In Mongoose, there is Model.create and Collection.insert. According to the Mongoose developer, they are essentially the same when called with an array of documents, although looking at the code makes me think that there are subtle differences:
using Model.create will call any validators/hooks held on your schema;
Model.create does a .save for each document in the array, resulting in N database calls (where N is the number of documents in the array); Collection.insert performs one large database call.