BSON [bee · sahn], short for Bin­ary JSON , is a bin­ary-en­coded seri­al­iz­a­tion of JSON-like doc­u­ments. Like JSON, BSON sup­ports the em­bed­ding of doc­u­ments and ar­rays with­in oth­er doc­u­ments and ar­rays. BSON also con­tains ex­ten­sions that al­low rep­res­ent­a­tion of data types that are not part of the JSON spec. For ex­ample, BSON has a Date type and a BinData type.

BSON can be com­pared to bin­ary inter­change for­mats, like Proto­col Buf­fers. BSON is more "schema-less" than Proto­col Buf­fers, which can give it an ad­vant­age in flex­ib­il­ity but also a slight dis­ad­vant­age in space ef­fi­ciency (BSON has over­head for field names with­in the seri­al­ized data).