# KX Reviews **Vendor:** KX **Category:** [Time Series Databases](https://www.g2.com/categories/time-series-databases) **Average Rating:** 4.6/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 51 ## About KX We power the time-aware data-driven decisions that enable fast-moving organizations to realize the full potential of their AI investments and outpace competitors. Our technology delivers transformational value by addressing data challenges around completeness, timeliness, and efficiency. We enable organizations to understand change over time and generate faster, more accurate insights — at any scale, and with cost efficiency. Our technology is essential to the operations of the world's top investment banks, aerospace and defense, high-tech manufacturing, healthcare and life sciences, automotive, and fleet telematics organizations. The primary audience for KX encompasses line-of-business leaders, developers, data scientists, and data engineers who require sophisticated analytics capabilities to create high-performance, data-driven applications. With its unmatched speed and scalability, KX allows users to efficiently process large volumes of data, whether in cloud environments, on-premises, or at the edge. This flexibility ensures that organizations can integrate KX technology into their existing workflows seamlessly, enhancing their analytical capabilities without causing disruptions to ongoing operations. KX distinguishes itself in the analytics landscape through its independently benchmarked performance, recognized as the fastest available on the market. This speed is vital for businesses that depend on real-time data insights to inform their decision-making processes. By enabling users to uncover richer, actionable insights quickly, KX facilitates faster and more informed choices, driving competitive advantage and transformative growth. Its ability to manage complex data sets and deliver insights promptly is particularly advantageous for industries that operate in fast-paced environments, where timely information is critical. Key features of KX include advanced time series and vector data analytics capabilities, which enable efficient management and analysis of extensive data volumes. Furthermore, KX integrates seamlessly with popular analytics tools, enhancing their performance and allowing users to maximize their existing investments. The platform's architecture is designed for high performance, ensuring that organizations can scale their analytics operations as needed without sacrificing speed or efficiency. With a global presence across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific, KX is trusted by leading organizations to spearhead their data and AI initiatives. By providing a powerful analytics solution, KX not only enhances operational efficiency but also fosters a culture of innovation, empowering businesses to remain competitive in an increasingly data-driven world. ## KX Pros & Cons **What users like:** - Users highlight the **lightning-fast performance** of KX's dashboard, enhancing their reporting and data manipulation experience. (6 reviews) - Users highlight the **impressive performance** of KX's dashboards, enjoying their speed and efficient data processing capabilities. (5 reviews) - Users admire the **powerful and versatile tools** of KX, enhancing efficiency in problem-solving and data handling. (5 reviews) - Users praise the **powerful and versatile tools** of KX, enhancing efficiency and continuous improvement in their work. (4 reviews) - Users value the **superior real-time analytics** of KX, allowing for swift, data-driven decisions in dynamic markets. (3 reviews) - Users highlight the **efficiency** of KX in solving problems quickly and leveraging hardware for data analysis. (3 reviews) - Users praise the **lightning-fast processing** of KX, benefiting from its efficient in-memory database capabilities. (3 reviews) - Features (3 reviews) - Real-time Data Processing (3 reviews) - Customer Support (2 reviews) **What users dislike:** - Users find the **learning curve steep** but acknowledge the value of documentation and training resources available. (7 reviews) - The **difficult learning** curve of KX makes it challenging for beginners to master the q language effectively. (3 reviews) - Users note the **steep learning curve** of KX, with limited resources making initial mastery challenging. (3 reviews) - Users find KX licenses to be **expensive for hobbyists** , creating a barrier for casual users and small organizations. (2 reviews) - Users face **initial difficulties** with KX, struggling to learn and integrate due to limited resources and knowledge. (2 reviews) - Training Required (2 reviews) - Cloud Incompatibility (1 reviews) - Cloud Limitations (1 reviews) - Users find the **complexity of the q language** challenging, highlighting its steep learning curve and cryptic syntax. (1 reviews) - Complex Usage (1 reviews) ## KX Reviews ### 1. KX is an incredible company with the best time-series database in the world. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kenan D. | KDB+/q Developer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 01, 2025 **What do you like best about KX?** The continuous growth and improvement despite being the best in the world at what they do. Their platform, support and development are second to none. **What do you dislike about KX?** Nothing against KX, rather there is not much external material on KDB so the learning curve is a bit steep. But once you understand how it works there is no better tool. **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** The usability with other platforms by introducing KDB-X. ### 2. It is worth the effort **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Yiorgos [George] A. | DevOps Engineer, Financial Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 18, 2024 **What do you like best about KX?