ClickHouse Releases PostgresBench: A Fair Way to Compare Database Services

ClickHouse published PostgresBench on 20 June 2026, a free benchmarking tool that tests more than 40 database services. What makes it different: all the test data and results are publicly available, so anyone can verify the findings.

Companies that sell database services often claim their product is the fastest. But independent testing is rare, and many comparisons are not done fairly. PostgresBench tries to solve this problem by publishing everything openly — the tests themselves, the data used, and the results. Think of it like a sports league publishing the rulebook, scoresheets, and footage for every game, so fans can check the outcome themselves instead of just trusting what the announcer says.

ClickHouse built this tool as part of a larger effort. The company already publishes ClickBench, a similar tool that tests 40 databases and measures how fast they can handle analytical queries — questions that sift through large datasets to find patterns. PostgresBench focuses specifically on Postgres, a widely used open-source database that many companies have adapted for their own cloud services.

ClickHouse also published other benchmarks recently. In May 2026, it released CostBench, which measures how much it costs to run different cloud databases. Earlier, it tested how different databases handle JSON data — a common format for storing flexible, unstructured information. Each benchmark tackles a different question about database performance.

Here is something worth understanding about PostgresBench: ClickHouse benefits commercially from some of its results. The company makes a product called pg_clickhouse that speeds up database queries. When PostgresBench shows pg_clickhouse as the fastest, that helps ClickHouse sell more. This does not mean the test is unfair — the methodology is solid — but if you are choosing a database for your own work, it is smart to run the test yourself on data that looks like your actual workload rather than relying only on the published results.

Database services from large cloud companies like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, plus newer specialists like Neon and Supabase, all offer Postgres compatibility. But they work quite differently behind the scenes. PostgresBench gives teams a common reference point to compare them fairly for the first time. Whether it becomes the standard tool for this comparison depends on how well the community uses it and whether ClickHouse keeps the test current as new services launch.

The benchmark is free and available on GitHub at ClickHouse/PostgresBench.