ClickHouse vs MotherDuck Pricing (2026)
How do these two stack up on price? Here's what each one costs, what you get, and where the value sits.
| ClickHouse | MotherDuck | |
|---|---|---|
| Starts at | Custom | $250/mo |
| Number of plans | 3 | 3 |
| Free plan | — | |
| Free trial | ||
| Pricing model | usage-based | hybrid |
Basic
- Up to 1 TB storage
- 8-12 GiB total memory
- Backups every 24h, retained for 1 day
- 1 availability zone
- Export backups to your own cloud account
- Expert support with 1 business day response time
- Single sign-on authentication (SSO) using Google or Microsoft Social login
- Multi-factor authentication (MFA)
Scale
- Unlimited storage
- Configurable memory
- Compute-compute separation
- Backups every 24h, retained for 1 day
- Configurable backups
- 2+ availability zones
- Expert support with 1 hour response time 24x7 for Severity 1 issues
- S3 role-based access
- Private networking
- Automatic vertical scaling
- Manual horizontal scaling
Enterprise
- SAML Single sign-on authentication (SSO)
- Private regions
- Manual vertical scaling for custom profiles
- Enterprise support with 30 min response time for Severity 1 issues
- Named Lead Support Engineer
- Transparent data encryption / CMEK
- Scheduled upgrades
- Consultative migrations guides
- HIPAA and PCI compliance
Lite
- Up to 3 internal active users and 2 service accounts
- 10 GB free storage
- 10 hrs Pulse compute per month included
- Pulse instances only
- Role-based access control (preset roles)
- Guides: Shared context for better AI agent performance
- Community support
Business
Popular- Up to 10 internal active users and unlimited service accounts
- 5 instance types and read-scaling replicas
- Flights: agent-native data pipelines
- Guides: Shared context for better AI agent performance
- 90-day snapshot retention
- Query history
- Role-based access control (preset and custom roles)
- Support from MotherDuck experts
- 99.9% availability SLA
Enterprise
- Unlimited internal active users and service accounts
- Fixed-cost capacity pricing
- AWS PrivateLink connectivity
- IP allowlisting
- HIPAA BAA
ClickHouse vs MotherDuck FAQ
- Which one is cheaper?
- One or both use custom pricing, so it depends on your specific needs.
- Can I use either one for free?
- MotherDuck has a free plan. ClickHouse doesn't — though they do offer a free trial.
- How do they charge?
- Different approach here. ClickHouse uses usage-based pricing, while MotherDuck goes with hybrid. That changes the math depending on your team size and usage.
- Which one is a better deal?
- Depends on what you need. ClickHouse: Sitting in the usage-based analytics database space, ClickHouse avoids sticker-shock flat fees but the escalating per-unit compute rate (nearly double from Basic to Enterprise) signals they're not competing on being the cheap option once you scale up. They're positioning to win teams that want to start cheap and pay more as they mature, rather than budget-conscious shops that need pricing certainty upfront. MotherDuck: At $250/mo plus consumption fees, MotherDuck isn't chasing hobbyists — it's mid-market priced compared to heavyweight warehouses like Snowflake or BigQuery, betting that DuckDB's speed and simplicity justify a premium over free/open-source but a discount versus enterprise data warehouse contracts.
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