Prisma ORM
Ranked 7 of 11 ORMs by recommenders
Recommended for type-safe TypeScript database access and generated types. Critics often cite bugs and weak migration support.
Recommended for type-safe TypeScript database access and generated types. Critics often cite bugs and weak migration support.
33 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 14
- criticize it
- 19
- approval share
- 42%
Recommended in 9 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 14 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 0.7 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not 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
Generated, type-safe database types
“The ORM is great! I usually setup my projects so the Prisma generated types are shared with the front end”
Comment from 13 Nov 2025 on Hacker News “Prisma does type-safe ORM really well on the typescript side”
Comment from 17 Mar 2026 in “Show HN: Oxyde – Pydantic-native async ORM with a Rust core” “It is useful to have types generated for these values.”
Comment from 5 Dec 2025 in “What is better: a lookup table or an enum type?” Fast setup and smooth workflow
“a faster workflow using Prisma and StackRender that lets you go from an empty project to a working backend in minutes”
Comment from 4 Jan 2026 on Hacker News “using Prisma Next is the smoothest experience”
Comment from 19 Jul 2026 in “Supabase just announced searchable encryption”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Weak migrations and column renaming
“it doesn't even rename columns properly”
Comment from 10 Nov 2025 on Hacker News “Lack of reasonable support for migrations turned me off to Prisma”
Comment from 10 Nov 2025 on Hacker News Adds complexity and abstraction overhead
“seeing startups spin up managed postgres + redis clusters + prisma on day 1 just to collect waitlist emails is peak feature vomit”
Comment from 15 Apr 2026 in “Do You Even Need a Database?” “"dual-ORM" situation (Prisma + Drizzle; both with their faults) that ends up sapping a lot of productivity”
Comment from 1 Feb 2026 in “The history of C# and TypeScript with Anders Hejlsberg | GitHub” “suddenly you need a whole team of devs knowing all kinds of unecessary abstractions”
Comment from 11 May 2026 in “I'm going back to writing code by hand” Slow benchmarks and heavy queries
“we sometimes have weird database spikes and it's almost always an unintended heavy ORM query”
Comment from 22 Feb 2026 in “Postgres Is Your Friend. ORM Is Not” “Prisma Typescript also fails to win the benchmarks.”
Comment from 18 Apr 2026 in “What We Learned Building a Rust Runtime for TypeScript” “Prisma didn’t win the benchmark charts either.”
Comment from 14 Apr 2026 in “What We Learned Building a Rust Runtime for TypeScript”
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 |
| Prisma ORMThis page | 14 | 19 | 42% | 9 | — | — |
What people said
33 of the 37 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Slightly further down the scale, you start to see some Prisma, Fortinet, or F5 as well.”
“someone who has no idea what is going on finds a problem left for them, like a little code land mine”
“Prisma (NodeJS ORM) for example just did a major overhaul and is now pushing a completely different API.”
“there's a type system to lean on and proper nomenclature”
“Prisma is using the canary successfully.”
“using Prisma Next is the smoothest experience”
“they shipped an ORM that couldn’t do JOINs”
“I've been burnt by prisma before”
“Love the MongoDB support!”
“suddenly you need a whole team of devs knowing all kinds of unecessary abstractions”
“The backend-frontend is also a mess, wondering if we can just go vanillaJS without the mess that is pgtyped/prisma.”
“Prisma Typescript also fails to win the benchmarks.”
“seeing startups spin up managed postgres + redis clusters + prisma on day 1 just to collect waitlist emails is peak feature vomit”
“Prisma didn’t win the benchmark charts either.”
“Prisma does type-safe ORM really well on the typescript side”
“I looked at Prisma, I very much prefer the Protobuf/Thrift model”
“It is totally unsuitable for any serious application.”
“The software itself is bad enough”
“I hit half a dozen bugs within a day, one of which wiped my DB.”
“the abomination that is Prisma not ranking first is positive news”
“we sometimes have weird database spikes and it's almost always an unintended heavy ORM query”
“schema issues are easily solved with solutions like drizzle or prisma”
“"dual-ORM" situation (Prisma + Drizzle; both with their faults) that ends up sapping a lot of productivity”
“they used prisma to handle their database interactions.”
“a faster workflow using Prisma and StackRender that lets you go from an empty project to a working backend in minutes”
“having constant db issues”
“All you need is a migration tool and a database connection.”
“It is useful to have types generated for these values.”
“tries to download "engine binaries" from https://binaries.prisma.sh”
“equivalent - but much better - reference documentation for prisma”
“The ORM is great! I usually setup my projects so the Prisma generated types are shared with the front end”
“Lack of reasonable support for migrations turned me off to Prisma”
“it doesn't even rename columns properly”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.