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ClickHouse vs DuckDB: catalog facts
ClickHouse	DuckDB
Freemium Free and open source to self-host, with a paid managed cloud service also available.	Free Free and open source under the MIT licence.
Self-hosted	Windows, macOS, Linux, Command line
Columnar storage gives fast query performance over very large datasets Widely adopted as the backend for other open source observability tools	Queries CSV and Parquet files directly with no loading step Embeds into Python, R and the shell with a single dependency
Using it well for observability requires additional tooling or schema design on top Operating a ClickHouse cluster at scale takes real database administration expertise	Single-process by design; it is not a shared multi-user database Concurrent writers are not supported
Self-hosted, Downloadable app	Downloadable app
Open source	Open source
License not stated	License: MIT
Not stated if an account is needed	Not stated if an account is needed
Not stated if it works offline	Not stated if it works offline
Official website Full listing and sources Checked September 22, 2026	Official website Full listing and sources Checked September 22, 2026

Catalog facts only. Anything “not stated” is unconfirmed. Check full listings for details.