** The teseness of the language. It allows for expressing a lot in the monitor area **What do you dislike about KX?** The license that I have to renew yearly. I mean come on! I am a hobby user. I definitely do not run it daily and it is a product you want to gain popularity. Make-it-easy **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** I am not solving any business problem for my employer with Kx. What I am trying to do though is to make it a replacement for Prometheus. I hate PromQL. So in an ideal world I want a prometheus remote_write API to store in a Kx and be able to run queries there, that are longer than the 15 days time span that Prometheus is optimized for. ### 3. The best ecosystem for quants and data engineers **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Alex T. | KDB+ developer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 16, 2024 **What do you like best about KX?** - You can feel that the product is made with love. The syntax is very powerful, so you can write short statements instead of long SQL queries - Speed is insane. - Good integration with other technologies and tools like python and Java - The ecosystem is just nice, everything is in place, language, documentation, vs code plugin, own IDE (KX developer), dashboards. - Good community usually questions on StackOverflow answered on the same day, also they have a forum, free courses and a Slack community **What do you dislike about KX?** - Not so many companies use it, although it is very popular in the finance sector - It requires knowledge, time, and dedication, but which tool is not? - No so many open source projects to learn from **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** - Getting and storing large amount of market data - Storing all analytics about usage of the market data ### 4. I've about 1.5 years experience in kdb+/q working in the front office. **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Adam C. | senior developer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 01, 2025 **What do you like best about KX?** very fast in memory database in the world **What do you dislike about KX?** The q language is very cryptic and difficult to program. **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** fastest in memory database in the world. ### 5. Pushing the boundaries of real time processing using Kx **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Harmanjeet S. | Kdb+/q developer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 17, 2024 **What do you like best about KX?** The thing i like about kx is the platform supports high performance stream processing which makes it very beneficial for many industries which require real time decision making especially in financial domain. **What do you dislike about KX?** Its steep learning curve for beginners. Difficulty in code debugging when you've just started. But it gets easier when you get good understanding.. **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** Kx has helped with high frequency event processing and real time decision making and providing immediate insights solving problem to detect fraudulent transactions in banks and executing trades with low latency. ### 6. KX-Dashboard provides quick way to create a real-time dashboard **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Investment Banking | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 18, 2024 **What do you like best about KX?** I use KX's kx-dashboard product to create user reports/dashboards , I found it very easy to create the user reports / dashboard using ox-dashboard. In our organisation we have moved from very wel know dashboard creation product to kx-dashboard . As we found it is faster and has few better functionalities like breadcrum and pivote data grid. I have also created this https://lnkd.in/dWFzFtCe video to showcase how can we create real-time dashboard using ox product .. **What do you dislike about KX?** Steep Learning curve . For learning KX kdb it does take some time **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** Benefits 1)Quickest way to create user dashboard 2) faster way to analyse real time and EOD data ### 7. KX has listens to our requests and makes recommendations and proposals for the client. **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kim Chuan O. | Business Project Manager, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 23, 2024 **What do you like best about KX?** KX has been attentive to the client's needs and will accomodate client's demands and requests to the best of their abilities. **What do you dislike about KX?** As a seasoned developer in the software industry, KX can drive the core standards for the client to level up, especially for clients lack expertise in the specialisd field. **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** KX is helping my firm in the Surveillance System. My firm is taking in trading data from more than 50 platforms and most of them had to be integrated into the surveillance system for monitoring purposes. KX has the capability to take in the data across the multitude of platforms in specific format. They also have the market abuse scenarios ready for implementation upon selection by the client. ### 8. KX is highly optimized for time-series data handling and database operations. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Adnan S. | Quantitative Analyst, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 21, 2025 **What do you like best about KX?** Firstly Exceptional speed in processing time-series data.Apart from that I personally like the PyKX which is fantastic to work on combine on both Python and KX. **What do you dislike about KX?