MongoDB Pricing: Understanding Your Options and Reducing Costs

MongoDB has become the leading NoSQL database for modern, data-driven applications due to its intuitive document data model and scalable distributed architecture. As a non-relational database, MongoDB eschews rigid schema design for flexible JSON-style documents with dynamic schemas. This enables fluid development and simplified management of unstructured and nested data.

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With over 20 million downloads and thousands of global customers, MongoDB has proven its development speed, operational agility, and ability to scale workloads cost-efficiently. Its core capabilities around high availability, horizontal scalability, and sophisticated querying drive adoption with developers and enterprises alike.

How Much Does MongoDB Cost?

MongoDB's pricing ranges between $20,000 to $150,000 for its Enterprise Advanced offerings and high-tier Atlas deployments, which primarily target large organizations with substantial database needs. This wide range indicates scalable pricing based on factors such as deployment scale, number of servers or clusters, support level, specific features required, and data volume.

MongoDB Atlas 

MongoDB Atlas is MongoDB's database-as-a-service offering. It provides fully managed MongoDB clusters on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

Serverless from $0.10/million reads (Per 1 million reads)

Atlas Serverless bills based on usage, starting at $0.10 per million read operations. It auto-scales seamlessly to match workload demands.

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Ideal for:

• Variable/unpredictable workloads
• Short-lived tasks and functions
• Pay-as-you-go pricing

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Serverless includes 1TB storage, backups, monitoring, and security features. You only pay for the operations used.

Dedicated from $57/month (Estimated based on $0.08 per hour)

Dedicated clusters provide predictable performance on dedicated AWS, Azure, or GCP instances. Pricing starts at $57/month for an M10 cluster (2 vCPUs, 10GB storage). Larger clusters with more RAM, storage, and compute power are available.

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Ideal for:

• Production applications
• Consistent workloads
• Total control over the environment

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Dedicated cluster features include fine-grained security controls, database snapshots, performance metrics, and on-demand scaling.

Shared from $0/month (Free forever for free clusters)

The Atlas Shared plan offers 512 MB of shared storage and shared computing resources. This is suitable for early development and testing.

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Key free tier highlights:

• Forever free option with no credit card required
• Easy upgrades to paid tiers as needed
• Entry-level introduction to MongoDB Atlas

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The free tier does not provide dedicated resources or full management features.

MongoDB Enterprise Advanced

For running MongoDB on your own servers or private cloud, MongoDB Enterprise Advanced includes:

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• Commercial license for MongoDB Enterprise Server
• Ops Manager for monitoring and automation
• Connectors to BI and visualization tools
• Advanced security and access controls
• 24x7 support options

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The pricing for Enterprise Advanced depends on several factors:

• Number of servers
• Required RAM and storage capacity
• Desired support level (standard or premium)
• Additional add-on features and tools

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MongoDB provides customized quotes based on these variables. Pricing scales based on the deployment size, with volume discounts available for large deployments.

How to Get a Better Deal on MongoDB

Only Sign Up For Required Services

Carefully evaluate which Atlas tier (serverless, dedicated, shared) best fits your workload needs. Don't overprovision services beyond what is required. For Enterprise Advanced, opt for standard support if the premium is unnecessary. Start small and scale up over time to only pay for the capacity being utilized.

Gain Leverage With Competitor Price Rates

Research pricing of comparable databases like Couchbase, Cloudera, and MariaDB. Use their rates as leverage when negotiating MongoDB discounts, especially for large Enterprise deployments.

Use the Free Tier

Use MongoDB's generous free tier for development, testing, and proofs-of-concept before investing in paid tiers. Validate market fit with the free tier before scaling up.

Collaborate With Other Departments

Pool MongoDB budget resources across teams to increase buying power. When possible, DevOps, app teams, and analytics groups can share infrastructure.

Explore Annual or Multi-Year Contracts

Annual Atlas subscriptions provide lower hourly rates vs. monthly plans. Multi-year Enterprise Advanced contracts offer the best rates and flexibility.

MongoDB’s Core Features 

MongoDB provides a flexible JSON-like document data model, automatic sharding for horizontal scalability, and built-in replication for high availability. Other key features include:

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1. Document Data Model: MongoDB uses a document data model in which data is stored in flexible, self-contained documents grouped into collections. This model is more natural for developers and allows for dynamic schemas and faster iteration.

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2. Indexing: Indexes can be created on demand to optimize query performance and document traversal. As data scales, indexes support faster queries.

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3. Sharding: Sharding automatically distributes data across multiple shards, enabling horizontal scalability as database size increases.

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4. Replication: Built-in replication maintains multiple copies of data and provides high availability, fault tolerance, and disaster recovery.

