20+ MongoDB Alternatives You Should Know About

As MongoDB® has changed their license from AGPL to SSPL many are concerned by this change, and by how sudden it has been. Will SSPL be protective enough for MongoDB, or will the next change be to go to an altogether proprietary license? According to our poll, many are going to explore MongoDB alternatives. This blog post provides a brief outline of technologies to consider.

Open Source Data Stores

• PostgreSQL is the darling of the open source database community. Especially if your concern is the license,   PostgreSQL’s permissive licence is hard to beat. PostgreSQL has powerful JSON Support, and there are many successful stories of migrating from MongoDB to PostgreSQL
• Citus  While PostgreSQL is a powerful database, and you can store terabytes of data on a single cluster, at a larger scale you will need sharding. If so, consider the  Citus PostgreSQL extension, or the DBaaS offering from the same guys.
• TimescaleDB   If on the other hand you are storing  time series data in MongoDB, then  TimescaleDB might be a good fit.
• ToroDB  If you would love to use PostgreSQL but need MongoDB wire protocol compatibility, take a look at ToroDB. While it can’t serve as a full drop-in replacement for MongoDB server just yet, the developer told me that with some work it is possible.
• CockroachDB  While not based on the PostgreSQL codebase,  CockroachDB is PostgreSQL wire protocol compatible and it is natively distributed, so you will not need to do manual sharding.
• MySQL ® is another feasible replacement. MySQL 5.7 and MySQL 8 have great support for JSON, and it continues to get better with every maintenance release. You can also consider MySQL Cluster for medium size sharded environments. You can also consider MariaDB and Percona Server  for MySQL
• MySQL DocStore  is a CRUD interface for JSON data stored in MySQL, and while it is not the same as MongoDB’s query language, it is much easier to transition to compared to SQL.
• Vitess Would you love to use MySQL but can’t stand manual sharding? Vitess is a powerful sharding engine for MySQL which will allow you to grow to great scale while using proven MySQL as a backend.
• TiDB is another take on MySQL compatible sharding. This NewSQL engine is MySQL wire protocol compatible but underneath is a distributed database designed from the ground up.
• CouchDB is a document database that speaks JSON natively. Although a document based database, CouchBase offers N1QL language which has SQL look and feel.
• ArangoDB is multi-model database, which can be used as document store.
• Elastic   While not a perfect choice for every MongoDB workload, for workloads where document data is searched and analyzed ElasticSearch can be a great alternative.
• Redis is another contender for some MongoDB workloads. Often used as a cache in front of MongoDB, it can also be used as a JSON store through extensions.  While such extensions from RedisLabs are no longer open source, GoodForm projects provides open source alternatives.
• ClickHouse may be a great contender for moving analytical workloads from MongoDB. Much faster, and with JSON support and Nested Data Structures , it can be great choice for storing and analyzing document data.
• Cassandra does not have a document data model, but it has proven to be extremely successful for building scalable distributed clusters. If this is your main use case for MongoDB, then you should consider Cassandra.
• ScyllaDB is a protocol compatible Cassandra alternative which claims to offer  much higher per node performance.
• HBase is another option worth considering, especially if you already have a Hadoop/HDFS infrastructure.

Public Cloud Document Stores

Most major cloud providers offer some variant of a native document database for you to consider.

• Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is an interesting engine that provides multiple NoSQL APIs, including for  MongoDB and Cassandra.
• Amazon DynamoDB supports key value and document based APIs. While not offering MongoDB compatibility, DynamoDB has been around for a long time, and is the most battle tested of the public cloud database offerings.
• Google Cloud DataStore  – Google Cloud offers a number of data storage options  for you to consider, and Cloud DataStore offers a data model and query language that is the most similar to MongoDB.

If you’re not ready for a major migration effort, there is one more solution for you – Percona Server for MongoDB .  Based on MongoDB Community, and enhanced by Percona with Enterprise Features, Percona Server for MongoDB offers 100% compatibility. As we wrote in a previous post, we commit to shipping a  supported AGPL version until the situation around SSPL is clearly resolved.

Want help on deciding what is the best option for you, or with migration heavy lifting? Percona Professional Services can help!

Have idea for another feasible MongoDB alternative?  Please comment, and I will consider adding it to the list!