Hetzner ClickHouse® Hosting vs. 8 Managed Alternatives

These are the best alternatives to self-hosting ClickHouse® on Hetzner:

1. Tinybird
2. ClickHouse® Cloud
3. Aiven for ClickHouse®
4. Altinity.Cloud
5. ByteHouse
6. DoubleCloud
7. AWS Marketplace
8. CelerData
9. TabHouse

When you need to deploy ClickHouse® for low latency real-time analytics, one of the most important decisions is whether to self-host on low-cost infrastructure like Hetzner or rely on a managed service that removes operational complexity.

Hetzner has become a popular choice for self-hosted ClickHouse® deployments thanks to its powerful bare-metal servers at prices 50–70% lower than AWS, GCP, or Azure. A single dedicated server with dozens of CPU cores and large amounts of RAM can cost a fraction of what you'd pay on hyperscalers.

But that cost advantage comes with a trade-off. Running ClickHouse® on Hetzner means owning everything: installation, configuration, replication, backups, monitoring, scaling, upgrades, and 24/7 incident response.

As a result, a growing ecosystem of managed ClickHouse® alternatives has emerged to eliminate that operational burden. Some are official services from ClickHouse® Inc., others are specialized vendors with deep ClickHouse® expertise, and a few introduce cloud-native architectures that rethink how analytical databases scale.

We evaluate pricing, ease of use, scalability, support, ideal use cases, and performance characteristics for each option.

Need ClickHouse® without the operational headaches?

If you're evaluating hosting options and want to skip infrastructure management entirely while getting instant APIs, streaming ingestion, and production-ready security out of the box, try Tinybird. It's a real-time data platform built on ClickHouse® that handles everything from data ingestion to API publication—no cluster management required.

Quick Comparison: Hetzner vs. Managed Alternatives

1. Tinybird: Real-Time Data Platform Built on ClickHouse®

Rather than starting with database hosting options, let's begin with a fundamentally different approach: Tinybird.

Tinybird isn't traditional "ClickHouse® hosting"—it uses ClickHouse® under the hood but completely abstracts database management, providing a real-time data platform for building streaming data products rapidly.

Beyond Database Management

Tinybird is a fully managed real-time data platform built on ClickHouse® that bundles ingestion, transformation, and API publication into one integrated service.

You write SQL queries over data (internally stored in ClickHouse® managed by Tinybird), and with one click you publish them as secure HTTP endpoints. Building real-time analytics applications becomes dramatically simpler—you don't deal with infrastructure, only query and API design.

Zero Infrastructure Investment

The entire Hetzner vs. managed services debate often centers on a fundamental question: Do you need database control, or do you need data results?

Tinybird firmly answers: results. The platform is serverless by design—instant setup, limitless scale, with built-in high availability, auto-scaling with zero-copy replication, schema evolution, and SOC 2 Type II compliance.

You don't provision servers, configure clusters, manage capacity, tune ClickHouse® settings, or worry about backups. You just connect data sources and build.

Integrated Data Pipeline

Tinybird provides fully managed connectors for ingesting data from Apache Kafka, Confluent Cloud, Google BigQuery, Snowflake, Amazon S3, DynamoDB, and more, supporting real-time change data capture from operational databases. It even includes an HTTP streaming endpoint to write thousands of events per second directly from application code.

These integrated connectors save substantial development time and costs by eliminating the need to build and host external ingestion services.

Developer-First Workflows

Unlike traditional databases, Tinybird integrates directly with git-based version control. You create schemas (.datasource files), connect to Kafka or S3 (.connection files), and build SQL-based API endpoints (.pipe files) in your local environment, then push them to the cloud with the CLI.

You can work manually or use Tinybird's agentic experience to accelerate development with AI-assisted workflows.

Instant API Layer

Many real-time analytics use cases are user-facing analytics—embedded dashboards and metrics in software products accessed by end users. Tinybird makes this extraordinarily simple through a fully managed API publication layer.

Any SQL query in Tinybird can be published instantly as a fully documented, scalable HTTP endpoint without writing additional application code. Tinybird hosts and automatically scales your APIs.

For user-facing analytics serving thousands of concurrent users with sub-100ms latency requirements, you can't beat going from SQL to production API in seconds.

Predictable Pricing

Unlike ClickHouse® Cloud's per-minute billing, Tinybird offers monthly plans with fixed pricing that include certain compute and storage capacity. There's a Free plan to start without cost, a Developer plan around $25/month, and scalable Enterprise plans.

