Compare moats
Up to three covered companies, band by band. Every call is a curated editorial judgment, never a disclosed figure — and every band carries its cited basis.
| Alphabet | KLA Corporation | MongoDB | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Moat rating | wide Google Search commands ~91% of worldwide search (StatCounter, Jun 2026) and Alphabet sustained a 32% consolidated operating margin on $402.8B of FY2025 revenue (FY2025 10-K), evidence of a durable, dominant advantage. | wide The fiscal 2026 10-K states 'The strength of our competitive positions in many of our existing markets is primarily due to our leading technology', and frames process control as 'an essential enabler' of the yield ramp in fabs the filing says now cost 'well above $10 billion'. | narrow The FY2026 10-K frames a 'rapidly evolving and highly competitive' database market where the principal rivals — 'legacy database providers and large cloud providers' — hold explicit advantages: 'longer operating histories, more established relationships … significantly greater financial, technical, marketing or other resources … broader global distribution,' and can offer competing products 'at a low cost or no cost.' A developer-mindshare and switching-cost position is defensible but not wide against that field. |
| Moat type | network effects The 10-K states competing in advertising depends on simultaneously attracting and retaining users, advertisers, and content providers — a three-sided marketplace whose value compounds with scale, the classic network-effect flywheel behind ~85% of Alphabet's revenue. | intangibles ip The 10-K reports over 9,100 active patents and over 3,600 pending applications with terms running through 2045, alongside proprietary process-control software (Klarity, I-PAT, aiSIGHT) that turns inspection and metrology data into yield learning. | switching costs A database is the system an application is built on: the 10-K states 'a database directly impacts an application's performance, scalability, flexibility and reliability,' and Atlas is 'our managed multi-cloud database-as-a-service' running the customer's live workloads — re-platforming a database is a rewrite, not a swap. |
| Leadership | clear leader Clear leader in its core markets — ~91% of worldwide search and ~69% of mobile OS (StatCounter, Jun 2026) — though only the #3 hyperscaler in cloud infrastructure at ~13%, behind AWS and Azure (Synergy Research, Q2 2025). | clear leader The 10-K opens by describing KLA as a supplier of 'industry-leading equipment and services' and attributes its competitive positions 'in many of our existing markets' primarily to leading technology; named competitors are Applied Materials, ASML, Hitachi High-Tech, Lasertec and Onto Innovation. | co leader The 10-K positions MongoDB as the leading document database by developer mindshare but names 'legacy database providers and large cloud providers' as better-resourced rivals across the broader database market — a category leader within a market it does not lead overall. |
| Pricing power | strong A 32% consolidated operating margin held flat 2024→2025 on $402.8B revenue (FY2025 10-K), reflecting strong pricing power in a near-monopoly search-ad auction. | strong Services were approximately 23% of fiscal 2026 total revenues on an installed base that recurs, backlog nearly doubled to $12.57 billion, and SEC-reported net income was 35.6% of revenue in fiscal 2026 with operating income at 41.2% of revenue in fiscal 2025. | moderate Owning the IP and the roadmap ('the determination of which features are included in our free or paid offerings') gives real list-price control, but the same filing flags competitors offering database products 'at a low cost or no cost basis,' which caps it. |
| Summary | Alphabet's core engine is a three-sided advertising marketplace — the FY2025 10-K says competing depends on simultaneously attracting users, advertisers, and content providers — anchored by Google Search's ~91% worldwide share and Android's ~69% mobile-OS share (StatCounter, Jun 2026), which give it unmatched reach and first-party data. That scale converts to profit: a 32% consolidated operating margin on $402.8B of FY2025 revenue. | KLA sells the inspection, metrology and yield-management layer a fab must run to reach volume production: the 10-K says accelerating the yield ramp ahead of competitors is critical to chipmakers' profitability, and backlog nearly doubled from $7.86 billion to $12.57 billion in the year to June 30, 2026 'due to strong demand driven by the AI infrastructure buildout'. | MongoDB monetizes developer mindshare that began as open source: the 10-K notes 'we own the intellectual property of our offerings since we are the creators of the software,' which lets it run a 'proprietary software subscription business model' and control the roadmap. The durable asset is the document-model install base and Atlas's managed multi-cloud workloads, positioned for AI as 'the underlying database … capable of processing queries against rich and complex data structures.' The counterweight, in the filing's own words, is that the large cloud providers it depends on for Atlas hosting are also its best-resourced competitors. |
| Chain position | Full-stack AI player: designs its own TPU accelerators, operates Google Cloud (the #3 hyperscaler), and develops the Gemini frontier models — both a supplier of AI compute and a developer of AI products. | Sits beside the process steps rather than in them — it measures and inspects what deposition, etch and lithography produce, and TSMC alone exceeded 10% of revenue in each of the last three fiscal years. | Layer-10 application-layer data platform — the operational database under AI and general software workloads. |
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| Long-horizon vote | +0.42 at weight 0.20 · swarm bullish Editorial prior, not backtested. | +0.42 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. | +0.13 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. |