EF Core
Hacker ApprovedShares rank 8 of 11 ORMs by recommenders
Recommended as one of the best ORMs, with batteries included and performance now comparable to Dapper, and it reduces the need for manual transaction management.
Recommended as one of the best ORMs, with batteries included and performance now comparable to Dapper, and it reduces the need for manual transaction management.
16 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 11
- criticize it
- 5
- approval share
- 69%
Recommended in 9 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 11 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 2.2 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 9 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Considered one of the best ORMs
“EF Core is truly one of the best ORMs I've ever used.”
Comment from 12 Nov 2025 in “.NET 10” “Hands down the best ORM. Others don't come close.”
Comment from 19 Nov 2025 in “Programming the Commodore 64 with .NET” “EF Core being possibly the best ORM out there”
Comment from 8 Apr 2026 in “Explore union types in C# 15” - Comment from 1 Feb 2026 in “The history of C# and TypeScript with Anders Hejlsberg | GitHub”
Hard to give up once used
“having used EfCore/Linq a while I'd be hard pressed to like going back though”
Comment from 3 Mar 2026 in “Moldova broke our data pipeline” “EF Core come batteries included and is so much better, it isn't fun anymore.”
Comment from 24 Nov 2025 in “Shai-Hulud Returns: Over 300 NPM Packages Infected” “EF Core itself is worth the price of admission, IMO.”
Comment from 12 Nov 2025 in “.NET 10” Lets AI agents follow established patterns
“which allow my agent to easily follow decades of best practiced patterns”
Comment from 18 Oct 2026 in “Show HN: Sphinx – A hook that quizzes you on your AI's code before shipping” “allow my agent to easily follow decades of best practiced patterns”
Comment from 18 Oct 2026 in “Show HN: Sphinx – A hook that quizzes you on your AI's code before shipping”
Other ORMs people recommend
The four most recommended other ORMs, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Entity Framework Core | 35 | 19 | 65% | 12 | — | — |
| SQLAlchemy | 33 | 28 | 54% | 11 | — | — |
| Drizzle ORM | 25 | 6 | 81% | 10 | — | Approved |
| Dapper | 19 | 3 | 86% | 7 | — | Approved |
| EF CoreThis page | 11 | 5 | 69% | 9 | — | Approved |
What people said
19 of the 22 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“which allow my agent to easily follow decades of best practiced patterns”
“allow my agent to easily follow decades of best practiced patterns”
“they had enough time to refactor EF Core to use code generators”
“EF Core and F# still don't fully work”
“the performance of EF Core is comparable to Dapper now”
“What EF needs is support for using postgresql's `array_agg` when `include`ing collections.”
“I always inevitably want to model something in the domain in a way that is not be supported by EF.”
“allowing you to write SQL where it's needed and still use its infrastructure for all the tedious work of materializing your results”
“handles the ORM tradeoffs in a very usable and mostly efficient way”
“really good ORM (EF Core) that implements UoW and reduces a lot of the need for transaction management”
“EF Core being possibly the best ORM out there”
“having used EfCore/Linq a while I'd be hard pressed to like going back though”
“one of the best ORMs (EF Core)”
“great ecosystem (orleans, ef core, aspire, asp.net core, blazor, signalr, etc)”
“EF Core come batteries included and is so much better, it isn't fun anymore.”
“Hands down the best ORM. Others don't come close.”
“EF Core is truly one of the best ORMs I've ever used.”
“EF Core itself is worth the price of admission, IMO.”
“You're telling me that burj khalifa of abstractions doesn't have room to tune SQLite to what web devs expect?”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.