ClickHouse
Depends
Confidence: High
Buy if your team queries billions of rows and has data-engineering capacity to run it.
Comparison
ClickHouse vs MotherDuck
ClickHouse and MotherDuck both land on Depends.
MotherDuck
Depends
Confidence: Medium
Buy it if you're a small-to-mid data team that lives in SQL and wants DuckDB power with sharing and zero ops.
| Compare | ClickHouse | MotherDuck |
|---|---|---|
| Verdict | Depends | Depends |
| Best for | Real-time analytics on billions of rows | Startups and small data teams |
| Who it's not for | Small apps needing a simple CRUD database | Petabyte-scale enterprises |
| Privacy | Active project with a public security changelog; several CVEs disclosed over the years, including RCE and SSRF issues. | No known public vulnerabilities found in the sources reviewed. |
| Support quality | Support program exists but no quality evidence | Vendor claims engaged support; thin independent evidence |
| Public sentiment | Users overwhelmingly praise speed, stability, and cost, while flagging operational complexity at extreme scale and thin GUI tooling.² | Users love the simplicity and sharing, but grumble about the 2026 price hike and whether it belongs in production. |
| Biggest gotcha | Cloud pricing separates compute and storage; heavy ingest drives costs up | Feb 2026 hike killed the $25 plan; entry paid tier is $250 Business16 |
Pick ClickHouse when
- Real-time analytics on billions of rows
- Observability and log analytics at scale
- User-facing embedded analytics
- SQL-fluent data teams
When ClickHouse is not a fit
- Small apps needing a simple CRUD database
- Teams with no dedicated data or ops engineers
- Transactional (OLTP) workloads
- Anyone wanting spreadsheet-grade reporting
Pick MotherDuck when
- Startups and small data teams
- dbt + SQL analytics stacks
- Ex-Redshift warehouses under 1TB
- DuckDB fans needing sharing
When MotherDuck is not a fit
- Petabyte-scale enterprises
- Teams needing mature governance and admin tooling
- Budget hobbyists . the $25 plan is gone
- Anyone unwilling to accept hosted-DuckDB lock-in
Sources
- ClickHouse Cloud Reviews & Ratings 2026gartner.comreview
review
- ClickHouse tops $250M ARR and 4000 customersclickhouse.comofficial
- ClickHouse lands $15B valuationbloomberg.comnews
security
- CVE-2024-22412 . NIST NVDnvd.nist.govsecurity
- ClickHouse Pricingclickhouse.comofficial
- ClickHouse Reviews, Pricing & Featurescheckthat.aireview
- Honest review of MotherDuck - Data Engineering Centraldataengineeringcentral.substack.comreview
- MotherDuck Reviews | G2g2.comreview
review
- Astroturfing controversy - r/bigdatareddit.comreview
- MotherDuck pricing changes 2026 - Layerbaselayerbase.comnews