6 Billion Valuation
9 May 2025, The Information

Wiz Research Uncovers Exposed DeepSeek Database Leaking Sensitive Information, Including Chat History
29 January 2025, wiz.io

Bcachefs, Btrfs, EXT4, F2FS & XFS File-System Performance On Linux 6.15
10 May 2025, Phoronix

DeepSeek Exposed Database Leaks Sensitive Data
30 January 2025, Infosecurity Magazine

DeepSeek AI Database Exposed: Over 1 Million Log Lines, Secret Keys Leaked
30 January 2025, The Hacker News

provided by Google News

Hands-On Exploratory Data Analysis with DuckDB
10 May 2025, Packt

Streamlining access to tabular datasets stored in Amazon S3 Tables with DuckDB | Amazon Web Services
18 March 2025, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Abusing DuckDB-WASM To Create Doom In SQL
23 April 2025, Hackaday

DuckDB project releases Local web UI, but not as open source
19 March 2025, devclass

Analyzing JSON Data with DuckDB and SQL
1 May 2025, KDnuggets

provided by Google News

Share this page