An Enterprise-Grade MongoDB Alternative Without Licensing or Lock-in

MongoDB Community Edition software might set the stage for achieving your high-volume database goals, but you quickly learn that its features fall short of your enterprise needs.

So you look at MongoDB Enterprise software, but its costly and complex licensing structure does not meet your budget goals. You’re also not certain its features will always align with your evolving technology needs. What’s more, you’re wary of the expenses and restrictions of vendor lock-in.

Still, you don’t want to ditch the advantages of MongoDB Enterprise software. But you can’t absorb the negatives, either.

Don’t despair; there are alternatives. In this blog, we’ll examine the reasons why people would seek an alternative to MongoDB Enterprise, and we’ll identify some of the most popular NoSQL alternatives. Then, we’ll highlight some reasons why Percona Software for MongoDB might be the alternative you seek.

First, some stage-setting for this blog article.

The popularity of MongoDB

MongoDB has emerged as a popular database platform. It ranks No. 5 among all database management systems and No. 1 among non-relational/document-based systems (DB-Engines, July 2023).

Developers and DBAs like MongoDB’s ease-of-use. Instead of the table-based structure of relational databases, MongoDB stores data in documents and collections, a design for handling large amounts of unstructured data and for real-time web applications. DBAs and developers appreciate its combination of flexibility, scalability, and performance.

More specifically, DBAs and developers like that MongoDB stores data in JSON-like documents with optional schemas. It’s a good setup for real-time analytics and high-speed logging.

Taking a deeper dive, MongoDB is a system for analyzing data because documents are easily shared across multiple nodes and because of its indexing, query-on-demand, and real-time aggregation capabilities. MongoDB replica sets enable data redundancy and automatic failover, setting the stage (there’s that term again) for high availability. MongoDB also provides strong encryption and firewall security. MongoDB is preferable for working with content management systems and mobile apps.

And MongoDB is popular across industries. A survey of 90,240 companies using MongoDB listed the leading uses as Technology and Services (23%), Computer Software (16%), and Internet (6%).

So, if MongoDB provides such a great foundation, why not just step up to MongoDB Enterprise?

Why businesses seek an alternative to MongoDB Enterprise

The reasons for choosing an alternative to MongoDB Enterprise vary depending on business objectives, technical requirements, on-staff expertise, and project specifications. But there are common concerns about MongoDB Enterprise that drive people to seek alternatives.

Those problems (some with shared elements) include:

• High cost and complicated pricing structure: Many companies say MongoDB has an expensive and complicated pricing structure (Cloud Zero, January 2023). MongoDB Enterprise is a commercial (proprietary) product with licensing fees, as well as support and maintenance charges that can rapidly escalate. With the potentially high costs and complications of tiers, pay-as-you-go, hourly and monthly rates, etc., companies and organizations seek alternatives that offer similar functionality at a lower cost.
• Limited toolset: MongoDB Enterprise offers advanced features for data encryption, authentication, auditing, access control, and more. But you can be out of luck and forced to spend additional money if business-critical objectives require specific features or capabilities unavailable in MongoDB Enterprise.
• Not really open source: Even the MongoDB Community version is not open source; it’s source-available and is under the SSPL license (introduced by MongoDB itself). MongoDB Enterprise, built on the Community version, adds proprietary features and database management tools. MongoDB Enterprise is commercial. Customers miss out on the cost-effectiveness, creative freedom, and global community support (for innovation, better performance, and enhanced security) that come with open source solutions and from companies with an open source spirit.
• Inflexibility: Proprietary software puts a company — and its ability to tailor solutions to fit specific use cases — at the mercy of the software vendor. Conversely, open source database software (and companies that support source-available software with open source terms) provides the flexibility to customize and modify the software to suit specific requirements. Organizations have access to the source code, allowing them to make changes and enhancements as needed. This level of flexibility is particularly valuable for businesses with unique or specialized needs.
• Vendor lock-in: Relying on contracted MongoDB Enterprise support to address immediate concerns, reduce complexity, and provide a secure database might provide initial comfort, but trepidation about vendor lock-in would be legitimate. Concerns about price hikes, paying for unnecessary technology, and being blocked from new technology can provide the impetus to seek an alternative to MongoDB Enterprise. Companies might opt for alternative databases that offer more of the aforementioned flexibility and the ability to migrate to different platforms or technologies in the future without significant challenges.
• Infrastructure incompatibility: Organizations might have existing tools and applications that are not readily compatible with MongoDB Enterprise software. If an alternative database has better compatibility or provides specific integrations with the company’s existing technology stack, that might be a compelling reason to seek an alternative to MongoDB Enterprise.
• Needless complexity: For smaller companies and/or those with simpler needs or limited database budgets and resources, some of the advanced features in MongoDB Enterprise could introduce unwanted complexity in the database environment. Such organizations might seek a more straightforward alternative.

