You are responsible for managing your deployment of the MongoDB Community Edition. This can require specialized knowledge and take time away from more value-added activities.

Atlas includes a fully managed cloud database and associated data services. This means backups, patches, upgrades, and other operational tasks are automated and handled for you.

You can download the MongoDB Community Edition to develop locally, but you will not get full-text or vector search capabilities. Developing with change streams and transactions requires additional setup.

You can use the Atlas CLI to easily set up sandboxed local Atlas deployments for development and testing, including using Atlas Search and Vector Search locally. Local Atlas deployments support change streams and transactions out of the box.

No on-call technical support.

Atlas comes with basic support included, with increased SLA coverage available as optional.

You have to manage patching and upgrading manually.

Atlas applies software patches and upgrades automatically.

You will need to design and implement your own backup strategy.

Atlas provides backups as a safety measure in the event of data loss for all clusters above the M2 tier and enhanced features such as cloud backups for M10 and higher tiers.

No built-in monitoring capabilities – you will need to set up and integrate your database with your chosen third-party monitoring and alerting tools.

Atlas provides built-in tools, alerts, charts, integrations, and logs to help you monitor your database deployments.

No full-text search capabilities

Atlas provides full-text search capabilities with Atlas Search, allowing you to use a single, unified API across both your database and search operations.

No vector search capabilities.

Atlas Vector Search allows you to build intelligent applications powered by semantic search and generative AI over any type of data.

No stream processing capabilities.

With Atlas Stream Processing, you can use one platform to continuously process streaming data alongside other application data stored in your database.

No built-in data visualization capabilities.

With Atlas Charts, you can easily create, share, and embed visualizations of your MongoDB Atlas data.

While the Community Edition includes many standard security capabilities like Queryable Encryption with explicit encryption, SCRAM authentication, role-based access control, and TLS/SSL encryption, setting up and maintaining your security configurations requires more time and effort.

Atlas comes pre-configured with secure default settings, along with additional security features beyond what’s offered in the Community Edition, like in-use encryption to protect sensitive workloads, Queryable Encryption, advanced authentication support, granular auditing, IP access list management, network peering connections, and private endpoints. Atlas has gone through third-party compliance standards, so it meets enterprise regulatory requirements and measures.

You have to set up and manage replica sets yourself. While you can scale vertically and horizontally, you must do both manually.

Atlas uses replica sets by default, automatically distributes database clusters across the availability zones, and provides a 99.995% uptime SLA for all clusters M10 and higher.

Atlas offers the ability to have globally distributed clusters in a few clicks or API calls, allowing teams to easily achieve data residency compliance and lower latency for global applications.

You can scale horizontally with sharding, but this requires deploying and managing complex infrastructure.

Atlas can automatically scale your cluster tier, storage capacity, or both in response to cluster usage. This removes the need to write scripts or do other manual work to make scaling decisions.

Atlas also makes it easy to control costs by specifying a range of maximum and minimum cluster sizes that your cluster can automatically scale to.