ScaleGrid

Pros

The ease of use was fantastic! The dev ops that goes into setting up scalable and redundant MongoDB clusters in Microsoft Azure is fairly daunting, but ScaleGrid automates 95% of that! They also make it very easy to switch from Azure to AWS, an initiative of ours which is currently underway. We are also currently implementing a sharding solution for improved horizontal scalability and ScaleGrid has made that process much easier to manage as well.

Cons

There is not much to not like about ScaleGrid. My biggest complaint is the lack of multi user account with groups and access controls, this forces us to use a single login to manage our ScaleGrid instances, which is not ideal. I think the monitoring metrics are in a pretty good place now but could be improved to be more on par with what you get from a more mature platform like AWS RDS for example.

Pros

Although I could have spun up yet another database in Azure or AWS, I found during the proof of concept stage that even though it is an Azure or AWS solution that ScaleGrid is managing, the throughput and reliability is much higher.
In fact, it is because ScaleGrid effectively manage the instance for us that I decided to let them take the hassle.

Cons

It is slightly more expensive than going direct but the value add of being fully managed and pre-configured was worth the additional spend.

Pros

I'm using MongoDB and it's easy to spin up a database, though it takes about 20 minutes to complete the set up.

Backup services etc seems ideal, with different frequency settings.
Automatic replica and sharded cluster set ups (though I've never tried).

Cons

Expensive, just expensive.
Slow - Spinning up server takes a long time (20-30 minutes).
Updating takes a long time.
Migration also takes a long time.

They claimed they use encryption at rest, while that is only available in MongoDB Enterprise version. They are not using enterprise version.

Pros

We previously used mlab for our hosted MongoDB needs, but they shut down. Out of all competitors ScaleGrid stood out to us because of their fair pricing and simple setup.

Cons

We would have liked to have our test/staging environment on a different cluster. This would double our costs though. Mlab offered free environments for testing. They had very small data allowance, but it was perfect for us. We now had to opt into having our test database live on the same cluster. It's okay, but that could be improved. Accessing backups is also cumbersome. Often I just need to look up something that for instance got deleted by accident. These are small issues and definitely not a deal breaker.

Pros

It was easy to deploy, doesn't force me to upgrade other dependent environments.

Cons

It's more than double the price for small start-ups then what mLab offered. There was a comparable shared cluster subscription, but it seems like they stopped offering it as soon as mLab users were forced to move elsewhere due to an acquisition from MangoDB (Atlas).