DynamoDB vs MongoDB NoSQL

I know this is old, but it still comes up when you search for the comparison. We were using Mongo, have moved almost entirely to Dynamo, which is our first choice now. Not because it has more features, it doesn't. Mongo has a better query language, you can index within a structure, there's lots of little things. The superiority of Dynamo is in what the OP stated in his comment: it's easy. You don't have to take care of any servers. When you start to set up a Mongo sharded solution, it gets complicated. You can go to one of the hosting companies, but that's not cheap either. With Dynamo, if you need more throughput, you just click a button. You can write scripts to scale automatically. When it's time to upgrade Dynamo, it's done for you. That is all a lot of precious stress and time not spent. If you don't have dedicated ops people, Dynamo is excellent.

So we are now going on Dynamo by default. Mongo maybe, if the data structure is complicated enough to warrant it, but then we'd probably go back to a SQL database. Dynamo is obtuse, you really need to think about how you're going to build it, and likely you'll use Redis in Elasticcache to make it work for complex stuff. But it sure is nice to not have to take care of it. You code. That's it.

With 500k documents, there is no reason to scale whatsoever. A typical laptop with an SSD and 8GB of ram can easily do 10s of millions of records, so if you are trying to pick because of scaling your choice doesn't really matter. I would suggest you pick what you like the most, and perhaps where you can find the most online support with.