Compass 1,815 is MongoDB 1,815 's free desktop GUI (version 1.50.0, for Windows, macOS and Linux). Paste a connection string and you get a document browser with an editable JSON view, a schema tab that samples a collection and reports each field's types and value distribution, an aggregation builder that previews every stage, and an index tab with usage counts. The schema tab earns the download: it answers "what is in here" at a glance.
The Database Tools are the command-line half, versioned separately (100.18.0 here).
| Tool | Job |
|---|---|
| mongodump / mongorestore | binary BSON backup and restore, with indexes |
| mongoexport / mongoimport | JSON, CSV and TSV interchange |
| bsondump | turn a .bson dump file into readable JSON |
| mongostat / mongotop | live operation counts, per-collection timings |
| mongofiles | put and get GridFS files (GridFS) |
The first two pairs are not interchangeable. mongodump writes BSON, so types, indexes and collection options survive a round trip; it is the backup tool, and replaces the automated backups an Atlas 1,815 M0 cluster lacks. mongoexport writes text, so Decimal128, dates and ObjectId become extended-JSON strings or, in CSV, lose their types.
mongoexport --uri="mongodb://127.0.0.1:28017/bookshelf" --collection=books \
--fields=title,year --type=csv --out=books.csv
mongodump --uri="mongodb://127.0.0.1:28017/bookshelf" --out=dump/2026-09-22T07:40:21.927+0800 exported 2 records 2026-09-22T07:40:22.049+0800 done dumping `bookshelf.books` (2 documents) $ cat books.csv title,year Eloquent JavaScript,2024 Designing Data-Intensive Applications,2017
Both take the same --uri, so the same command runs against a container or an Atlas cluster. Add --gzip to compress a dump, --query for a subset, and --drop on mongorestore to replace rather than merge — merging is the default, and how a "restore" leaves stale documents behind.