Free and Pro
What the free tier includes forever, which limits are hard and which are soft, and exactly what a Pro licence adds.
The free tier is not a trial that expires. It stays free, and it is a usable MongoDB client on its own. Pro removes the capacity limits and adds the features listed below.
Separately from both, every eligible device gets a 14-day Pro trial, once, with no payment and no signup.
What free includes
| Free | |
|---|---|
| Saved connections | 8 |
| Favorite queries | 5 |
| Pinned collections | 5 |
| Open tabs | No limit |
| Authentication | No auth, username and password, SCRAM-SHA-1, SCRAM-SHA-256 |
| Schema analysis | 500 sampled documents |
| Generated test documents | 500 |
| Operation log entries | 250 |
The three sampling numbers are soft limits: the feature works, it just stops at that size. Inputs that have one show you the free maximum rather than letting you type a number they will reject.
What Pro adds
Pro removes every limit above, and adds:
- Charts, six types with stacking, dual axis and PNG export
- Cluster monitoring, live metrics, replica set health, slow queries and the profiler
- User and role management
- AI access, the built-in MCP server with its permission and approval model
- Detached windows, document comparison, and custom themes
- Excel import and export, cross-instance collection copy, and database-level import and export
- Four more authentication methods: X.509, LDAP, Kerberos and AWS IAM
Anything gated says so where you find it, rather than failing when you press it.
How a licence behaves
Pro is sold monthly, annually, or as a one-time lifetime licence. A licence activates on up to 3 devices.
- Devices you no longer use can be freed. A device inactive for 30 days can be removed automatically, and you can deactivate the current device without cancelling the subscription.
- Subscriptions validate at startup, and a network failure does not take away access you already have. Being offline on a plane does not downgrade you.
- An inactive subscription gets a three-day grace period before reverting to free. A revoked licence reverts immediately.
- A lifetime licence includes every future update, with no time limit, and activates on any version.
Moving a licence to a new machine, and what to do when activation fails, are covered in Licence activation.
What happens to your data if you stop paying
Nothing. Your connections, queries, tabs and themes are in a local database on your machine. Falling back to free re-applies the capacity limits to what you can create from then on; it does not delete what you have.