Alternatives to MongoDB Enterprise

There are plenty of alternatives, but we’re not going to cover them all here, of course. Instead, let’s examine a few of the more popular non-relational (NoSQL) database options.

MongoDB Community

We’ve already touched on MongoDB Community’s licensing, but let’s address some of what the software lacks to be a viable technology alternative to its Enterprise sibling.

For starters, MongoDB Community lacks the advanced security features available in MongoDB Enterprise. It also lacks more advanced monitoring and management features like custom alerting, automation, and deeper insights into database performance that are part of MongoDB Enterprise. While it offers basic backup and restore functionality, the Community version lacks advanced features in MongoDB Enterprise, such as continuous backups, point-in-time recovery (PITR), and integration with third-party backup tools.

And from a support standpoint, for the loss of a better word, it’s lacking. The MongoDB Community edition does not come with official technical support or service level agreements (SLAs) from MongoDB Inc.

Redis

Known for exceptional performance, Redis is a popular in-memory data platform. It stores data in RAM, which enables fast data access and retrieval. Redis can handle a high volume of operations per second, making it useful for running applications that require low latency. Redis supports a wide range of data structures, including strings, lists, sets, sorted sets, and hashes. Developers appreciate how Redis supplies appropriate data structures for specific use cases.

Storing large datasets can be a challenge, as Redis’ storage capacity is limited by available RAM. Also, Redis is designed primarily for key-value storage and lacks advanced querying capabilities.

Redis ranks right after MongoDB as the sixth most popular database management system (DB-Engines, July 2023).

Apache Cassandra

Apache Cassandra, with users across industries, ranks as the 12th most popular database management system (DB-Engines, July 2023). It’s an open source distributed NoSQL database that offers high scalability and availability. It manages unstructured data with thousands of writes every second.

Fault tolerance and linear scalability make Cassandra popular for handling mission-critical data. But because Cassandra handles large amounts of data and multiple requests, transactions can be slower, and there can be memory management issues.

Couchbase

Couchbase is a distributed document store with a powerful search engine and built-in operational and analytical capabilities. It’s designed to handle high volumes of data with minimal delay. An in-memory caching mechanism supports horizontal scaling, which enables it to handle large-scale applications and workloads effectively. Couchbase — No. 32 in database popularity (DB-Engines, July 2023) — uses a distributed, peer-to-peer architecture that enables data replication and automatic sharding across multiple nodes. This architecture ensures high availability, fault tolerance, and resilience to failures.

With Couchbase, certain tasks can be more challenging or time-consuming. Its indexing mechanisms are not as well-developed as those of some other database solutions. Additionally, it has its own query language, so the learning curve can be steeper.

Percona’s MongoDB alternative: Enterprise advantages with none of the strings

Here’s one more alternative: If you want enterprise-grade MongoDB — without the high cost of runaway licensing fees or restrictions of vendor lock-in — consider Percona Software for MongoDB.

Secure, enterprise-grade Percona Software for MongoDB is freely available and empowers you to operate the production environments you want, wherever you want. Benefits include:

• High performance without lock-in — Operate production environments requiring high-performance, highly available, and secure databases. Do it without licensing costs and vendor lock-in.
• Data durability — Ensure it via an open source, distributed, and low-impact solution for consistent backups of MongoDB sharded clusters and replica sets.
• Scalability — Freely deploy and scale MongoDB in a public or private cloud, on-premises, or hybrid environment—no credit card required.
• MongoDB database health checks — Monitor, receive alerts, manage backups, and diagnose user-impacting incidents rooted in database configuration.
• Automated procedures and accelerated value — Automate deployments, scaling, and backup and restore operations of MongoDB on Kubernetes.

For MongoDB users, Percona offers:

• Percona Server for MongoDB — A source-available, fully compatible drop-in replacement for the MongoDB Community Edition with enterprise security, backup, and developer-friendly features.
• Percona Backup for MongoDB — This is a fully supported, 100% open source community backup tool for MongoDB. It creates a physical data backup on a running server without notable performance and operating degradation. Percona Backup for MongoDB offers PITR and a backup management interface via Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM).
• Percona Toolkit for MongoDB — A collection of advanced open source command-line tools that are engineered to perform a variety of tasks too difficult or complex to perform manually.
• Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) — An open source database observability monitoring and management tool that’s ideal for finding MongoDB database issues.

With Percona Software for MongoDB, you can ensure data availability while improving security and simplifying the development of new applications — in the most demanding public, private, and hybrid cloud environments.

And with Percona, you’re never on your own. We back our MongoDB offerings with Percona Support, Managed Services, and Consulting. We’ll provide support that best fits the needs of your company or organization — without a restrictive contract.

Ready to leave MongoDB, Inc. behind? Percona is the cost-effective, enterprise-grade alternative businesses trust.