Why BigQuery can’t match ClickHouse Cloud for real-time analytics

CostBench compared ClickHouse Cloud and BigQuery while continuously ingesting 113.2 billion stock-market quote records and running scheduled aggregate and drill-down queries that included newly arrived data. Using native real-time ingestion and preparation features, the benchmark measured preparation costs, normalized query costs, and accumulated query runtime, reporting that ClickHouse achieved an end-to-end performance-per-dollar score 438 times better than BigQuery Capacity pricing and 512 times better than BigQuery On-demand pricing under its scoring formula. ClickHouse used asynchronous inserts to store, sort, and incrementally pre-aggregate data during ingestion, while BigQuery used the Storage Write API, clustering, and incremental materialized views refreshed asynchronously. The reported preparation costs were $28.69 for ClickHouse versus $243.09 under BigQuery Capacity pricing and $264.59 under On-demand pricing; accumulated query runtime was 58.29 seconds for ClickHouse and 49.36 minutes for BigQuery. ClickHouse’s drill-down queries were reported as roughly 4.37 times faster overall, while its aggregate queries were 267 times faster overall, which the benchmark attributes largely to ordered raw data and continuously current summaries. The comparison used equivalent data, schemas, query schedules, and keys, disabled query-result caching, and modeled BigQuery’s Capacity and On-demand options as alternative prices for the same observed query workload rather than separate executions.

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