The Cloud-Native Alternative to Save on MongoDB OpsManager
Let’s be honest. MongoDB is a great database, but the operational tax of running it in production is absurd.
If you are running MongoDB at scale, you are likely stuck in one of two expensive traps:
The Atlas Trap: You are burning cloud credits at an alarming rate for managed instances.
The Enterprise/OpsManager Trap: You are self-hosting but paying massive licensing fees for "Enterprise Advanced" just to get essential features like backups, LDAP, and a management UI (OpsManager).
If you try to run Community Edition on your own, you lose the safety net - no automated Point-in-time Recovery (PITR) backups, no cohesive monitoring, and manual sharding management.
There is a third option. You can get enterprise parity on your own infrastructure, managed by Kubernetes, without the licensing stranglehold.
MongoDB OpsManager is the standard for self-hosted management, but it forces you into the MongoDB ecosystem. It manages backups, automation, and monitoring, but it requires the Enterprise license to unlock the features that actually matter (like encrypted storage or Kerberos).
You are essentially paying a premium for a GUI that runs scripts you could arguably write yourself - if you had the time.
The Solution: OpenEverest (The Engine)
OpenEverest is the open-source answer to database provisioning and management on Kubernetes. Formerly known as Percona Everest, it has evolved into a fully vendor-neutral platform.
It allows you to spin up production-ready MongoDB clusters on any K8s cluster (EKS, GKE, AKS, or bare metal).
How it replaces OpsManager features for free:
Database Engine: Instead of the crippled Community Edition, OpenEverest deploys Percona Server for MongoDB. This is a drop-in replacement that gives you "Enterprise" features (encryption at rest, audit logging, LDAP) without the license key.
Orchestration: It uses the Percona Operator for MongoDB to handle the heavy lifting - scaling, healing, and complex topology management (sharding/replica sets).
Backups: Forget buying OpsManager storage. OpenEverest handles physical and logical backups, including Point-in-Time Recovery (PITR) directly to your S3-compatible storage.
Monitoring: It integrates natively with PMM (Percona Monitoring and Management) and other observability solutions to give you query analytics and metrics that actually beat OpsManager’s default dashboards.
The Solanica Platform
OpenEverest is the engine. Solanica Platform is the chassis and the pit crew.
We built Solanica Platform on top of OpenEverest for organizations that cannot rely solely on community support. We are an early-stage startup, which means we are hungry, agile, and actually run by engineers, not account executives.
Solanica Platform provides:
Hardened Security: Enterprise-grade security configurations out of the box.
Plugin Architecture: Extensibility that OpsManager lacks.
Support: When production breaks at 3 AM, you don't post on a forum. You call us.
Feature Comparison: OpsManager vs. Solanica/OpenEverest
We are not here to sell you vaporware. Here is strictly what you get operationally.
Feature
MongoDB OpsManager (Enterprise)
Solanica Platform / OpenEverest
Licensing Cost
High (Per Node/Core)
Open Source (Free) / Solanica (Fraction Fees)
Vendor Lock-in
High (Proprietary tooling)
None (Kubernetes Native)
Deployment
Proprietary Agents
Native Kubernetes Operators
Backups
OpsManager Backup Daemon
PITR to S3-compatible (Native)
Encryption
Requires Enterprise License
Included (Data-at-rest & In-transit)
Monitoring
OpsManager Metrics
PMM (Prometheus/Grafana based) or else
Sharding
Automated
Automated
UI/API
Web UI and API
Web UI and API
Why This Works
The underlying technology relies on battle-tested open-source components. We are leveraging the Percona Operator for MongoDB to ensure the database itself is stable. We aren't reinventing the database; we are fixing the management plane.
You get the stability of Percona’s MongoDB distribution (which is feature-equivalent to Mongo Enterprise) combined with the orchestration capabilities and simplicity of OpenEverest.
The Bottom Line
Unlock significant cost savings on your Kubernetes infrastructure. We provide the essential enterprise features tailored for your cluster, allowing you to scale without the 'Enterprise' price tag.