According to TheRegister.com, MongoDB CEO Chirantan Desai used the company’s Q3 FY 2026 earnings call to take direct aim at PostgreSQL, claiming a “super-high growth” AI customer switched because PostgreSQL “could not just scale.” The company reported revenue of $628.3 million for the quarter ending October 31, a 19% year-over-year increase, with operating losses narrowing to $18.4 million. Following the report, which beat investor forecasts, MongoDB’s share price spiked 23% on Tuesday morning. Desai’s comments come as PostgreSQL has surged in popularity, even overtaking MongoDB in developer surveys like Stack Overflow’s by 2023.
MongoDB on the defensive
Here’s the thing: this feels like a classic case of protesting a bit too much. MongoDB built its empire on being the fast, flexible, schema-less alternative to rigid relational databases. And for a long time, that was a killer pitch. But the landscape has shifted dramatically. PostgreSQL isn’t just that old project from the 1980s anymore. It’s become the darling of developers, and more importantly, the foundation for a whole new wave of scalable, cloud-native services from every major player. When an analyst directly asked about the “PostgreSQL-kind-of-narrative” in Silicon Valley, Desai’s retort about one scaling win starts to sound a little thin. It’s a defensive move, and that’s always telling.
The real competition isn’t PostgreSQL
Look, the real story isn’t MongoDB vs. vanilla PostgreSQL. It’s MongoDB vs. the entire ecosystem building on top of PostgreSQL. We’re talking about distributed systems like CockroachDB, YugabyteDB, and Google’s AlloyDB. Microsoft just announced HorizonDB, its own distributed PostgreSQL service to rival AWS and Google. Even PlanetScale, famous for MySQL, is now in the PostgreSQL game. Basically, the hyperscalers and startups are solving the very scalability problem Desai is highlighting. They’re using PostgreSQL’s robust relational core and engineering new distributed storage layers around it. That’s the existential threat.
A battle of philosophies
So what’s MongoDB’s play now? They’re pivoting the conversation from pure scale to enterprise readiness and reliability. That’s smart, because it’s a harder claim for the new crop of Postgres-compatible services to immediately refute. But Microsoft is already blurring the lines further with DocumentDB, a document database service built on a PostgreSQL backend. Think about that. It promises MongoDB-like flexibility with a battle-tested relational engine underneath. For companies choosing their foundational tech stack, that’s a compelling hybrid proposition. The narrative is no longer “NoSQL vs. SQL.” It’s becoming “What’s the most efficient, scalable abstraction for my data, regardless of the underlying engine?”
Where does this leave us?
I think Desai is right about one thing: it’s still too early to declare a definitive “platform of choice” for AI workloads. These systems are chewing through insane volumes of unstructured and semi-structured data—log files, embeddings, you name it. MongoDB’s document model should, in theory, be a natural fit. But if the scalable, distributed future is being built on PostgreSQL-compatible protocols, MongoDB risks being sidelined by the ecosystem, not the technology. Their strong earnings show they’re not going anywhere soon. But the competitive moat they once had is getting filled in from all sides. The next few years will be less about trash-talking and more about who can deliver that reliable, scalable foundation at the best price. And in that race, the finish line is still way off in the distance.
