I looked into pg_analytics and some other solution like Citus before working on pg_analytica.

The key difference is solutions like pg_analytics completely swap out the native postgres row based storage for columnar storage.

Not using the default postgres storage engine means you miss outon a lot of battle tested, functionality like updating existing rows, deleting rows, transactional updates etc. Columnar stores are not suited for transactions, updates and deletes.

pg_analytica retains the existing Postgres storage and only exports a time delayed version of the table in columnar format. This way developers get the benefit of a transactional storage and fast analytics queries.