Exploring the Best GUI Tools for ClickHouse: A Beginner's Guide
Next week, we talked about ClickHouse, the powerful new backend database that will be used in Zabbix 8.0 to handle the massive data volume of the observability world.
While I understand the incredible potential of ClickHouse, I’ll admit that I approached it as a beginner when it comes to daily management. Because I wanted to optimize my workflow, I set out to find the best graphical user interface (GUI) tools to help manage ClickHouse efficiently. Today, I want to share exactly what I discovered during my testing.
Why Look for a Third-Party ClickHouse GUI?
If you install ClickHouse via a Docker container, it already provides some built-in web interfaces. You get a basic SQL UI to run queries and view data, along with a performance dashboard to monitor system health. These are absolutely useful for checking if everything is running optimally.
But I couldn't help but wonder: Is there something more evolved out there?
A quick trip to the official ClickHouse website reveals a dedicated page listing various open-source and commercial GUI solutions, such as AGX, ChartDB, Datastoria, HouseOps, and more. Surprisingly, despite ClickHouse being used everywhere in modern applications, many of these management tools haven't been updated in years. So, I decided to test the ones that looked the most modern and actively maintained.
Testing ClickHouse Management Tools: The Good, The Bad, and The Buggy
Armed with my command line, I spun up some Docker containers to test three specific tools: Dory, CHouseUI, and CH-UI. Here is how my experience went.
Dory & CHouseUI: Promising but Problematic
Dory caught my eye because it’s a 360-degree database manager. It supports MariaDB, PostgreSQL, and ClickHouse all in one place—which is perfect for a Zabbix environment! However, after spinning up the container and trying the default credentials provided in their GitHub documentation, I was hit with an "invalid origin" error.
I had a similar user experience with CHouseUI. On paper, it promises an extensive set of features, touching on cluster management, AI, and security. Unfortunately, the default credentials simply wouldn't let me log in. I promise to debug these in the future, but for a quick setup, they didn't pass the test.
CH-UI: The Winner That Actually Works
The only tool that truly satisfied me right out of the box was CH-UI. The setup was incredibly straightforward: I just downloaded the binary and launched it with my ClickHouse connection details. Instantly, I was greeted with a sleek, functional web interface.
Deep Dive into CH-UI Features
Once connected, CH-UI proved to be a highly capable tool. Here are some of the standout features that make it my current favorite for managing ClickHouse:
- Comprehensive Dashboard Overview: You get an immediate, clear picture of how your specific ClickHouse instance is running.
- Query Management: It allows you to run, save, and manage your SQL queries effortlessly.
- Table Insights: You can easily view the schemas and data of the tables created for Zabbix (like history, trends, etc.), including row numbers, sizes, and engines.
- Top Slow Queries & Table Sizes: This is arguably the most useful feature for troubleshooting. If you are facing storage issues or system slowdowns, CH-UI immediately highlights the largest tables and the queries causing bottlenecks.
- Multi-Connection Support: In the admin panel, you can add connections to multiple ClickHouse instances, which will be incredibly useful once we start managing clusters and data replication.
Integrating AI into ClickHouse Management
One of the most fascinating sections of CH-UI is the "Brain" feature, which allows you to interact with your database using Artificial Intelligence. You can hook it up to OpenAI, Ollama, or any OpenAI-compatible API.
I connected it to my local LLM instance running Qwen 3.5 to see if it could help me query ClickHouse. I asked it to "pick up my most active table," and the AI successfully generated the correct SQL query!
However, there is a slight limitation: the AI integration seems to lack a Model Context Protocol (MCP) service. This means the AI cannot execute the queries directly (it throws a "read-only" error), but rather it acts as a specialized prompt generator. It’s still a fantastic feature, but direct execution would take it to the next level.
The Magic of ClickHouse Data Compression
While exploring CH-UI, I ran a query on table history to check data sizes, and it perfectly illustrated why ClickHouse is so highly praised for data management.
In our previous episode, I mentioned that ClickHouse compresses data by an incredible factor. Seeing it in CH-UI confirmed this: one of our heaviest tables, the Text Log, was 32 GB uncompressed. Once compressed by ClickHouse, it shrank down to just 3.6 GB! We are talking about a compression ratio of almost 10:1. When you scale this up to massive enterprise installations, the storage optimization is simply mind-blowing.
Limitations to Keep in Mind
It’s worth noting that CH-UI does have some "Pro" functions locked behind a paid license. If you need advanced features like query scheduling, deep governance, cluster health monitoring, or advanced query insights, you will need to pay for the official license. But given that it's the most reliable tool I tested, it might just be worth the investment for enterprise users.
Wrapping Up
The world of ClickHouse is vast, and since it’s completely new territory for me, I am excited to keep learning. In future episodes, I plan to explore how data is distributed across clusters and how replicas are created.
What about you? Do you know of any other hidden gems or better GUI tools for ClickHouse? I am incredibly curious to learn more, so please let me know down in the comments!
Don't forget to connect with me!
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That’s all for today. I'm Dimitri Bellini, and I'll see you in the next episode with something just as interesting. Bye, everyone!