DBMS > ClickHouse vs. Elasticsearch vs. Splunk

System Properties Comparison ClickHouse vs. Elasticsearch vs. Splunk

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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, RESTful modern search and analytics engine based on Apache Lucene

Elasticsearch lets you perform and combine many types of searches such as structured, unstructured, geo, and metric

Analytics Platform for Big Data

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Search engine
Vector DBMS

Search engine

Secondary database models

Time Series DBMS

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	18.77
Rank	#31	Overall
	#19	Relational DBMS

Score	123.81
Rank	#9	Overall
	#1	Search engines
	#1	Vector DBMS

Score	71.39
Rank	#18	Overall
	#2	Search engines

Website

clickhouse.com

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

www.splunk.com

Technical documentation

clickhouse.com/docs

www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/index.html

docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk

Developer

Clickhouse Inc.

Elastic

Splunk Inc.

Initial release

2016

2010

2003

Current release

v24.6.2.17-stable, July 2024

8.6, January 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Elastic License

commercial

Limited free edition and free developer edition available

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++

Java

Server operating systems

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

All OS with a Java VM

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Flexible type definitions. Once a type is defined, it is persistent

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

Secondary indexes

yes

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

SQL-like query language

Splunk Search Processing Language for search commands

APIs and other access methods

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

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

HTTP REST

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
Groovy
Community Contributed Clients
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C#
Java
JavaScript
PHP
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

key based and custom

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

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

yes

Multi-source replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

ES-Hadoop Connector

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Synchronous doc based replication. Get by ID may show delays up to 1 sec. Configurable write consistency: one, quorum, all

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

Transaction concepts

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

A 'Transaction' in Splunk has a different meaning: grouping related events into a single one for later searching

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

Memcached and Redis integration

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.

Access rights for users and roles

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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

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PostgreSQL is the DBMS of the Year 2017
2 January 2018, Paul Andlinger, Matthias Gelbmann

Elasticsearch moved into the top 10 most popular database management systems
3 July 2017, Matthias Gelbmann

MySQL, PostgreSQL and Redis are the winners of the March ranking
2 March 2016, Paul Andlinger

show all

Enterprise Search Engines almost double their popularity in the last 12 months
2 July 2014, Paul Andlinger

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