** I don't dislike just that it usually is not very easy to learn languages and other Stuff but you require dedication. **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** I think it handles Time Series very smoothly ### 9. Very good for kdb experts **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 27, 2024 **What do you like best about KX?** it is complex but its very very fast and efficient for columner data manupulation and aggregation. **What do you dislike about KX?** it has a very steep learning curve and takes a long time to discover and write most efficient code. it being a niche product also limits the amount to help you can find on the internet **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** Developing real time risk engine ### 10. Best array programming language for big data **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Alexander U. | Consultant, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 03, 2024 **What do you like best about KX?** KDB/Q is a great programming language, very powerful, after you learn the syntax you becoming highly efficient in solving problems **What do you dislike about KX?** Nothing really. I would love to see a bigger user community but that's about it **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** Fast data manipulation, streaming and storage. Allows to analyse data like it's hard to do otherwise ### 11. Quick to write, quick to execute query language **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Calvin W. | Senior Software Developer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 24, 2024 **What do you like best about KX?** - Easy to write complicated logic with minimal code - Has built in query language plus analytical functions **What do you dislike about KX?** - Not everyone uses it and can sometimes be difficutlt to integrate with other application **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** Large data capture made possible. Run queries and generate reports on large amounts of data quickly. Investigage data quality issues quickly ### 12. Fastest time series database **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 27, 2024 **What do you like best about KX?** Vectorized nature and the power of the product to crunch data sets utilising the hardware efficiently **What do you dislike about KX?** The documentation and community collaboration was not great in past but has improved massively **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** Trade and quite data analytics ### 13. Powerful Tool, Challenging to Lean **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 23, 2024 **What do you like best about KX?** The tool is extremely fast and efficient, and makes warehoused data easily accessable. **What do you dislike about KX?** As a user with limited knowledge of kx products, it's very hard to learn initially. Limited resources online makes the barrier to entry even more significant **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** Providing us with pre and post trade analytics to optimise our e-trading. ### 14. Best tool in the market **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 04, 2024 **What do you like best about KX?** for real time data applications, it provides the best latency in the market **What do you dislike about KX?** it is not open source framework, but the team is working towards it. **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are working on a data repository which is in sync with the market and brokers so that the internal teams can use the real-time data for various purposes. ### 15. Domain Specific **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sankaranarayanan P. | Associate Vice President, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 23, 2024 **What do you like best about KX?** KX's features are mostly the relavant ones to the domain, ease of application use and it's dashboard for all areas including infra. **What do you dislike about KX?** Application could have a detailed logging for better troubleshooting. **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** Solving the trade Surveillance that are regulatory in nature ### 16. KX: Fast, Performant. **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 11, 2024 **What do you like best about KX?** The fastest time-series database, we have used. The different types of join are very useful, once you learn ALL of them and their nuances. Using PyKX in the jupyter notebook, we have access to the console in a cell. This is very nice freature when debugging and proto-typing. **What do you dislike about KX?** The licensing and setup can be very difficult to manage and and maintain. Setting up PyKX, with the dual licenses available -- being open yet closed -- is confusing. Debugging KDB+ and PyKX can be frustrating. **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** The most used and very powerful freature is the window and asof joins. We are always impressed with the speed of the results and easy of exporting to csv's and pushing the data to other parts of the data stack. The other important freature is the continued intergration with python . ### 17. Great experience using KX products **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 04, 2024 **What do you like best about KX?** KX products are extremely powerful and versatile. **What do you dislike about KX?** KX licenses could be expensive for a small organization. Perhaps it has to be considered the benefits in the long term adopting KX products, i.e. whether at the end, KX licenses makes you saving money. **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** kdb+ becomes very useful for time series analytics. ### 18. Leading timeseries database **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Games | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 29, 2024 **What do you like best about KX?