Officially, it's a column-oriented database. This means that, internally, it stores columns together rather than rows together. In practice, it means that it's optimized for calculating analytics over large datasets.

I've found, from personal experience, that it makes a good replacement for time-series databases, even though it's technically not a time-series database. My employer migrated our KPIs and other metrics from InfluxDB to ClickHouse a couple of years ago, and the drastic improvements in performance were well worth the time it took to migrate our data. It also helped that ClickHouse uses a subset of SQL, unlike InfluxDB which uses a superficially SQL-like but practically very different proprietary language.