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5. Authentication: Robust authentication mechanisms like SCRAM ensure that only authorized users can access and query the database.

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6. Database Triggers: Triggers allow the execution of custom code when specific database events occur, like updates to documents.
   
   
7. Time Series Support: Efficient storage and expiry of time series data from sources like IoT sensors.

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8. Ad-Hoc Querying: Supports dynamic, real-time queries for analytics and reporting. Indexing optimizes query performance.

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9. Load Balancing: Sharding and replication provide native load balancing across distributed clusters.

MongoDB Alternatives 

Some popular open-source alternatives to MongoDB include:

1. Amazon DynamoDB

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed proprietary NoSQL database offered by AWS. It provides predictable performance at scale and is highly available across multiple AWS availability zones.

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DynamoDB is a great option for serverless applications on AWS that need a highly scalable document store. However, it lacks some of MongoDB's advanced features, such as multi-document ACID transactions, sophisticated querying, and the aggregation framework.

2. Oracle Database

Oracle Database is a popular legacy relational database used heavily in enterprise environments. It offers strong ACID compliance, a mature codebase, and powerful SQL querying.

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However, Oracle DB requires complex schema design upfront and is not as developer-friendly as MongoDB's document model. It can also be more challenging to scale horizontally across low-cost servers compared to MongoDB's distributed architecture.

3. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is a fully managed, globally distributed database service designed for scalability and guaranteed low latency. It offers turnkey global distribution, elastic scaling, SLAs, and support for documents, key-value, wide-column, and graph data models.

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Azure Cosmos DB is comparable to MongoDB Atlas in being a fully managed cloud service. Its proprietary SQL query language is less expressive than MongoDB's, but Cosmos DB makes tradeoffs to guarantee single-digit millisecond latency.

4. MariaDB

MariaDB is an open-source relational database that can be used as a drop-in replacement for MySQL. It is more mature and stable than MongoDB, having been hardened over decades of production use.

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However, MariaDB is not designed for large-scale horizontal scalability like MongoDB. Complex joins can also impact performance. MariaDB remains popular for applications that require ACID transactions and SQL support.

5. Couchbase

Couchbase is a leading NoSQL document database that competes directly with MongoDB. It is designed for scalability, availability, and performance at scale.

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Couchbase and MongoDB have extensive overlapping capabilities, including indexing, querying, and managed cloud services. However, MongoDB has more flexible data models with better support for nested documents and arrays.

6. Cloudera

Cloudera provides enterprise big data platforms based on Hadoop and Apache Spark. It focuses on analytics and data warehousing rather than as an operational database.

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Cloudera is a complementary technology for managing and analyzing large-scale datasets for business intelligence. MongoDB integrates well with Cloudera for operational database workloads within a big data pipeline.

How Spendflo Can Help You Get Better Deals on MongoDB

Spendflo is a SaaS spend management solution that combines AI-powered software with expert procurement services to optimize cloud and software costs.

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With Spendflo, you get:

• Visibility into all of your software and cloud costs from one centralized platform. This includes MongoDB and other databases.
• AI-driven analytics to identify cost optimization opportunities and right-size subscriptions to needs.
• Procurement experts who leverage buying power across thousands of clients to negotiate the best possible deals with vendors.
• Vendor benchmarking to compare pricing against industry standards.
• Bill validation and consolidation for simplified tracking.
• Slack first workflows to simplify software procurement and license management.

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Spendflo has unmatched experience negotiating with vendors like MongoDB. Their procurement experts can analyze your current MongoDB spending and provide a free savings assessment.

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Get a free pricing analysis from Spendflo today for a personalized estimate of how much you could save on MongoDB and other software/cloud services costs. 

Frequently Asked Questions about MongoDB Pricing

How much does MongoDB cost?

MongoDB offers a free tier on Atlas. Paid pricing starts at around $57/month. There is also a customized plan for Enterprise Advanced.

Is there a free version of MongoDB?

The Shared plan is free, offering 512 MB of shared storage and shared computing resources.

What is the most expensive MongoDB plan?

The Enterprise Advanced subscription with premium support and maximum memory/storage configuration would be the highest-cost option.

What factors affect pricing for Atlas cloud service?

Atlas pricing depends on cluster size, region, SLA tier, additional features like backups and VPC peering, and reserved instance term if applicable. More resources increase the price.

How does Ops Manager fit into Enterprise Advanced pricing?

Ops Manager for monitoring and automation is included with Enterprise Advanced subscriptions. Pricing is based on cluster size and SLA support tier.

Can I run MongoDB Enterprise Server in multiple environments?

Enterprise Server licenses allow production deployment in on-premises, private cloud, public cloud, and hybrid environments.

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