Comparing MongoDB (NASDAQ:MDB) and Salesforce (NYSE:CRM)

Salesforce (NYSE:CRM) and MongoDB (NASDAQ:MDB) are both large-cap technology companies, but which is the better investment? We will compare the two businesses based on the strength of their earnings, risk, analyst recommendations, institutional ownership, dividends, valuation and profitability.

Analyst Recommendations

This is a summary of current recommendations for Salesforce and MongoDB, as provided by MarketBeat.com.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
Salesforce	3	13	31	3	2.68
MongoDB	0	7	28	2	2.86

Salesforce presently has a consensus price target of $278.12, indicating a potential upside of 16.12%. MongoDB has a consensus price target of $462.91, indicating a potential upside of 17.45%. Given MongoDB’s stronger consensus rating and higher probable upside, analysts clearly believe MongoDB is more favorable than Salesforce.

Volatility & Risk

Salesforce has a beta of 1.26, indicating that its share price is 26% more volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, MongoDB has a beta of 1.74, indicating that its share price is 74% more volatile than the S&P 500.

Profitability

This table compares Salesforce and MongoDB’s net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

	Net Margins	Return on Equity	Return on Assets
Salesforce	21.99%	24.90%	11.27%
MongoDB	2.12%	1.06%	0.84%

Insider & Institutional Ownership

80.4% of Salesforce shares are held by institutional investors. Comparatively, 89.3% of MongoDB shares are held by institutional investors. 3.5% of Salesforce shares are held by company insiders. Comparatively, 2.6% of MongoDB shares are held by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that large money managers, hedge funds and endowments believe a stock will outperform the market over the long term.

Earnings and Valuation

This table compares Salesforce and MongoDB”s top-line revenue, earnings per share (EPS) and valuation.

	Gross Revenue	Price/Sales Ratio	Net Income	Earnings Per Share	Price/Earnings Ratio
Salesforce	$41.52 billion	4.75	$7.46 billion	$10.97	21.83
MongoDB	$2.46 billion	12.89	-$71.15 million	$0.71	555.09

Salesforce has higher revenue and earnings than MongoDB. Salesforce is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than MongoDB, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.

Summary

Salesforce beats MongoDB on 9 of the 15 factors compared between the two stocks.

About Salesforce

Salesforce, Inc. provides Customer Relationship Management (CRM) technology that brings companies and customers together worldwide. The company's service includes sales to store data, monitor leads and progress, forecast opportunities, gain insights through analytics and artificial intelligence, and deliver quotes, contracts, and invoices; and service that enables companies to deliver trusted and highly personalized customer support at scale. In addition, its platform offering comprise a flexible platform that enables companies of various sizes, locations, and industries to build business workflow and apps with customer; online learning platform that allows anyone to learn in-demand Salesforce skills; and Slack, an intelligent productivity platform. The company's marketing services enables companies to plan, personalize, automate, and optimize customer marketing journey, connecting interaction, and connected products; and commerce services, which empowers shopping experience across various customer touchpoint, such as mobile, web, social, and stores and provides click-to-code tools that offers customers to build and deploy solutions. Further, its analytics offering includes Tableau, an end-to-end analytics solution for range of enterprise use cases and intelligent analytics with AI models, spot trends, predict outcomes, creates summaries, timely recommendations, and take action from any device; and integration service including MuleSoft, which provides building blocks to deliver end-to-end and connected experiences. Additionally, the company provides data cloud, a hyperscale data engine native to Salesforce; vertical services to meet the needs of customers in industries, such as financial services, healthcare and life sciences, manufacturing and automotive and government; and offers salesforce starter for small and medium-sized businesses. Salesforce, Inc. was incorporated in 1999 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

About MongoDB

MongoDB, Inc., together with its subsidiaries, provides general purpose database platform worldwide. The company provides MongoDB Atlas, a hosted multi-cloud database-as-a-service solution; MongoDB Enterprise Advanced, a commercial database server for enterprise customers to run in the cloud, on-premises, or in a hybrid environment; and Community Server, a free-to-download version of its database, which includes the functionality that developers need to get started with MongoDB. It offers professional services comprising consulting and training. The company was formerly known as 10gen, Inc. and changed its name to MongoDB, Inc. in August 2013. MongoDB, Inc. was incorporated in 2007 and is headquartered in New York, New York.