This predictability helps avoid billing surprises—you pay a fixed amount while usage stays within allocation.

When Tinybird Makes Sense

Tinybird is ideal when:

• You need real-time analytics in production quickly (days, not months)
• Your use case involves user-facing dashboards or embedded analytics
• You want to avoid infrastructure management entirely
• You need sub-100ms query latency with automatic scaling
• You're building APIs on top of analytical data

Tinybird might not fit if:

• Hard requirements mandate data reside in your own cloud account (BYOC)
• You need to leverage existing cloud commitments
• You require deep customization of underlying ClickHouse® deployment

Tinybird also fits telemetry-heavy Internet of Things (IoT) workloads, where billions of sensor readings per day demand immediate transformation and visualization without maintaining complex streaming or OLAP infrastructure.

2. Hetzner Self-Hosted ClickHouse®: Maximum Control, Maximum Effort

Self-hosting ClickHouse® on Hetzner means renting dedicated servers or cloud instances from Hetzner and manually installing, configuring, and operating the database yourself.

Why Teams Choose Hetzner

The primary draw is cost. Hetzner offers powerful hardware at dramatically lower prices than major cloud providers—often 50-70% cheaper for equivalent specifications.

A dedicated server with multiple high-performance cores, dozens of gigabytes of RAM, and fast NVMe storage can cost just tens of euros per month. The same compute capacity on AWS might cost hundreds of dollars monthly.

Hetzner also includes generous bandwidth in their plans, reducing the egress costs that can balloon on other clouds.

The Control Advantage

With self-hosting, you get complete control over every configuration parameter. You choose the exact ClickHouse® version, customize every setting, optimize hardware utilization, and tune for your specific workload.

Since ClickHouse® is open source, there are no licensing fees. You pay only for infrastructure plus your team's time.

The Operational Reality

Here's where self-hosting gets complicated. The infrastructure cost is low, but the hidden costs are substantial.

You must invest significant engineering hours in initial setup—installing ClickHouse®, configuring clusters for high availability, setting up replication, implementing backup strategies, and establishing monitoring.

Many organizations underestimate the operational load of running ClickHouse® in production. There's no 24/7 support beyond what your own team provides.

Who Should Choose Hetzner

Hetzner self-hosting makes sense when:

• Your team has proven ClickHouse® operational expertise
• You're optimizing for lowest possible infrastructure costs
• You have dedicated DevOps/database engineering resources
• Your workload is relatively stable and predictable

3. ClickHouse® Cloud: The Official Managed Service

ClickHouse® Cloud is the official managed service from ClickHouse® Inc., designed to be the easiest path to deploying ClickHouse® without touching infrastructure.

Serverless Simplicity

ClickHouse® Cloud operates as a serverless platform. You configure services in terms of compute units and storage capacity, and the system handles the underlying infrastructure. Resources are billed per minute, providing flexibility to pay only for active usage.

Pricing Structure

Compute costs range from approximately $0.22 to $0.39 per compute unit per hour. Storage costs around $25 per TB per month.

A small service used only during business hours might cost around $66 monthly. A production configuration with two replicas, 32GB RAM each, and 5TB storage would cost approximately $2,669 monthly.

Deployment Experience

Setup is remarkably simple. A few clicks select your cloud provider, region, and service tier. Minutes later, you have a production-ready ClickHouse® endpoint.

Integrated tools like ClickPipes handle data ingestion from common sources—Kafka, S3, and others—without building external pipelines.

Ideal Use Cases

ClickHouse® Cloud suits teams wanting the simplest, most direct ClickHouse® production experience with confidence that experts manage the infrastructure. It's ideal for startups and enterprises that don't want DevOps distraction.

Variable or unpredictable workloads benefit enormously from per-minute billing.

4. Aiven for ClickHouse®: Multi-Cloud Simplicity

Aiven is a European managed services provider offering numerous open-source technologies including Kafka, PostgreSQL, OpenSearch, and ClickHouse®.

Fixed Monthly Pricing

Aiven operates with fixed monthly plans providing cost predictability. The base ClickHouse® plan starts around $190 monthly and includes a 3-node high-availability cluster.

Plans scale upward—Business and Premium tiers offer larger node sizes with pricing from $500/month to ~$1,900/month.

A key advantage: all networking costs are included in the monthly price. No surprise charges for data egress.

