MongoLab

We recently switched from MongoDB and the Python library MongoEngine to PostgreSQL and Django in order to:

• Better leverage GraphQL (using the Graphene library)
• Allow us to use the autogenerated Django admin interface
• Allow better performance due to the way some of our pages present data
• Give us more a mature stack in the form of Django replacing MongoEngine, which we had some issues with in the past.

MongoDB was hosted on mlab, and we now host Postgres on Amazon RDS .

We went with MongoDB , almost by mistake. I had never used it before, but I knew I wanted the *EAN part of the MEAN stack, so why not go all in. I come from a background of SQL (first MySQL , then PostgreSQL ), so I definitely abused Mongo at first... by trying to turn it into something more relational than it should be. But hey, data is supposed to be relational, so there wasn't really any way to get around that.

There's a lot I love about MongoDB, and a lot I hate. I still don't know if we made the right decision. We've been able to build much quicker, but we also have had some growing pains. We host our databases on MongoDB Atlas , and I can't say enough good things about it. We had tried MongoLab and Compose before it, and with MongoDB Atlas I finally feel like things are in a good place. I don't know if I'd use it for a one-off small project, but for a large product Atlas has given us a ton more control, stability and trust.