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Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.data vs. MongoDB Atlas

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.data

    Score8.8 out of 10
    N/AAstra DB is a vector database for developers. In 2025 Datastax, the developer and supporter of Astra DB, was acquired. Astra DB is now available as a component of the IBM watsonx.data Multicloud offering.N/A

    MongoDB Atlas

    Score7.8 out of 10
    N/AMongoDB Atlas is the company's automated managed cloud service, supplying automated deployment, provisioning and patching, and other features supporting database monitoring and optimization.

    $57

    per month

    Pricing
    Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.dataMongoDB Atlas
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    Dedicated Clusters
    $57
    per month
    Dedicated Multi-Reigon Clusters
    $95
    per month
    Shared Clusters
    Free
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.dataMongoDB Atlas
    Free Trial
    YesNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    YesYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    YesNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.dataMongoDB Atlas
    Considered Both Products
    Discontinued Products
    Chose Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.data
    Astra DB, which is built on Apache Cassandra, is well-known for its smooth horizontal scalability, making it an ideal solution for applications with quickly rising data and traffic. Although MongoDB Atlas provides high availability, Astra DB's multi-region capability can …
    Incentivized
    Chose Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.data
    Since I was familiar with CQL, choosing Astra DB was the only smart choice for me. It is equally capable as all the other cloud-based fully managed database services currently out in the market. It provides very good documentation also for people who are new to it, making it …
    Incentivized
    Chose Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.data
    Astra DB is more optimized as compared to its rivals in many cases such as the replication provides with maximum uptime.
    Incentivized
    Chose Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.data
    The tools astra db provides are much more effective and efficient, especially the integration allowed within astra db. One can customize the choice of tools as per their requirements.
    Incentivized
    Chose Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.data
    Some advantages of Cassandra by itself over the other solutions is being masterless and column oriented. About Astra DB, for us the decision-making factor was having a serverless solution and with the latest Cassandra version and features, additionally it provides a rich set …
    Incentivized
    MongoDB
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    46 Answers
    100%
    Would buy again
    5 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    45 Answers
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    5 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    98%
    Happy with the feature set
    45 Answers
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    5 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    98%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    40 Answers
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    5 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    98%
    Implementation went as expected
    44 Answers
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    5 Answers
    Features
    Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.dataMongoDB Atlas
    Vector Database
    Comparison of Vector Database features of Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.data and MongoDB Atlas
    Feature
    Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.data
    8.0
    12 Ratings
    1% above category average
    MongoDB Atlas
    -
    Ratings
    Vector Data Connection8.212 Ratings00 Ratings
    Vector Data Editing8.56 Ratings00 Ratings
    Attribute Management7.710 Ratings00 Ratings
    Geospatial Analysis8.26 Ratings00 Ratings
    Geometric Transformations8.06 Ratings00 Ratings
    Vector Data Visualization8.07 Ratings00 Ratings
    Coordinate Reference System Management:7.96 Ratings00 Ratings
    Data Import/Export8.011 Ratings00 Ratings
    Symbolization and Styling8.35 Ratings00 Ratings
    Data Sharing and Collaboration7.69 Ratings00 Ratings
    Database-as-a-Service
    Comparison of Database-as-a-Service features of Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.data and MongoDB Atlas
    Feature
    Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.data
    -
    Ratings
    MongoDB Atlas
    8.9
    6 Ratings
    5% above category average
    Automatic software patching00 Ratings9.16 Ratings
    Database scalability00 Ratings9.96 Ratings
    Automated backups00 Ratings9.96 Ratings
    Database security provisions00 Ratings9.16 Ratings
    Monitoring and metrics00 Ratings6.56 Ratings
    Automatic host deployment00 Ratings9.05 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.dataMongoDB Atlas
    Small Businesses
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    Google BigQuery
    Score8.8 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    No answers on this topic
    Azure Database
    Score8.8 out of 10
    Enterprises
    No answers on this topic
    Google Cloud SQL
    Score8.7 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.dataMongoDB Atlas
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.7
    (46 ratings)
    8.3
    (6 ratings)
    Usability
    7.8
    (4 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.9
    (4 ratings)
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    8.6
    (44 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.dataMongoDB Atlas
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Discontinued Products
    We've been super happy with Astra DB. It's been extremely well-suited for our vector search needs as described in previous responses. With Astra DB’s high-performance vector search, Maester’s AI dynamically optimizes responses in real-time, adapting to new user interactions without requiring costly retraining cycles.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    MongoDB