Multi-Cloud Deployment

From the Aiven console or CLI/API, deploy ClickHouse® on your preferred cloud: AWS, GCP, Azure, DigitalOcean, or UpCloud. Aiven handles the 3-node replication configuration, networking, and disk setup automatically.

Since Aiven uses standard open-source ClickHouse®, there's no vendor lock-in on data.

Ideal Use Cases

Aiven works well when you want convenience with fixed costs. Unlike ClickHouse® Cloud's pure consumption model, you know your monthly bill—valuable for annual budgeting.

It's particularly attractive for organizations already using other Aiven services. Many real-time analytics projects combine Kafka + ClickHouse®—having both managed on the same platform simplifies integrations.

5. Altinity.Cloud: Expert Management with Maximum Flexibility

Altinity.Cloud is the managed ClickHouse® service from Altinity, a company deeply specialized in ClickHouse® with core contributors since the project's early days.

Deployment Flexibility

Altinity.Cloud offers two deployment modes: Altinity's cloud (managed environment on AWS/GCP/Azure/Hetzner) or Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC)—Altinity installs and manages ClickHouse® in your own cloud account.

This BYOC capability is differentiating—few alternatives allow managed operations in your own infrastructure.

Transparent Pricing

Altinity uses straightforward usage-based pricing: approximately $0.0625 per vCPU/hour on AWS/GCP/Azure, and around $0.0347 per vCPU/hour on Hetzner BYOC.

The Hetzner rate reflects infrastructure cost savings passed to customers—roughly 50% lower than major clouds. Data egress is included up to $500/month.

Their philosophy: no hidden fees, no proprietary lock-in. Altinity uses 100% open-source ClickHouse®.

Elite Support

This is a major strength. Altinity provides 24/7 elite support included for all customers from day one. You get ClickHouse® experts responding rapidly to any incident.

They assist not just with service issues but also with schema optimization and query tuning—functioning almost as an extension of your data team.

Best-Fit Scenarios

Altinity.Cloud is ideal for organizations wanting the best of both worlds: open-source advantages (no lock-in, low infrastructure costs, flexibility) combined with managed service benefits.

Strict compliance or data localization requirements? BYOC lets you maintain data in your private VPC while delegating management.

Cost-sensitive teams find Altinity's Hetzner backend support attractive—achieve vCPU costs at half AWS prices while retaining managed service benefits.

6. ByteHouse: Cloud-Native Elastic Architecture

ByteHouse is a managed alternative from ByteDance (the company behind TikTok), based on ClickHouse® technology but with modern cloud-native architecture.

Architectural Innovation

ByteHouse implements a shared-everything storage approach. Data resides in distributed storage while compute nodes (called "virtual warehouses") can be started or stopped independently, all accessing the same data.

This enables separate ingestion and ad-hoc query clusters reading identical data without copying it. Warehouses can shut down when unused to save costs while data remains persistently accessible.

Pricing Model

ByteHouse uses a combined model: Compute is charged per hour (an 8-core/32GB node costs ~$1.12/hour). Storage costs approximately $0.034 per GB monthly (~$34/TB/month).

Prepaid monthly packages offer discounts—a month-long M warehouse contract with 1TB storage costs ~$1,154.

Ideal Applications

ByteHouse excels for variable or spiky workloads. An application going suddenly viral globally could rapidly scale analytical clusters to absorb load, then scale back after the spike.

It's attractive for teams wanting "cloud data warehouse" patterns but preferring ClickHouse® technology over Snowflake/Redshift.

7. AWS Marketplace: Quick Deployment Options

AWS Marketplace offers another path to deploy ClickHouse® with third-party help—either via pre-configured images (AMIs) or SaaS services from various vendors.

One-Click AMIs

Popular options include Amazon Machine Images with pre-installed ClickHouse®. For example, "Fully Managed, Secured, and Optimized ClickHouse®" by ManageStacks starts a Docker Compose with ClickHouse® + Tabix (web GUI), automatically generates SSL certificates, and configures Apache proxy with basic authentication.

This AMI is free itself—no license fees, only pay for underlying EC2 instance costs.

SaaS Services via Marketplace

Altinity.Cloud is available via AWS Marketplace, letting AWS enterprise customers subscribe there for unified billing. Contracting through Marketplace consolidates billing into AWS accounts, potentially using AWS credits for payment.

Use Cases

AMIs are great for rapid testing or small internal projects. A BI team wanting to analyze data could launch this AMI and have a mini data warehouse running without days of configuration.

