DBMS > ClickHouse vs. Couchbase vs. GreptimeDB vs. Milvus

System Properties Comparison ClickHouse vs. Couchbase vs. GreptimeDB vs. Milvus

Please select another system to include it in the comparison.

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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.

A distributed document store with integrated cache, a powerful search engine, in-built operational and analytical capabilities, and an embedded mobile database

An open source Time Series DBMS built for increased scalability, high performance and efficiency

A DBMS designed for efficient storage of vector data and vector similarity searches

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Time Series DBMS

Key-value store

originating from the former Membase product and supporting the Memcached protocol
Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension
Search engine
Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

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

Score	16.34
Rank	#38	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	17.30
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	0.06
Rank	#352	Overall
	#33	Time Series DBMS

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

clickhouse.com/docs

docs.couchbase.com

docs.greptime.com

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

Developer

Clickhouse Inc.

Couchbase, Inc.

Greptime Inc.

Initial release

2016

2011

2022

2019

Current release

v24.4.1.2088-stable, May 2024

Server: 7.2, June 2023; Mobile: 3.1, March 2022; Couchbase Capella (DBaaS), June 2023

2.3.4, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Business Source License (BSL 1.1); Commercial licenses also available

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

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.

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.
DoubleCloud: Fully managed ClickHouse alongside best-in-class managed open-source services to build analytics at scale.
Aiven for Clickhouse: Managed cloud data warehousing with high-speed analytics.

Zilliz Cloud – Cloud-native service for Milvus

Implementation language

C++

C, C++, Go and Erlang

Rust

C++, Go

Server operating systems

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

Linux
OS X
Windows

Android
Docker
FreeBSD
Linux
macOS
Windows

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

schema-free, schema definition possible

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Vector, Numeric and String

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

SQL++, extends ANSI SQL to JSON for operational, transactional, and analytic use cases

yes

APIs and other access methods

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

CLI Client
HTTP REST
Kafka Connector
Native language bindings for CRUD, Query, Search and Analytics APIs
Spark Connector
Spring Data

gRPC
HTTP API
JDBC

RESTful HTTP API

Supported programming languages

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
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C++
Erlang
Go
Java
JavaScript

C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Functions and timers in JavaScript and UDFs in Java, Python, SQL++

Python

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

key based and custom

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

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

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

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

Ephemeral buckets

yes

User concepts

Access control

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.

User and Administrator separation with password-based and LDAP integrated Authentication. Role-base access control.

Simple rights management via user accounts

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

GreptimeDB is a SQL & Python-enabled timeseries database system built from scratch...
» more

Milvus is an open-source and cloud-native vector database built for production-ready...
» more

Competitive advantages

- Inherits advantages of Rust, such as excellent performance, memory safe, resource...
» more

Highly available, versatile, and robust with millisecond latency. Supports batch...
» more

Typical application scenarios

For IoT industries, GreptimeDB can seamless integrate with message queues and other...
» more

RAG: retrieval augmented generation Video media : video understanding, video deduplication....
» more

Key customers

Greptime's clients span multiple sectors including IoT, connected vehicles, and energy...
» more

Milvus is trusted by thousands of enterprises, including PayPal, eBay, IKEA, LINE,...
» more

Market metrics

GreptimeDB has garnered global recognition by topping GitHub trends following its...
» more

As of January 2024, 25k+ GitHub stars 10M+ downloads and installations 3k+ enterprise...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

GreptimeDB: open source, distributed, cloud-native TSDB; supports Hybrid Time-series...
» more

Milvus was released under the open-source Apache License 2.0 in October 2019. Fully-managed...
» more

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.