    It is good if you: 1. Have unstructured data that you need to save (since it is NoSQL DB) 2. You don't have time or knowledge to setup the MongoDB Atlas, the managed service is the way to go (Atlas) 3. If you need a multi regional DB across the world
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    Discontinued Products
    • We need to be able to process a lot of data (our biggest clients process hundreds of milions of transactions every month). However, it is not only the amount of data, it is also an unpredictable patterns with spikes occuring at different points of time - something athat Astra is great at.
    • Our processing needs to be extremaly fast. Some of our clients use our enrichment in a synchronous way, meaning that any delay in processing is holding up the whole transaction lifecycle and can have a major impact on the client. Astra is very fast.
    • A close collaboration with GCP makes our life very easy. All of our technology sits in Google Cloud, so having Astra in there makes it a no-brainer solution for us.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    MongoDB
    • Generous free and trial plan for evaluation or test purposes.
    • New versions of MongoDB are able to be deployed with Atlas as soon as they're released—deploying recent versions to other services can be difficult or risky.
    • As the key supporters of the open source MongoDB project, the service runs in a highly optimized and performant manner, making it much easier than having to do the work internally.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Discontinued Products
    • Need better fine-grained Security options.
    • The support team sometimes requires the escalate button pressed on tickets, to get timely responses. I will say, once the ticket is escalated, action is taken.
    • They require better documentation on the migration of data. The three primary methods for migrating large data volumes are bulk, Cassandra Data Migrator, and ZDM (Zero Downtime Migration Utility). Over time I have become very familiar will all three of these methods; however, through working with the Services team and the support team, it seemed like we were breaking new ground. I feel if the utilities were better documented and included some examples and/or use cases from large data migrations; this process would have been easier. One lesson learned is you likely need to migrate your application servers to the same cloud provider you host Astra on; otherwise, the latency is too large for latency-sensitive applications.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    MongoDB
    • For someone new, it could be challenging using MongoDB Atlas. Some official video tutorials could help a lot
    • Pricing calculation is sometimes misleading and unpredictable, maybe better variables could be used to provide better insights about the cost
    • Since it is a managed service, we have limited control over the instances and some issues we faced we couldn't;'t know about without reaching out to the support and got fixed from their end. So more control over the instance might help
    • The way of managing users and access is somehow confusing. Maybe it could be placed somewhere easy to access
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    Discontinued Products
    It's a great product but suffers with counters. This isn't a deal breaker but lets down what is otherwise a good all round solution
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    MongoDB
    I would give it 8. Good stuff: 1. Easy to use in terms of creating cluster, integrating with Databases, setting up backups and high availability instance, using the monitors they provide to check cluster status, managing users at company level, configure multiple replicas and cross region databases. Things hard to use: 1. roles and permissions at DB level. 2. Calculate expected costs
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    Discontinued Products
    Their response time is fast, in case you do not contact them during business hours, they give a very good follow-up to your case. They also facilitate video calls if necessary for debugging.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    MongoDB
    We love MongoDB support and have great relationship with them. When we decided to go with MongoDB Atlas, they sent a team of 5 to our company to discuss the process of setting up a Mongo cluster and walked us through. when we have questions, we create a ticket and they will respond very quickly
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    Discontinued Products
    Graph, search, analytics, administration, developer tooling, and monitoring are all incorporated into a single platform by Astra DB. Mongo Db is a self-managed infrastructure. Astra DB has Wide column store and Mongo DB has Document store. The best thing is that Astra DB operates on Java while Mongo DB operates on C++
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    MongoDB
    MongoDB is a great product but on premise deployments can be slow. So we turned to Atlas. We also looked at Redis Labs and we use Redis as our side cache for app servers. But we love using MongoDB Atlas for cloud deployments, especially for prototyping because we can get started immediately. And the cost is low and easy to justify.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Scalability
    Discontinued Products
    We are well aware of the Cassandra architecture and familiar with the open source tooling that Datastax provides the industry (K8sSandra / Stargate) to scale Cassandra on Kubernetes.
    Having prior knowledge of Cassandra / Kubernetes means we know that under the hood Astra is built on infinitely scalable technologies. We trust that the foundations that Astra is built on will scale so we know Astra will scale.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    MongoDB
    No answers on this topic
    Return on Investment
    Discontinued Products
    • Better uptime due to the managed service having no outages
    • Less technical debt because we don't need to worry about upgrading our Cassandra clusters
    • Lower cost on infrastructure as a whole
    • Quick and easy to integrate vector search into our tech stack
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    MongoDB
    • Positive - Faster provisioning so we don't have development teams waiting.
    • Positive - Automated backups and server management - eliminates need for dedicated DBAs.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
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