# Amazon Redshift vs ClickHouse Cloud

Canonical: https://inetgeek.com/compare/aws-redshift-vs-clickhouse-cloud/

Every value below is read from Amazon Redshift's and ClickHouse Cloud's own documentation. See https://inetgeek.com/methodology/ for how.

## At a glance

| Criterion | Amazon Redshift | ClickHouse Cloud |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| What the free plan includes | A two-month free trial for provisioned clusters, capped at 750 hours a month — so one cluster running continuously exhausts it almost exactly. Serverless is offered with a credit instead, drawn down at a rate that depends on the endpoint capacity. | Trial credits over a 30-day window, drawn down until they are depleted or the window closes, whichever comes first. Adding a card during the trial does not end it — the credits keep being consumed first. A time-boxed credit rather than a standing allowance, which is the opposite of BigQuery's tebibyte renewing every month. |
| Entry paid plan | $0.543 an hour for a provisioned cluster, or $1.50 an hour for serverless — about $391 and $1,080 a month if left running. Serverless shuts down when idle and bills per second with a 60-second minimum, so the higher hourly rate can be the cheaper one. | From $66.52 a month for a Basic service active 6 hours a day — one replica with 8 GiB of RAM and 2 vCPUs, 500 GB of compressed data and 500 GB of backup. The same service active 24 hours a day is $186.27, so the entry price is a statement about usage as much as about capacity. |
| Pricing model | Two deployment options priced on time rather than data. Provisioned bills per node-hour for a cluster you size yourself; Serverless bills Redshift Processing Unit hours per second, with a 60-second minimum and no charge for start-up time, shutting down when inactive. Managed storage is billed independently of compute in both. | Compute, storage and data transfer itemised separately, with compute varying by how many hours a day the service is active — $39.91, $79.83 or $159.66 in the published example for 6, 12 or 24 hours, against a flat $25.30 of storage. Scale, the always-on auto-scaling tier, starts at $499.38 a month. |

## Where they differ

### What the free plan includes

- Amazon Redshift: A two-month free trial for provisioned clusters, capped at 750 hours a month — so one cluster running continuously exhausts it almost exactly. Serverless is offered with a credit instead, drawn down at a rate that depends on the endpoint capacity. ([source](https://aws.amazon.com/redshift/pricing/))
- ClickHouse Cloud: Trial credits over a 30-day window, drawn down until they are depleted or the window closes, whichever comes first. Adding a card during the trial does not end it — the credits keep being consumed first. A time-boxed credit rather than a standing allowance, which is the opposite of BigQuery's tebibyte renewing every month. ([source](https://clickhouse.com/docs/products/cloud/reference/billing))

### Entry paid plan

- Amazon Redshift: $0.543 an hour for a provisioned cluster, or $1.50 an hour for serverless — about $391 and $1,080 a month if left running. Serverless shuts down when idle and bills per second with a 60-second minimum, so the higher hourly rate can be the cheaper one. ([source](https://aws.amazon.com/redshift/pricing/))
- ClickHouse Cloud: From $66.52 a month for a Basic service active 6 hours a day — one replica with 8 GiB of RAM and 2 vCPUs, 500 GB of compressed data and 500 GB of backup. The same service active 24 hours a day is $186.27, so the entry price is a statement about usage as much as about capacity. ([source](https://clickhouse.com/docs/products/cloud/reference/billing))

### Pricing model

- Amazon Redshift: Two deployment options priced on time rather than data. Provisioned bills per node-hour for a cluster you size yourself; Serverless bills Redshift Processing Unit hours per second, with a 60-second minimum and no charge for start-up time, shutting down when inactive. Managed storage is billed independently of compute in both. ([source](https://aws.amazon.com/redshift/pricing/))
- ClickHouse Cloud: Compute, storage and data transfer itemised separately, with compute varying by how many hours a day the service is active — $39.91, $79.83 or $159.66 in the published example for 6, 12 or 24 hours, against a flat $25.30 of storage. Scale, the always-on auto-scaling tier, starts at $499.38 a month. ([source](https://clickhouse.com/docs/products/cloud/reference/billing))

## Which should you choose?

Pick Amazon Redshift if Constant, predictable query load already inside AWS. At $0.543 an hour a provisioned cluster costs the same whether it serves one query or a million, so heavy continuous use is where the hourly model pays.

Pick ClickHouse Cloud if Knowing what a part-time warehouse costs. The published example is explicit — $66.52 a month for a Basic service awake six hours a day against $186.27 awake around the clock — with compute, storage and egress itemised separately.

Consider something else: Amazon Redshift — The warehouse sits idle. A provisioned cluster bills around $391 a month doing nothing; serverless shuts down when inactive but starts at $1.50 an hour, so the cheaper rate and the cheaper bill are not the same option.

Consider something else: ClickHouse Cloud — Data transfer matters. It is the only one here that puts public internet egress and cross-region transfer on the invoice as their own lines, so moving results out has a price the others absorb.

## Documented by only one

- Kind of free offer: ClickHouse Cloud: Free trial
- Egress over allowance: ClickHouse Cloud: Itemised rather than absorbed: the published example carries $1.15 of public internet egress on 10 GB and $0.16 of cross-region transfer on 5 GB. The only member of this category that puts data transfer on the invoice as its own line.
- Storage price: Amazon Redshift: Redshift Managed Storage grows independently of compute, so a cluster can be sized for query performance without over-provisioning disk. The page states the separation as the design point rather than quoting one rate for it.

## Questions this comparison answers

**Entry paid plan: Amazon Redshift or ClickHouse Cloud?**

Amazon Redshift: $0.543 an hour for a provisioned cluster, or $1.50 an hour for serverless — about $391 and $1,080 a month if left running. Serverless shuts down when idle and bills per second with a 60-second minimum, so the higher hourly rate can be the cheaper one.
ClickHouse Cloud: From $66.52 a month for a Basic service active 6 hours a day — one replica with 8 GiB of RAM and 2 vCPUs, 500 GB of compressed data and 500 GB of backup. The same service active 24 hours a day is $186.27, so the entry price is a statement about usage as much as about capacity.

**Should I choose Amazon Redshift or ClickHouse Cloud?**

Pick Amazon Redshift if Constant, predictable query load already inside AWS. At $0.543 an hour a provisioned cluster costs the same whether it serves one query or a million, so heavy continuous use is where the hourly model pays.
Pick ClickHouse Cloud if Knowing what a part-time warehouse costs. The published example is explicit — $66.52 a month for a Basic service awake six hours a day against $186.27 awake around the clock — with compute, storage and egress itemised separately.