ClickHouse narrows gap on $SNOW and $DBX with 6.6x faster queries and rising $NBIS stock in 2025

In the fiercely contested arena of data analytics and cloud warehousing, ClickHouse is emerging as a formidable challenger to established giants like Snowflake and Databricks, both commanding valuations exceeding $60 billion. Recent benchmarks and market analyses reveal that ClickHouse’s performance advantages in speed and cost efficiency are narrowing the competitive divide, potentially reshaping enterprise choices in data management solutions.

The Competitive Landscape in Data Analytics

As enterprises grapple with exponential data growth fuelled by AI and machine learning demands, the battle for dominance in data warehousing and analytics platforms intensifies. Snowflake, with its cloud-agnostic architecture, has long been synonymous with scalable data storage and querying, while Databricks leverages its lakehouse model to blend data lakes and warehouses for advanced AI workloads. Yet, ClickHouse, an open-source columnar database, is gaining traction by delivering superior query performance on large datasets at a fraction of the cost.

According to a detailed comparison published on Airbyte’s resource site in July 2025, ClickHouse outperforms Snowflake in scenarios requiring high-speed analytics on massive volumes of data, particularly in real-time processing and OLAP tasks. The analysis highlights ClickHouse’s ability to handle petabyte-scale datasets with sub-second query times, often at lower operational expenses due to its efficient compression and indexing mechanisms. This positions it as an attractive alternative for cost-conscious organisations seeking to optimise their data infrastructure without sacrificing scalability.

Databricks, meanwhile, excels in integrated machine learning pipelines, but ClickHouse’s recent advancements in join-heavy queries challenge this edge. A benchmark from ClickHouse’s own blog in June 2025 demonstrated that its cloud offering executed join-intensive SQL queries up to 6.6 times faster than Databricks and Snowflake equivalents, with cost savings exceeding 60%. These results, replicated across datasets ranging from 721 million to 7.2 billion rows, underscore a shift where performance metrics are increasingly dictating vendor selection.

Market Valuations and Growth Trajectories

Snowflake and Databricks each boast market capitalisations north of $60 billion, reflecting investor confidence in their roles as enablers of the AI-driven economy. Snowflake’s fiscal Q4 2025 results, as reported in financial news outlets like AInvest, showed robust revenue growth, though tempered by competitive pressures and a high-profile data breach that affected clients such as AT&T and Ticketmaster. Analysts at AInvest noted Databricks’ blistering 57–60% annual growth rate, attributing it to its open-source roots and lakehouse architecture, which appeals to enterprises building custom AI models.

ClickHouse, while not publicly traded in its own right, is benefiting from this rivalry through strategic investments and partnerships. The company’s recent $350 million fundraising round, as detailed in a PitchBook article from early August 2025, signals its ambitions to scale enterprise adoption. This infusion positions ClickHouse at an inflection point, with potential to capture market share from incumbents by emphasising open-source flexibility and cost-effectiveness.

Live market data as of 10 August 2025 indicates related dynamics in publicly traded entities with exposure to this space. For instance, Nebius (NASDAQ: NBIS), which holds an equity stake in ClickHouse, closed at $68.78, marking a 5.31% increase from its previous close of $65.31. This movement reflects a broader 37.41% rise over the past 50 days and a staggering 102.50% gain over 200 days, underscoring investor enthusiasm for companies aligned with disruptive data technologies. The stock’s 52-week range from $14.09 to $71.49 highlights its volatility, yet a price-to-book ratio of 4.98 suggests valuations are pricing in significant growth potential.

Performance Benchmarks and Cost Implications

Diving deeper into the benchmarks, ClickHouse’s edge becomes evident in join operations, a critical component of complex analytics. In a two-part series on ClickHouse’s blog from June 2025, tests showed that by optimising joins with in-memory dictionaries, query speeds improved dramatically without necessitating data reloading or schema changes. Compared to Snowflake’s Gen2 Compute advancements and Databricks’ ML dominance, ClickHouse’s approach offers a plug-and-play efficiency that could erode market shares in high-velocity environments like e-commerce and financial services.

Cost remains a pivotal battleground. Reddit discussions from May 2024, evolving into 2025 analyses on platforms like Chaos Genius, reveal a growing perception of Snowflake as “expensive” among enterprise users. Chaos Genius’s May 2025 report contrasts this with ClickHouse’s architecture, which separates storage and compute more aggressively, potentially reducing bills by leveraging commodity hardware. For Databricks, the integration of Apache Spark provides versatility, but at scales where query costs balloon, ClickHouse’s columnar storage proves more economical.