** Lightening fast. Columnar and vector approach. Low foot print . Can be spun up in Raspbery pi . **What do you dislike about KX?** Learning curve is high but lot of documentation and training. Kx academy is very helpful for a new learner . **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** Crunching realtime data sets and providing key actionable insights ### 19. Concise, efficient & powerful **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Cat T. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 04, 2023 **What do you like best about KX?** The q language - an incredibly efficient way to write code. Once the initial learning curve had been mastered, proficient q developers can achieve more with less, improving time-to-market, enabling market data and analytics systems to quickly innovate and keep up with changing market behaviour. **What do you dislike about KX?** When I first started writing kdb/q code in 2003, there was almost zero documentation to be found, but this has improved so much in 20 years - code.kx.com is an amazing resource and Kx Academy is a great tool to introduce new developers to the language. **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** Kx technologies enables the customisation of real time and historical analytics offering insights into the trading process. The language is efficient to write and run, allowing detailed analytics to run over large-scale datasets really quickly, enabling users to pivot their perspectives and really dig deep into the data, improve understanding of market microstructure, uncover trading patterns and identify optimisation opportunities. ### 20. Speed, Scalable & Succinct **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Shatrughan K. | KDB Trainer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 23, 2023 **What do you like best about KX?** The terseness of Q language has won me. So much could be done in so less is amazing about KDB/q. Even the whole application is only few KBs and that contains whole world of analytical functions with well thought implementation to work on huge dataset in a jiffy. It's highly recommended for the scalable timeseries data specially for huge volumes where lot of analysis is involved and speed is the key. **What do you dislike about KX?** Though I have seen the documentation and online helps improving over last one decade, as compared to other traditional databases and languages, there is still a significant gap. Moreover, for many years, it has been a closed community with not much documents in public domain. But now, it's no more the same. There are a lot of forums and helps available. **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** Storing the trading data and providing analytics on the data. I have used it as a KDB developer in several investment banks. It certainly gave results real quick in comparison to all other databases for the same amount of data. ### 21. Powerful and fast but with steep learning curve **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 26, 2023 **What do you like best about KX?** The q language allows for incredible amounts of work to be done with comperatively little. People who demonstrate great skill are capable of incredibly quick prototyping and exploration of both data and ideas. The ecosystem with Q-Studio and the ease of use for initial data exploration is incredible and I find it much quicker than spinning up the proper python script or sql query to accomplish the same thing. The underlying database has very strong performance on tick based market data. **What do you dislike about KX?** The Q language has some of the worst error messaging I have ever experienced. The learning curve ends up being extremely taxing since solving problems can take far longer than it would take in a comperable product. The free book does a great deal of work to alleviate this but I think the effort to increase clarity of error messaging would be worth the costs. **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** KX is solving the problem of storing all market data used by the firm and offering quants and analysts insight into different aspects. Compared to OneTick, the previous solution, KX offers a much improved overall experience. ### 22. Excellent performance and productivity **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jonny P. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 24, 2023 **What do you like best about KX?** It's a very powerful, flexible and high performance system. It's really a programming language which also has a database, which brings a great deal of flexibility. The language, q, provides very succinct ways of expressing relatively complex operations. There aren't many systems that provide capabilties to operate on all of streaming, in-memory and storage backed data. The community of developers is small, but accessible and helpful. **What do you dislike about KX?** The programming language, q, can be a double edged sword- there is a (sometimes overstated) learning curve. The learning curve is related to both the syntax and the mindshift change required when coming to a vector language from a more traditional programming background. The upside though is the expressiveness and productivity achieved when the curve is overcome. The standard tooling is limited- you end up building a lot which you don't have to with other systems, but then because people like the language and system they sometimes end up buliding too much which would be better done in other ways. **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** All the problems associated with time series data storage, management and analysis. ### 23. Kx - the finest database to rule them all **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Hospital & Health Care | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 19, 2023 **What do you like best about KX?