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)
- 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
- 90-day snapshot retention
- Query history
- Role-based access control (preset roles)
- Support from MotherDuck experts
- 99.9% availability SLA
Enterprise
- Unlimited internal active users and service accounts
- Fixed-cost capacity pricing
- AWS PrivateLink connectivity
- Role-based access control (custom roles)
- 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: ClickHouse is going after the high-performance OLAP segment — think Snowflake and BigQuery alternatives for teams that care deeply about query speed on large datasets. The pricing is competitive for raw compute but the multi-dimensional billing (compute + storage + egress + ingestion) can stack up fast, positioning them as a serious tool for data-heavy teams rather than a budget play. MotherDuck: Positioned as a cost-efficient alternative to Snowflake and BigQuery for teams that don't need a full data warehouse — the $250 base is approachable, but the compute rates (especially Jumbo and above) put it in mid-market territory. They're clearly targeting data-savvy startups and mid-size teams who want DuckDB's speed without managing infrastructure themselves.
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