MongoDB AtlasPricing

MongoDB Atlas Pricing

Your data is the core of your entire business. It’s the power behind every decision and insight you will ever have, and the groundwork for the development of any software or product you build. With a database program like MongoDB Atlas, development and analytics teams can access data fast and scale easily for growth. It’s a managed database service designed to optimize your workloads and simplify your daily workflows.

What Is MongoDB Atlas?

MongoDB Inc. is a software development company that offers both an open-source and managed version of their namesake NoSQL database program. MongoDB Atlas is their managed database service. You can download the free open-source option here.

MongoDB Atlas is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) NoSQL database, with an optional SQL interface. It’s a multi-cloud and multi-region solution for cloud computing applications. Some of the major cloud computing platforms they work with include Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure.

The program stores data in a model similar to JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), which allows teams to build document databases. You can see what that looks like on MongoDB’s definition page here. They provide examples of document databases and explain their main benefits, particularly their flexible schema and their ability to optimize database loading time.

In the Atlas program, they use sharding and horizontal scaling to accelerate the load time of your database. Their vCPU (a central processing unit connected to a virtual machine) scales to any workload through sharding. Sharding is database partitioning with the goal of breaking up the database into shards so it runs faster.

The database shards get stored in individual servers. This can be referred to as horizontal scaling; it’s essentially sharing the workloads of the database across a line of servers so that your loading time is expedited. For more information about sharding with MongoDB, see their full definition here.

There can be quite a few use cases for MongoDB Atlas. Users could be developer teams that want more freedom with programming languages, or research and data scientists running real-time analytics. The software is most often used by mid-size or small businesses but that doesn’t mean major enterprises don’t love them.

Famous enterprises that use MongoDB Atlas include Liberty Mutual Insurance and SEGA.

Remember: Sonic approves of MongoDB Atlas, if you remember nothing else from this article.

For a quick intro to using MongoDB Atlas, see the video below.

Intro to MongoDB Atlas in 10 mins | Jumpstart

How Much Does MongoDB Cost?

MongoDB Atlas has 3 different plans to give teams flexibility. The costs depend mainly on your workload needs and which cloud provider you use. Not all plans have a full range of features, so it will also strongly depend on each team’s personal use cases. The fewer features you need, the more likely it’ll be that you can take advantage of their cheaper options.

You will also notice that MongoDB sorts their subscription plans a little less intuitively. Their page does not sort them from biggest to smallest. If they did, it would read Shared, Serverless, and Dedicated. The Serverless and Dedicated tiers have a usage-based pricing model, whereas the cost of Shared is determined by what cluster you use.

When you go to MongoDB Atlas’ direct pricing page, you will find more rates in the “view pricing” link. The link pulls up a pop-up with all related rates for general usage and the usage of cloud service providers like AWS, GCP, and Microsoft Azure. The table below shows the advertised rates MongoDB Atlas offers, but for the full list of relevant costs, you need to check the extended pricing for each plan.

For customer support, you will need to purchase MongoDB’s separate support subscriptions here. They are not automatically offered in their cloud database plans.

For the Serverless subscription, teams get access to 1TB of data storage, automated elastic scalability, end-to-end encryption, and daily backups. This version offers minimal configuration, and has an Admin API for programming and managing Atlas resources.

In this version, you won’t find the 99.99% SLA guarantee, or any of the “beyond the database” features they advertise. These include Atlas Data Federation (query and analysis), Atlas Charts (data visualization), and BI connector for using your Atlas database for business intelligence (BI) analytics.

They do make a note to say certain features are ‘coming later,’ but currently, this version of the plan doesn’t have those capabilities. Severless also has limited diagnostic and optimization capabilities.

The Dedication plan has all features, from full diagnostics to “beyond the database” benefits. It comes with a whopping 4TB per database shard, 768GB of RAM per shard, and as much as 96 vCPUs per shard.

This version is great for large teams with big databases. You’ll get plenty of scalability, performance tracking, and management features. If you don’t have an extensive and complex database that you need to scale and break up as much, then this may not be a necessary expense.

Shared is the closest to a free tier you can get with MongoDB Atlas. This version is only free if you use the M0 Cluster Tier. If you use the other cluster tiers available like M2 and M5, then it will be $9/month and $25/month respectively. This means the tier can be free forever, and doesn’t require a credit card to make an account.

Benefits of this version include as much as 5GB of data storage, as well as shared RAM and vCPU. Using a shared cluster is a more economical option for teams on a budget. For the exact specifications of Atlas clusters M0, M2, and M5, go here.

What Are Some MongoDB Alternatives?

Couchbase is a powerful, multi-cloud, managed NoSQL database service that is very similar to MongoDB. Couchbase Capella is their managed database option that competes with MongoDB Atlas. Couchbase Server is the name of their open-source and unmanaged version.

With Capella, pricing is per node rather than per usage or cluster used like with MongoDB Atlas. On the direct pricing page for Couchbase Capella you will find a “view detailed pricing” link. It will lead you to the rest of their node rates. The table below has Capella’s reported starting rates per node per hour.

Couchbase Capella offers daily backups, as well as different levels of support included in each plan. With MongoDB, support is broken down into separate subscriptions.

For unique features, MongoDB has the option for a completely free cluster, whereas Couchbase Capella does not offer a free version. Both NoSQL database services have the capability to run queries with SQL.

It’s not easy to compare costs because the billing model for each service is different so there is no perfect equivalent. Not to mention that each team’s usage will vary, so initial estimates can be very misleading if you don’t know your exact usage metrics.

Though MongoDB Atlas does have their own helpful comparison breakdown between both products, it’s important to remember they are biased because they want you to pick them.

MongoDB Atlas points out in their comparison that Couchbase does not work with Microsoft Azure. This is not completely true. Couchbase Capella can be used through your Microsoft Azure account. This is a recent development as of January 2021. MongoDB’s comparison still has some good points about their software; you can find their full breakdown here.

More Resources

If you want to find related software, go here to find products with user-provided feedback. For those that have used any of the platforms discussed here, please leave a review to help other buyers make informed decisions.