** Willingness to partner with users and customers Good support across multiple channels (email, forums, listbox) Timely release of features to address emerging developments (eg., vector db) **What do you dislike about KX?** Tutorials require understanding of KDB+ to resolve issues. A better managed learning management system will greatly help in adoption. Needs to foster a more collaborative approach - eg., open sourcing pyKx was a great step. Other features such as REST API should be ideally released to the public so that access to basic functionalities are made more widely accessible **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** Kx supports all major enterprise needs for high-performance computing especially with large TB-PB scale databases that would otherwise take 10x the number of resources and 10x the cost. ### 24. KDB is second-to-none for wrangling time series data **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Chris M. | Founder, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 18, 2023 **What do you like best about KX?** Fast, efficient, highly expressive terse syntax that is beautifully designed and well considered. The ability to mix programming and database primitives together can lead to some very elegant solutions. KDB Developer is a nice addition for EDA/charting. Performance is as fast as the metal allows, and use of multicore is transparent and easy. **What do you dislike about KX?** Steep learning curve; it probably takes some months to really get productive. **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** Wrangling time series data for ML pipelines, EDA work, feature engineering. ### 25. Unlimited power **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Marcos V. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 26, 2023 **What do you like best about KX?** Q/Kdb+ is extremely fast in large databases processing. Its code is fast and clean and it is integrated into Python via PyKX. **What do you dislike about KX?** The setup can be a bit triky, but once yo have it installed there are not problems. **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** Extremely speeds up database processing compared to its competitors without having to leave the Python environent. ### 26. Have been a business sponsor of KX for over 20 years using to support many businesses **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Andrew F. | Head of Trading Analytics, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 30, 2023 **What do you like best about KX?** Fundamentally KX core value was always about speed and efficiency. In the early days they didnt have many user tooling so you needed to find experts that were few and far between but at the end of the day the performance was differentiating and still is. Their focus on speed and minimising space for data is still their edge. They have evolved their tooling to make adoption easier but their underlying power is still their strength. **What do you dislike about KX?** It really depends on your perspective. It takes more effort than simpler languages to get things up and running. but if your target is scalable and you want a strong foundation like anything you have to put the effort in. From my perspective there are no dislikes other than the community is still perhaps too small **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** processing massive amounts of real-time data, processing and deriving real time insights. ### 27. User, partner and enthusiast **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Paul O. | Enterprise Service Manager, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 06, 2023 **What do you like best about KX?** Completeness of the solution. Streaming analytics, data and analytics in memory and analysis of historical data on disk in a single solution is unique. KX can do everything another time series database can do but faster and more efficienctly - it also has unique temporal analytics capabilities others have never been able to replicate. **What do you dislike about KX?** The amount of times the user community has solved the same problems in marginally different ways. A managed cloud service on aws, open sourcing pykx and standardising kdb architect through kdb Insights are great steps forward to address this and allow builders to focus on outcomes rather than plumbing. **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** Analysis of fast moving data with the benefit of historical context allowing faster decision making and greater insight for business processes. ### 28. Wall Street's secret is out **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Standy C. | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 26, 2023 **What do you like best about KX?** KX is a beautiful solution for running analytics on large data sets, particularly when time series is involved. Its structure leads to elegant code and small systems that are easy to maintain and cheap to run while delivering performance orders of magnitude better than the competition. After 20+ years of dominating electronic trading analytics on Wall Street, its latest version with Python integration and cloud interoperability leaves it ideally placed to capitalise on growing data analytics needs in other areas, notably Artificial Intelligence. **What do you dislike about KX?** People often say it's difficult to learn, but the reality is that the analytics it supports would be far more difficult to achieve using other "easy" languages and data stores. **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** Electronic Trading Market Making Client Profitability Trading Analtics TIC Data Analytics Market Abuse Surveillance ### 29. After using KX, it's hard to go back to anything else **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Investment Management | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 24, 2023 **What do you like best about KX?