ClickHouse vs MySQL
- ✦ Column-oriented storage
- ✦ Vectorized query execution
- ✦ Real-time ingestion
- ✦ ACID Transactions (InnoDB)
- ✦ Replication
- ✦ Full-Text Search
Real-World Scenarios: When to Choose Which
The question that matters: “In what situation will I regret choosing A over B after 3 months?”
Count unique users and calculate click-through rates across billions of ad impressions in milliseconds
MySQL replication routes heavy analytical queries to a read replica, removing contention with write-heavy OLTP traffic and keeping application response times below 100ms during peak loads.
Ingest clickstream events via Kafka, query 100B rows in under 1 second for live dashboards
Store and query server logs at petabyte scale with 10x better compression than Elasticsearch
Replace InfluxDB with ClickHouse for metrics storage, gaining SQL query support and better compression
MySQL's InnoDB full-text index supports natural language and boolean search queries on text columns without a separate Elasticsearch deployment for basic in-app search needs.
ProxySQL in front of MySQL pools thousands of application connections into tens of database connections, preventing connection exhaustion on deployments that scale web processes horizontally.
Pricing Intelligence
ClickHouse Plans
Free tier available
- • Self-hosted
- • Full features
- • Community support
- • $0.20/hr compute from
- • Free trial credits
- • Managed service
- • Dedicated resources
- • SLA
- • Enterprise support
MySQL Plans
Free tier available
- • GPL license
- • Full SQL
- • Community support
- • Commercial license
- • Oracle support
- • Advanced security
Feature Matrix
12 differences found across 18 standardized features
- •Column-oriented storage
- •Vectorized query execution
- •Real-time ingestion
- •Kafka integration
- •SQL support
- •Distributed tables
- •Compression (LZ4/ZSTD)
- •Approximate query functions
- •Materialized views
- •Replicated tables
- •JSON support
- •Geospatial functions
- •Time-series optimizations
- •REST and native protocols
- •ACID Transactions (InnoDB)
- •Replication
- •Full-Text Search
- •JSON Support
- •InnoDB Cluster
- •MySQL Shell
- •Partitioning
- •Stored Procedures
- •Views & Triggers
- •Performance Schema
- •Point-in-Time Recovery
- •SSL/TLS
- •Row-Level Locking
- •HeatWave (MySQL Analytics)
- •Cloud Services
- •PHP Integration
Pros & Cons Face-Off
Evaluative strengths and weaknesses: not feature lists
- +Fastest OLAP query performance for analytical queries at scale
- +Aggressive compression cuts storage costs 5-10x vs row-oriented DBs
- +Open source with full feature parity on self-hosted
- −Not designed for OLTP workloads or frequent row updates
- −Complex cluster configuration for self-hosted HA deployments
- +Most widely deployed database: abundant expertise and tooling
- +Battle-tested for 30 years on the web
- +HeatWave adds analytics and ML without ETL
- +Available managed on AWS RDS, Azure, GCP
- −PostgreSQL has surpassed it in features for new projects
- −Oracle ownership creates open-source licensing concerns
At a Glance
Frequently Asked Questions
Related Comparisons
Sources
- 1.ClickHouse Official Pricing–Vendor pricing page
- 2.MySQL Official Pricing–Vendor pricing page
- 3.ClickHouse Official Website–Official product website
- 4.MySQL Official Website–Official product website