Analyst sentiment, as aggregated from sources like WebProNews in early August 2025, marks this rivalry as a catalyst for innovation. The article notes that competition between Snowflake and Databricks is accelerating advancements in enterprise AI, with CIOs benefiting from enhanced tools. Broader market sentiment from professional sources, such as Globe and Mail reports from late July 2025, views Databricks as a powerful pre-IPO contender, yet acknowledges Snowflake’s challenges, including investor skepticism post-Berkshire Hathaway’s stake divestment.

Implications for Investors and Enterprises

For investors, the narrowing gap signals opportunities in underdogs like ClickHouse, which could disrupt the duopoly. Forward-looking models from PitchBook suggest that if ClickHouse sustains its benchmark advantages, it might achieve enterprise-scale revenues rivalling a fraction of Snowflake’s $3 billion-plus annual run rate by 2027. Analyst-led forecasts from AInvest project Snowflake’s growth moderating to 30–35% annually amid competition, while Databricks could hit $2.5 billion in revenue by year-end 2025, per internal estimates cited in news coverage.

Enterprises face a nuanced decision matrix. Those prioritising AI integration might favour Databricks’ ecosystem, but for pure analytics speed, ClickHouse’s metrics are compelling. A hybrid approach is emerging, where organisations layer ClickHouse for querying atop existing Snowflake or Databricks storage, as hinted in X posts reflecting user sentiment—though such views remain anecdotal and unverified.

Nebius’s market performance exemplifies how indirect exposure to this competition can yield upsides. With shares outstanding at 203 million and a market cap of approximately $16.4 billion as of 10 August 2025, NBIS trades at a forward P/E that’s undefined due to projected losses, but its EPS (TTM) of $0.90 and book value of $13.80 indicate underlying asset strength. The stock’s strong buy rating of 1.2 from consensus analysts underscores optimism, particularly with earnings reported on 7 August 2025 showing resilience.

Risks and Future Outlook

Challenges persist. ClickHouse must overcome enterprise-grade hurdles like advanced security features, where Snowflake’s recent breach has heightened scrutiny across the board. Databricks’ $10 billion funding war chest, as per WebProNews, equips it for aggressive expansion, potentially marginalising smaller players.

Yet, the data analytics market, projected by analysts to exceed $100 billion by 2026, offers ample room for multiple winners. ClickHouse’s playbook, as outlined in PitchBook’s August 2025 analysis, involves leveraging open-source communities to innovate rapidly, a strategy that could steadily erode the valuation premiums of Snowflake and Databricks.

In this evolving landscape, the real winners may be enterprises harnessing these tools for AI supremacy, while investors eye disruptors for asymmetric returns. As benchmarks continue to favour efficiency, the gap ClickHouse is closing might soon become a chasm for the incumbents.

References

• Airbyte. (2025, July). ClickHouse vs Snowflake. https://airbyte.com/data-engineering-resources/clickhouse-vs-snowflake
• AInvest. (2025). Snowflake rating downgrade and growth projections. https://ainvest.com/news/snowflake-rating-downgrade-maturity-crossroads-data-cloud-giant-2507
• Chaos Genius. (2025, May). ClickHouse vs Snowflake. https://www.chaosgenius.io/blog/clickhouse-vs-snowflake/
• ClickHouse. (2025, June). Join Me If You Can – Part 1. https://clickhouse.com/blog/join-me-if-you-can-clickhouse-vs-databricks-snowflake
• ClickHouse. (2025, June). Join Me If You Can – Part 2. https://clickhouse.com/blog/join-me-if-you-can-clickhouse-vs-databricks-snowflake-join-performance
• Globe and Mail. (2025, July). How Databricks is quietly becoming one of the most powerful AI stocks yet to go public. https://theglobeandmail.com/investing/markets/markets-news/Motley%20Fool/33703773/how-databricks-is-quietly-becoming-one-of-the-most-powerful-ai-stocks-yet-to-go-public
• PitchBook. (2025, August). Big data wars: ClickHouse has a playbook to beat Snowflake at its own game. https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/big-data-wars-clickhouse-has-a-playbook-to-beat-snowflake-at-its-own-game
• Reddit. (2024, May). Snowflake vs ClickHouse discussion. https://www.reddit.com/r/snowflake/comments/1cozp88/snowflake_vs_clickhouse/
• WebProNews. (2025, August). Snowflake vs Databricks rivalry. https://webpronews.com/snowflake-vs-databricks-rivalry-drives-enterprise-ai-innovation
• X.com. (2025). Relevant discussions and user feedback. https://x.com/ttunguz/status/1703788060591468902, https://x.com/ttunguz/status/1768022457267429883, https://x.com/StockSavvyShay/status/1825871353817489435, https://x.com/StockSavvyShay/status/1869013099900289261, https://x.com/StockSavvyShay/status/1880627644355776696