** Kx has an extremely minimal language, and though it looks foreign at first it is actually quite simple and barebones. This simplicity allows you to work on the essential complexity of your problem instead of the incidental complexity added by the tools. Having used many of the popular alternatives, databricks/clickhouse/hadoop/pandas/polars none achieve the simplicity and elegance provided by this platform. **What do you dislike about KX?** Kx is a proprietary product this prevents mass adoption. This makes integrating with other tools harder. Recent releases of pykx and pgwire have made massive strides towards integrating with the larger ecosystem. **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** Kx allows us to see real-time trends in a client-facing business. Also, when debugging large datasets, nothing beats q for slicing and dicing the data. ### 30. Elegant, reliable and super fast **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Capital Markets | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 05, 2023 **What do you like best about KX?** KX makes light work of intricate time series transformations on vast amounts of data. **What do you dislike about KX?** This is an area currently at the forefront of focus for KX, with the recent release of PyKx. But making an easy interface to the rich ocean of data vizualization / ML libraries etc in Python is something I've been excited about for a while. **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** I work with the biggest dataset on the street, namely the US Equity Options market data feeds, both via OPRA and direct exchange feeds. There is no other way that my team could perform our data ingestion, derived analytics and overnight calibration in sufficient time if we did not have KX. ### 31. Very powerful technology **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kieran L. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 08, 2023 **What do you like best about KX?** Its speed, and the expressiveness of the language, q. The speed of development in the team is difficult to replicate in other languages. Its also a very lightweight technology that runs on standard hardware **What do you dislike about KX?** There is a bit of an upfront cost to get the grips with the language, which can put some people off, but thankfully it's not a very large language in terms of encyclopedic learning. **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are a trading firm that uses kdb+ for our data warehousing as well as quantitative trading. We use kdb+ for data capture, storage, calculating and reacting to signals, as well as machine learning with python plugins. I suspect our team is smaller in size than comparable teams, in large part due to the productivity gains to be had with kdb+ ### 32. A beautiful and powerful query language and database for structured data **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Nathan P. | Director - Quant Development, Financial Services, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 01, 2023 **What do you like best about KX?** Insane performance and elegant minimalist syntax. Ajing billions of rows in a few seconds is perfect for time series data analysis. **What do you dislike about KX?** Steep learning curve. Threat of writing overly terse and confusing"write only" code ever present. **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** 1. Constructing central limit order book(s) and market data from order flow. 2. Joining market data to client executions to calculate transaction cost analysis for a variety of algorithmic strategies. 3. Deriving easy to use static data tables for instruments and customers. ### 33. After 20 years of use I still think "wow, that was fast" **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Capital Markets | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 19, 2023 **What do you like best about KX?** KDB core is extremely capable of capturing and processing large volumes of timeseries data. Even after 20 years, it still produces moments of "wow, that was fast". The documentation has improved dramatically, barrier to entry reduced and the community of developers/number of partners has grown as a result. With the appropriate skills and experience, the q language and KDB are hard to beat for elegant and efficient timeseries analysis. **What do you dislike about KX?** The open frameworks and ancillary services solve a lot of the common problems and improved APIs increase access to the underlying data, but the core product is still quite raw and protection from bad user queries is still limited. **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** Capture and analysis of timeseries data to support and optimise systematic trading systems. ### 34. KX provides fantastic business solutions **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Tsz Wai L. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 20, 2023 **What do you like best about KX?** After working in the industry for 4 years it has been great learning about the core technology of KDB+, and also seeing the updates and improvements that are still being published. **What do you dislike about KX?** There can be a higher barrier for entry as it does take some time to learn about the technology, but it has done a great job integrating with other services. **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** The ability to integrate everything from loading to visualizing the data for the client using KX products is essential for my day-to-day work. Using kdb+ to store data and Kx Dashboard for visualization, and also helping client potentially migrate to newer KX services. ### 35. The best product for time-series DB management for years **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Val P. