MongoDB Atlas vs Grafana Cloud
Managed MongoDB with search, vector, stream processing
vs. Fully-managed observability — Prometheus + Loki + Tempo + Grafana
Pricing tiers
MongoDB Atlas
M0 — Free
Shared cluster, 512 MB storage, 100 ops/sec, 32 MB sort memory. Learning/exploration.
Free
Flex — Serverless
Autoscales 0-500 ops/sec. 5 GB storage. Pay-as-you-go, up to ~$30/mo.
$8/mo
M2 — Shared
Shared, 2 GB storage. Staging / small apps.
$9/mo
M5 — Shared
Shared, 5 GB storage.
$25/mo
M10 — Dedicated
2 GB RAM, 2 vCPU, 10-128 GB storage. First dedicated tier.
$57/mo
M20 — Dedicated
4 GB RAM, 2 vCPU, 20-256 GB storage.
$144/mo
M30 — Dedicated
8 GB RAM, 2 vCPU, 40-512 GB storage.
$389/mo
M40 — Dedicated
16 GB RAM, 4 vCPU, 80 GB-1 TB storage.
$749/mo
M50 — Dedicated
32 GB RAM, 8 vCPU, 160 GB-4 TB storage.
$1440/mo
M60 — Dedicated
64 GB RAM, 16 vCPU.
$2844/mo
M80 — Dedicated
128 GB RAM, 32 vCPU, 750 GB-4 TB.
$5256/mo
M300 — Dedicated
384 GB RAM, 96 vCPU.
$15732/mo
Enterprise
Multi-region Advanced, private network, BYOK, dedicated support.
Custom
Grafana Cloud
Free
Always free. 10k metrics series + 50 GB logs/traces/profiles + 3 users + 14-day retention.
Free
Self-Hosted (OSS)
Apache 2.0 / AGPL. Run Grafana + Mimir + Loki + Tempo yourself.
$0 base (usage-based)
Pro
$19/mo platform fee + usage-based overages. 10k metrics series + 50 GB included. 13-month metrics retention.
$19/mo
Enterprise
$25,000/year minimum. Custom retention, premium support, BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud) option.
$25000/mo
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing m0 on MongoDB Atlas vs free on Grafana Cloud.
| Metric | MongoDB Atlas | Grafana Cloud |
|---|---|---|
| backups | 0 backups | — |
| ops per sec | 100 ops/sec | — |
| sort memory mb | 32 MB | — |
| storage gb | 0.5 GB | — |
Features
MongoDB Atlas · 14 features
- Atlas App Services — Backend-as-a-service: Functions, HTTPS endpoints, users + auth, sync.
- Atlas Charts — Embedded dashboards + visualizations from Atlas data.
- Atlas Database — Core MongoDB with automated backups, monitoring, scaling on AWS/Azure/GCP.
- Atlas Data Federation — Query across Atlas, S3, and HTTP endpoints in one pipeline.
- Atlas Device Sync (Realm) — Offline-first mobile DB that syncs bidirectionally with Atlas.
- Atlas Search — Apache Lucene-based full-text search integrated into MongoDB aggregation pipelin…
- Atlas Stream Processing — Continuous processing of MongoDB change streams + Kafka. Pipeline aggregations o…
- Atlas Triggers — Database change triggers, scheduled triggers. Run Atlas Functions (Node.js).
- Atlas Vector Search — Vector similarity search via $vectorSearch operator. HNSW index. Up to 4096 dims…
- BYOK Encryption — Bring your own KMS key (AWS KMS, Azure Key Vault, GCP KMS).
- Data API — Read/write via REST. Alternative to drivers for edge/serverless.
- Multi-Region Clusters — Single cluster distributed across multiple regions for HA + low latency.
- Online Archive — Tiered storage: automatic cold data movement to cheaper S3-backed storage.
- Private Networking — VPC Peering, PrivateLink, CIDR allowlist.
Grafana Cloud · 16 features
- Alloy (OTel agent) — Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector with Grafana additions.
- Application Platform — Infrastructure + k8s + frontend + cloud provider integrations.
- Beyla (eBPF auto-instrumentation) — Zero-code auto-instrumentation via eBPF for any language.
- Faro (RUM) — Frontend observability — traces, logs, Core Web Vitals.
- Grafana in Azure Marketplace — "Azure Managed Grafana" — Azure-native deployment.
- Grafana Incident — Incident management with Slack-native flows.
- Grafana OnCall — On-call scheduling + incident response (powered by Amixr).
- Grafana SLO — Service level objective tracking + error budget visualization.
- Grafana (visualization) — Dashboards, variables, alerting, annotations over any datasource.
- k6 (synthetic + load testing) — Load testing + synthetic monitoring. JavaScript-based scripts.
- Loki (logs) — Prometheus-inspired log aggregation with LogQL.
- Mimir (metrics) — Horizontally-scalable Prometheus-compatible TSDB.
- Pyroscope (profiling) — Continuous profiling (CPU, memory, etc.).
- Self-Host Option — Full OSS stack deployable in your infra.
- Tempo (traces) — High-scale distributed tracing with TraceQL.
- Unified Alerting — Grafana-native alerting across metrics, logs, traces.
Developer interfaces
| Kind | MongoDB Atlas | Grafana Cloud |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | Atlas CLI, MongoDB Shell (mongosh) | Grafana Alloy (agent), grafana-cli |
| SDK | Atlas Device SDK (Realm), MongoDB Go Driver, MongoDB Java Driver, MongoDB .NET/C# Driver, mongodb (Node driver), mongodb (Rust), pymongo | Faro Web SDK (RUM) |
| REST | Atlas Admin API, Atlas Data API | Grafana HTTP API, Loki Push API |
| MCP | MongoDB MCP Server | — |
| OTHER | MongoDB Compass (GUI), MongoDB Wire Protocol | Prometheus Remote Write, Tempo OTLP |
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