# MongoDB

52 Hacker News commenters recommended MongoDB and 139 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 10 years (6 owners).

**Verdict:** Recommended for JSON-style document data, easy replica sets and failover, and a pleasant query language. Critics point to insecure defaults and a poor fit for relational data.

## Why people recommend it

- Easy replication, failover and sharding (4 comments): "I've used mongo with replication and automative failover for a decade in production with no downtime, no data lost." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47816743)) "Running MongoDB in a replica set is really easy and much easier than running postgres or MySQL in an HA setup." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45920082)) "The easiest I’ve done is in MongoDB replication, sharding, failover, and all that is super easy." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47816544))
- Long production track record (4 comments): "We've been using MongoDB in production since 2013, so it was a natural choice since we already know a lot more about it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46875395)) "People that know what they are doing have been using MongoDB for reliable horizontally-scalable document storage" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46429997)) "after 10 years, 1m+ users and hundreds of enterprise customers everything was just fine" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46882795))
- Schema-less, fast to start (3 comments): "Because that's the only database there, and nosql schemaless solutions are faster to get started" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45833724)) "I've found that schema-less databases reduce the class of errors agents struggle with most" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873301)) "schema-less: we don't have to think about DDL statements at any point." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45922492))
- Natural fit for JSON data (2 comments): "MongoDB is a natural choice if you are working with denormalized deeply hierarchical data structure like JSON." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49882723)) "For scenarios where I have one 'thing' that's not very relational, it works well." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46431357))

## What people warn about

- Poor fit for relational or ACID workloads (4 comments): "there are workloads out there, where you will get burnt badly if you pick anything other than a traditional RDBMS with ACID" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46242004)) "Maintaining a codebase with mongodb db is already hard enough considering 99% of the time you need a relational db." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46879052)) "Mongo was easy to start and iterate on, but SQL still won for many reasons." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50154447))
- Heavy operational burden to run (3 comments): "No one knew, for instance, how to lower the MongoDB resource usage, despite the fact that the clustered VMware install is using a very fast SSD storage solution" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47912641)) "Every single project that I worked on where MongoDB was used, also had MongoDB as the single largest constraint and operations time sink." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48443674)) "As much as I like MongoDB as a developer, the last thing I ever want to do is manage a deployment again." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45917679))
- Insecure defaults and slow patches (2 comments): "MongoDB's biggest weakness was its default settings, which made it insecure and very vulnerable to data consistency failures." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49879765)) "Why did it take them 4 days between publishing a CVE for the vulnerability (Dec 19th) and posting a public patch (Dec 23rd)?" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46428139))
- Vendor direction and open-source concerns (2 comments): "I can't imagine the future is bright for MongoDB as AI makes it much less painful to move off of legacy and/or overpriced software." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49880069)) "all these hipsters startups (MongoDB, Redis, etc) all ended up enshittifying their open source products" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46582710))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [RethinkDB](https://hackerapproved.com/p/rethinkdb.md): 5 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "MongoDB", https://hackerapproved.com/p/mongodb/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).