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 22, 2023 **What do you like best about KX?** Its performance is second-to-none when it comes to process large time-series based tables. **What do you dislike about KX?** To best architect a solution, one will have to program in Q, which can be challenging to some people. **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** The ability to join trades and quotes using historical and real-time data. Doing this helps us understand the state of the financial markets at single-tick-resolution, which is the highest resolution possible. ### 36. Excellent TSD for real time analytics and machine learning flows. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Vikas G. | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 18, 2023 **What do you like best about KX?** Extremely fast and reliable vector database!! **What do you dislike about KX?** It is still getting cloud ready with AWS, GCP and Azure. Most of use cases are in cloud now a days. **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** Critical problems in Telecom and Automotive domains ### 37. The best database I've ever worked with **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Nick M. | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 22, 2023 **What do you like best about KX?** KDB is an exceptional database. The built-in programming language, q, is exceptionally powerful and versatile. It allows us to build very flexible apis, stream low latency trading stats, administer our database, monitor trade performance and adds business value in many many other ways. **What do you dislike about KX?** There are very few downsides apart from the perceived learning curve to pick up the lanague, which I think is overstated. There are a few potential improvements around multithreadding, which could be a big help, but I've been told they're coming in v4.1 which will be very useful! **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** Financial services TCA / algo trading monitoring ### 38. Kx in the cloud is unstoppable **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Peter W. | Global Head of Financial Services Partner Technology, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 31, 2023 **What do you like best about KX?** Kx is the most performant analytical platform for timeseries and vector analytics. The AWS native integrations take Kx to the next level, and is already transforming how financial services organizations identify alpha in real-time, thanks to unlimited calculation performance in the cloud. The new AWS FinSpace managed Kdb will be a game changer as it takes the hassle out of running kdb and lets banks go straight to utilizing its power. **What do you dislike about KX?** None, now that it is managed in the cloud. **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** Equity and FX alpha ### 39. Cool language, potent for the appropriate environment **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Banking | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 21, 2023 **What do you like best about KX?** That it is declarative and functional, and somewhat easy to implement when you get used to it **What do you dislike about KX?** The very non-demonstrative exceptions and errors. Once this improves, the ceiling is infinite **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** The language is extremely fast and since it is declarative it is easy to mantain ### 40. KX technology delivers unmatched speed in data analytics **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Capital Markets | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 10, 2023 **What do you like best about KX?** KX real-time data processing capabilities have been updaralleled, enabling us to make swift, data-driven decision in the dynamic capital markets landscape. KX is the de-facto technology for real-time analtyics. **What do you dislike about KX?** While KX offers powerful real-time analytics, its steep learning curve and specialized adoption, slowed its cloud progress compared to other open-source mainstream technologies. **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** KX has enabled various research and analytics initiatives that lead to net business value. ### 41. Very powerful and fast database technology **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Faritha R. | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 23, 2023 **What do you like best about KX?** Highly efficient vector-based database technology to store large volumes of data and its super fast query performance. With its built-in q language, complex logic can be written with just a few lines of code! **What do you dislike about KX?** Users can get intimated by the learning curve of Q. However, with the recent offerings, especially open-source PyKx, interface with this database seem fairly easy. **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** To build multi-asset Trading analytics platform ### 42. The only real-time DB solution **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Harish T. | Cell Lead and Product Owner - Market Data, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 18, 2023 **What do you like best about KX?** Kdb+ is an excellent database management system that provides high performance and scalability. Essential for our real-time processing requirements and data management. **What do you dislike about KX?