The ClickHouse Trade-Off
Let’s give credit where it’s due: ClickHouse offers high performance at a relatively low cost for analytical workloads. But when used for logs, you’ll face friction like:
- Complex ingestion pipelines - You’ll need to write and maintain ETL code to parse logs into tabular formats
- Slow queries at scale - Especially when querying large time ranges or nested fields
- High storage usage - Log volumes grow fast, and columnar formats aren’t optimized for sparse log data
- Heavy engineering lift - Schema design, custom tooling, and constant tuning eat up cycles
- Batch ingestion delays - Doesn't support streaming ingestion, forces users to wait for the batch to be complete, and delays real-time insights.
In short: ClickHouse can do log analytics, but only with significant effort—and even then, it’s not real-time.
👉 Check out how our SigLens is 54x faster than ClickHouse.
Why SigLens Outperforms for Observability
SigLens is designed from the ground up for logs and observability workloads. It offers all the performance of ClickHouse, but without the engineering overhead or compromises in usability.
⚡ Built for Log Data
🧩 Zero ETL Required
Logs go in as-is. Query instantly. SigLens automatically optimizes storage and retrieval, so you don’t need to write custom pipelines. It also supports log ingestion through multiple protocols, making integration seamless.
🚀 Sub-Second Queries at Scale
💾 Up to 80% Storage Savings
🧘♀️ No Ops Overhead
SigLens vs. ClickHouse: At a Glance
Why Engineers Choose SigLens
ClickHouse is powerful, butnot purpose-built for observability. If you’re tired of fighting your tools and want a system that works with your data not against it, SigLens is the clear choice.
Let’s talk and see the action!
You don’t have to take our word for it—see SigLens side-by-side with your current stack.