Managed services via Marketplace suit enterprises with AWS agreements where adding a Marketplace line item is easier than new vendor contracts.

8. CelerData: Next-Generation Alternative

CelerData is the commercial entity behind StarRocks, an OLAP open-source database competing in the same space as ClickHouse®.

What Is StarRocks?

StarRocks is a columnar SQL engine focused on extreme query speeds with massive concurrency and mutable data support. CelerData offers CelerData Cloud—managed StarRocks with the pitch that it can replace ClickHouse®, offering superior performance in certain scenarios.

Performance Comparisons

CelerData claims StarRocks surpasses ClickHouse® in latency, concurrency, and cost-per-query for many workloads. In internal benchmarks, StarRocks often wins on queries with complex joins and high user concurrency.

Best-Fit Scenarios

Consider CelerData/StarRocks when:

• Complex SQL queries with multiple JOINs are common
• Extremely high concurrency needed (dozens or hundreds of users running dashboards simultaneously)
• Frequent data modifications required (updates, upserts)
• Large existing data lakes—StarRocks can query Parquet/Iceberg files directly

Decision Framework: Choosing Your ClickHouse® Deployment

Evaluate Your Team's Capabilities

Do you have ClickHouse® operational expertise in-house? Without that expertise, managed services eliminate the learning curve and operational risk of running complex distributed databases.

Assess Total Cost of Ownership

Don't just compare infrastructure prices. Factor in engineering time spent on setup, maintenance, monitoring, and the opportunity cost of engineers managing infrastructure vs. building features.

For small-to-medium workloads, managed services often have lower TCO when engineering time is valued properly.

Consider Your Workload Patterns

Variable workloads benefit from services with pause capabilities or auto-scaling (ClickHouse® Cloud, ByteHouse). Stable, predictable workloads might prefer fixed-price plans (Aiven) or optimized self-hosting.

Evaluate Compliance Requirements

Strict data sovereignty or regulatory requirements? BYOC options (Altinity, ClickHouse® Cloud BYOC) let you maintain data in your infrastructure while still getting managed operations.

Prioritize Time-to-Value

Need to ship quickly? Fully managed services (especially Tinybird for complete data platforms) get you operational in minutes to hours.

For developers seeking faster insight into event data and product metrics, Tinybird can also serve as a Google Analytics alternative, giving full control over real-time analytics without relying on third-party tracking platforms.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Is self-hosting ClickHouse® on Hetzner actually cheaper than managed services?

Hetzner infrastructure costs 50-70% less than major clouds. However, total cost of ownership includes engineering time for setup, maintenance, monitoring, and 24/7 operations. For small teams, managed services often cost less when you value engineering hours properly.

What's the performance difference between Hetzner and managed services?

Properly configured Hetzner can match or exceed cloud-based managed services for raw query speed. However, managed services often include optimizations, caching, and expert tuning that self-hosted deployments might lack. For most use cases, performance differences are negligible.

Which managed service has the best ClickHouse® expertise?

Altinity has the deepest ClickHouse® specialization with core contributors on their team and 24/7 elite support included. ClickHouse® Cloud offers direct support from ClickHouse® Inc.—the creators of the database.

Is Tinybird different from ClickHouse® Cloud?

Tinybird is a data platform built on ClickHouse®, not just managed database hosting. ClickHouse® Cloud provides managed database infrastructure you build on top of. Tinybird provides infrastructure plus ingestion, transformation, and API layers—a complete solution for building real-time data products.

Can I use Hetzner with a managed service provider?

Yes! Altinity.Cloud explicitly supports Hetzner BYOC deployments at roughly half the vCPU/hour cost of AWS/GCP. This combines Hetzner's infrastructure cost advantage with managed service convenience.

Choosing between Hetzner self-hosting and managed ClickHouse® alternatives ultimately depends on your organization's technical capabilities, budget constraints, compliance requirements, and strategic priorities.

Hetzner offers unmatched infrastructure cost efficiency for teams with deep ClickHouse® expertise willing to invest engineering time in operations. Managed services trade higher per-unit costs for dramatically reduced operational complexity, faster deployment, expert support, and better scaling capabilities.

For most organizations, especially those without dedicated database administration teams, managed services deliver better total value—enabling teams to focus on extracting insights from data rather than wrestling with infrastructure.

And if you're simply looking to build real-time analytics applications as quickly as possible without any infrastructure concerns, platforms like Tinybird that handle the entire stack from ingestion to APIs offer the fastest path from concept to production.