** Fairly niche technolgy, therfore a smaller q developer resource pool. **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** Back testing, analysis and reporting. ### 43. Learning KX **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 22, 2023 **What do you like best about KX?** It's very fast to run, and when you're familiar with the language, it's very easy to write programs. **What do you dislike about KX?** It has a very high entry barrier due to its complex syntax and being a functional language. **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** It helps me with data analysis. ### 44. My preferred database for timeseries data management, querying and high speed manipulations **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 24, 2023 **What do you like best about KX?** - Incredibly performant data querying allows rapid turnaround times - Very powerful inbuilt join capabilities - asof and window joins in particular - Both realtime and historical capabilities **What do you dislike about KX?** It can be difficult to find what you need in the documentation **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use KX software for our timeseries data and their rich query langaguge powers most of our in-house built data quality, data cleansing and data enrichment layers. It is the only software that I have full confidence in for handling our data volumes and also executing our loading and enrichment workloads at high speed and scale. ### 45. KX kdb is one software for computation storage and middleware one ever need in financial industry **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Vijay V. | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 21, 2023 **What do you like best about KX?** Based on strong fundamentals of computer engineering needed for next generation applications **What do you dislike about KX?** Slow learning if your are coming from non functional language background **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** Forex analytics ### 46. Journey with KX **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Konstantin O. | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 26, 2023 **What do you like best about KX?** What I like the most is performance and productivity **What do you dislike about KX?** I feel that products on top microservices might be easier to use. All libraries can be more customizable if they can be viewed as white boxes vs black boxes **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** Analyzing vast volumes of data in real-time as well as historically ### 47. Great accomplishments with Kx **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Devon M. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 22, 2023 **What do you like best about KX?** It is fast and allows a lot to be achieved with very little code. **What do you dislike about KX?** Hard to find coders and the community is rather small. **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** KX allows me to build and run large simulations very quickly. ### 48. Trading Analysis and Prototyping **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 06, 2023 **What do you like best about KX?** Ease of use. Analysis is simple, fast and easy to share. **What do you dislike about KX?** Some simple features not available especially related to IPC **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** Post and pre trade analysis ### 49. Outstanding vector-based database performance. Best of breed in time-series, which was my use case **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Michael D. | Executive Director, Engineering and Execution, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 19, 2023 **What do you like best about KX?** Q is terse and easy, but powerful. KDB is lightning fast. **What do you dislike about KX?** Still not as cloud-native as I'd like, but improving with recent announcements (Amazon FinSpace). **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** Market surveillance, business analytics ### 50. Excellent Product **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Investment Banking | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 23, 2023 **What do you like best about KX?** Functional programming aspects of Q langauge. Concise and can efficiently query large datasets. **What do you dislike about KX?** No RDB memory protection for very large queries. **What problems is KX solving and how is that benefiting you?** Financial data reporting and analytics. - [View KX pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/kx-kx/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-06-03+05%3A32%3A39+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=8af2edb8-1529-4c49-8f68-4e14d7268402&secure%5Btoken%5D=401282de58820487b8678914cdf2bab1488febeabb05bb756cda7c40f405d943&format=llm_user) ## KX Features **Storage** - Data Model - Data Types **Data Indexing** - Semantic Search - Indexing Data **Query latency** - Lower query latency - Continuous queries **Availability** - Auto Sharding - Auto Recovery - Data Replication **Data latency** - Lower data latency - Data pipeline performance **Performance** - Integrated Cache **Filters** - Accurate Search - Single Stage Filtering - Vector Database **Connectors** - Faster ingestion - Built-in connectors **Security** - Role-Based Authorization - Authentication - Audit Logs - Encryption **Scale** - Linearly scalable database - Storage management **Support** - Multi-Model - Operating Systems **Architecture** - Data security - Lockless architecture ## Top KX Alternatives - [Snowflake](https://www.g2.com/products/snowflake/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (706 reviews) - [SAP HANA Cloud](https://www.g2.com/products/sap-hana-cloud-2025-10-01/reviews) - 4.3/5.0 (522 reviews) - [InfluxDB](https://www.g2.com/products/influxdata-influxdb/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (98 reviews)