In May 2024, I pushed the first commit of CH-UI — a React app that could connect to ClickHouse and run queries. That was the entire feature set. Today, almost two years later, it’s a full management platform with a SQL editor, dashboards, an AI copilot, data pipelines, SQL models, and secure tunneling. All shipped as a single binary under Apache 2.0.
Here’s what happened in between.
The Numbers
- 68 releases from June 2024 to today
- 632 stars on GitHub
- 12 contributors across two major versions
- 2 complete architectures — React SPA (v1) and Go + Svelte (v2)
- 0 external dependencies at runtime
The first release was v1.0.5 on June 13, 2024. Yes, I skipped a few versions. The latest is v2.0.22 — shipped two days ago.
v1: Learning What People Actually Needed
v1 was a React/Vite SPA. No backend. You’d point it at a ClickHouse HTTP endpoint and start querying. Simple, limited, and honestly pretty rough around the edges.
But people showed up. They filed issues. They asked for things I hadn’t considered — JSON field rendering, Docker Compose setups, environment variable configuration. The v1.5 era was the most educational: 30 patch releases over nine months. Each one taught me something about what ClickHouse users actually struggle with.
The biggest lesson? People don’t just want a query box. They want a workspace. They want to explore schemas, save queries, build dashboards, manage users, and understand their data — all without switching tools or paying enterprise prices.
The Rewrite That Changed Everything
By late 2025, v1 had hit its ceiling. Adding features meant fighting the architecture. So I rewrote everything from scratch: Go for the backend, Svelte 5 for the frontend, compiled into a single binary.
I shipped v2.0.0 on February 20, 2026 — the same day I tagged v1.9.0-final as the last v1 release. No transition period. Clean break. The v1-last branch preserves the old code for anyone who needs it.
Since then: 22 releases in five weeks. The single-binary architecture made iteration faster, not slower. Every feature — from the AI copilot to the pipeline canvas — had to fit within one binary and one SQLite database. That constraint turned out to be a superpower. No Docker Compose files. No service orchestration. No “install these three things first.” Download, run, query.
What’s New in v2.0.22
The latest releases added features I’m particularly proud of:
Query Cost Estimation — Before you run a heavy query, CH-UI shows you the estimated cost using ClickHouse’s EXPLAIN ESTIMATE. Think of it like BigQuery’s dry-run pricing, but for self-hosted ClickHouse. It’s the kind of feature that prevents that “oh no” moment when someone accidentally scans a 500 billion row table.
Visual Column-Level Lineage — An interactive DAG built with SvelteFlow that traces data flow from source columns through transformations to final outputs. This is governance tooling that usually lives behind enterprise paywalls.
Langfuse Integration — If you’re using the Brain AI assistant, you can now pipe all LLM interactions to Langfuse for observability. Track token usage, monitor response quality, debug prompt issues. Full transparency on what the AI is actually doing.
Building Open Source as a Solo Developer
CH-UI has 12 contributors, but let’s be honest — the vast majority of the code is mine. That’s fine. Open source doesn’t have to mean a massive community from day one. It means the code is available, the license is permissive, and anyone can fork, extend, or learn from it.
What surprised me most was where adoption came from. Data teams at companies I’d never heard of. Individual analysts tired of clicking through phpMyAdmin-style interfaces. DevOps engineers who needed a quick way to check cluster health. The ClickHouse ecosystem has a lot of users who just want a solid UI that doesn’t require a procurement process.
The contributions that did come in were meaningful — bug reports that caught real issues, Docker improvements, documentation fixes. Every contributor made the project better in ways I wouldn’t have found on my own.
What’s Next
CH-UI Pro adds scheduled jobs, governance policies, alerting, and team features. The community edition keeps growing — it’s the foundation and it stays fully open.
The goal for the rest of 2026 is straightforward: make CH-UI the best way to work with ClickHouse. Not the most enterprise. Not the most feature-bloated. The best — meaning the fastest to set up, the most intuitive to use, and the most transparent in how it works.
If you’re running ClickHouse and haven’t tried it yet, grab the binary from GitHub or check out ch-ui.com. One download. One binary. Full platform.