DBMS > ClickHouse vs. InfluxDB vs. KairosDB vs. RRDtool vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison ClickHouse vs. InfluxDB vs. KairosDB vs. RRDtool vs. Snowflake

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.

DBMS for storing time series, events and metrics

Distributed Time Series DBMS based on Cassandra or H2

Industry standard data logging and graphing tool for time series data. RRD is an acronym for round-robin database.

The data is stored in a circular buffer, thus the system storage footprint remains constant over time.

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Time Series DBMS

Spatial DBMS

with GEO package

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

Score	15.55
Rank	#38	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	24.39
Rank	#28	Overall
	#1	Time Series DBMS

Score	0.67
Rank	#233	Overall
	#20	Time Series DBMS

Score	1.90
Rank	#132	Overall
	#11	Time Series DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

clickhouse.com

www.influxdata.com/products/influxdb-overview

github.com/kairosdb/kairosdb

oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

clickhouse.com/docs

docs.influxdata.com/influxdb

kairosdb.github.io

oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/doc

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Clickhouse Inc.

Tobias Oetiker

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2016

2013

1999

2014

Current release

v24.4.1.2088-stable, May 2024

2.7.6, April 2024

1.2.2, November 2018

1.8.0, 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

MIT-License; commercial enterprise version available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

GPL V2 and FLOSS

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.

Implementation language

C++

Java

Implementations in Java (e.g. RRD4J) and C# available

Server operating systems

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

Linux
OS X

through Homebrew

Linux
OS X
Windows

HP-UX
Linux

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Numeric data and Strings

yes

Numeric data only

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.

Exporting into and restoring from XML files possible

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

SQL-like query language

yes

APIs and other access methods

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

HTTP API
JSON over UDP

Graphite protocol
HTTP REST
Telnet API

in-process shared library
Pipes

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

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
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
Lisp
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Rust
Scala

Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python

with librrd library
C#

with a different implementation of RRDTool
Java

with a different implementation of RRDTool
JavaScript (Node.js)

with a different implementation of RRDTool
Lua
Perl
PHP

with a wrapper library
Python
Ruby

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

Triggers

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

key based and custom

Sharding

in enterprise version only

Sharding

based on Cassandra

none

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

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

selectable replication factor

in enterprise version only

selectable replication factor

based on Cassandra

none

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

based on Cassandra
Immediate Consistency

based on Cassandra

none

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

by using the rrdcached daemon

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

Depending on used storage engine

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.

simple rights management via user accounts

simple password-based access control

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

InfluxData is the creator of InfluxDB , the open source time series database. It...
» more

Competitive advantages

Time to Value InfluxDB is available in all the popular languages and frameworks,...
» more

Typical application scenarios

IoT & Sensor Monitoring Developers are witnessing the instrumentation of every available...
» more

Key customers

InfluxData has more than 1,900 paying customers, including customers include MuleSoft,...
» more

Market metrics

Fastest-growing database to drive 27,500 GitHub stars Over 750,000 daily active instances
» more

Licensing and pricing models

Open source core with closed source clustering available either on-premise or on...
» more

News

Scaling Data Collection: Solving Renewable Energy Challenges with InfluxDB
6 June 2024

Deadman Alerts with Grafana and InfluxDB Cloud 3.0
5 June 2024

Chasing the Skies: Monitoring Flights with InfluxDB
4 June 2024

Monitoring Your Cloud Environments and Applications with InfluxDB
30 May 2024

Webinar Recap: Unleash the Full Potential of Your Time Series Data with InfluxDB and AWS
29 May 2024

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.