ClickHouse
brute force so fast it sometimes beats an index
the under-considered answer when your vectors live beside a lot of structured data you also want to aggregate — and the wrong answer for pure low-latency rag.
clickhouse added hnsw-based vector similarity indexes that became genuinely usable during 2025, but the more interesting property is its scan speed. with a selective filter reducing the candidate set, an exact brute-force scan in clickhouse can beat an approximate index elsewhere — and you get perfect recall rather than an approximation.
that makes it a strong fit for a specific shape of problem: semantic search over data you are also aggregating and filtering heavily, like logs, events or clickstream with embeddings attached.
the description above is ours, condensed from the ranking. pricing moves — check it on the vendor's own page before you rely on it.
- category
- vector databases
- pricing
- free self-hosted; cloud pricing not verified here
- website
- clickhouse.com
the under-considered answer when your vectors live beside a lot of structured data you also want to aggregate — and the wrong answer for pure low-latency rag.
we researched this category against vendors' own pricing pages and licence files. that is where this line comes from — not from the vendor, and not from anything they paid for.