Prisma vs Drizzle: Which ORM Should You Use in Your SaaS?

When building a modern SaaS app, your choice of ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) tool plays a crucial role in developer experience, performance, and long-term maintainability. In the supastarter ecosystem, you're free to choose between two of the most popular TypeScript-first ORMs: Prisma and Drizzle.

Both tools offer powerful features, excellent TypeScript support, and vibrant communities — but they differ in philosophy, API design, and performance characteristics.

In this post, we'll take an objective look at Prisma vs Drizzle, highlight the strengths of each, and explain how supastarter gives you the flexibility to use either to build and scale your SaaS.

🔍 What Is Prisma?

Prisma is a mature and battle-tested ORM designed for full-stack applications. It provides:

A declarative schema for defining models
A TypeScript client with rich auto-completion
Migrations, introspection, and database seeding
Strong support for PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, and more

Pros of Prisma:

Excellent developer experience with strong type safety
Powerful CLI tooling
Great documentation and community
Rich query capabilities, including relations and nested writes

Cons:

Adds an abstraction layer that some developers find “heavy”
You manage schema definitions separately from your database schema
Some performance overhead in high-throughput scenarios

Prisma Schema Definition

With Prisma, you define your schema in a declarative .prisma file:

// schema.prisma
model Author {
  id        String   @id @default(cuid())
  email     String   @unique
  name      String
  posts     Post[]
  createdAt DateTime @default(now())
  updatedAt DateTime @updatedAt
}
 
model Post {
  id        String   @id @default(cuid())
  title     String
  content   String
  published Boolean  @default(false)
  authorId  String
  author    Author   @relation(fields: [authorId], references: [id], onDelete: Cascade)
  createdAt DateTime @default(now())
  updatedAt DateTime @updatedAt
}

Prisma Query Example

// Get all posts with their authors
const postsWithAuthors = await prisma.post.findMany({
  include: {
    author: true,
  },
});
 
// Get a specific post with its author
const post = await prisma.post.findUnique({
  where: { id: 'post-id' },
  include: {
    author: true,
  },
});
 
// Get posts by a specific author
const authorPosts = await prisma.author.findUnique({
  where: { id: 'author-id' },
  include: {
    posts: true,
  },
});

🔍 What Is Drizzle?

Drizzle ORM is a newer ORM that’s gaining popularity fast — especially among performance-conscious developers and framework authors.

It features:

SQL-like query building using native TypeScript
Schema definitions in code — no separate schema file
Lightweight runtime with minimal abstractions
Deep PostgreSQL support, with growing support for other databases

Pros of Drizzle:

Minimalist and very fast
Your schema is your code — no DSL or separate config file
Easier to inspect, customize, and debug SQL queries
More “framework-native” for modern tools like Next.js, SvelteKit, etc.

Cons:

Smaller ecosystem (for now)
Lacks some advanced features like Prisma’s nested create/update API
Fewer third-party plugins and recipes (though growing fast)

Drizzle Schema Definition

With Drizzle, you define your schema directly in TypeScript code:

// schema.ts
import { pgTable, text, boolean, timestamp, uuid } from 'drizzle-orm/pg-core';
import { relations } from 'drizzle-orm';
 
export const authors = pgTable('authors', {
  id: uuid('id').primaryKey().defaultRandom(),
  email: text('email').notNull().unique(),
  name: text('name').notNull(),
  createdAt: timestamp('created_at').defaultNow(),
  updatedAt: timestamp('updated_at').defaultNow(),
});
 
export const posts = pgTable('posts', {
  id: uuid('id').primaryKey().defaultRandom(),
  title: text('title').notNull(),
  content: text('content').notNull(),
  published: boolean('published').default(false),
  authorId: uuid('author_id').notNull().references(() => authors.id, { onDelete: 'cascade' }),
  createdAt: timestamp('created_at').defaultNow(),
  updatedAt: timestamp('updated_at').defaultNow(),
});
 
// Define relations
export const authorsRelations = relations(authors, ({ many }) => ({
  posts: many(posts),
}));
 
export const postsRelations = relations(posts, ({ one }) => ({
  author: one(authors, {
    fields: [posts.authorId],
    references: [authors.id],
  }),
}));

Drizzle Query Example

// Get all posts with their authors
const postsWithAuthors = await db
  .select()
  .from(posts)
  .leftJoin(authors, eq(posts.authorId, authors.id));
 
// Get a specific post with its author
const post = await db
  .select()
  .from(posts)
  .leftJoin(authors, eq(posts.authorId, authors.id))
  .where(eq(posts.id, 'post-id'))
  .limit(1);
 
// Get posts by a specific author
const authorPosts = await db
  .select()
  .from(authors)
  .leftJoin(posts, eq(authors.id, posts.authorId))
  .where(eq(authors.id, 'author-id'));

🧠 When to Choose Prisma

Use Prisma if you:

Want strong tooling and a well-established ecosystem
Prefer a declarative schema-based workflow
Need advanced query features like nested writes, batching, or transactions
Don’t mind some abstraction in exchange for convenience

⚡ When to Choose Drizzle

Use Drizzle if you:

Prefer writing your schema directly in code
Care deeply about performance and control
Want a smaller runtime and more visibility into your SQL
Are using tools like Turso, Neon, or edge-first deployments

🤝 Prisma and Drizzle in supastarter

With supastarter, you don’t have to choose between the two up front. Both Prisma and Drizzle are supported out of the box, and you can configure your stack to match your preferences:

Want to move fast with a proven ecosystem? Use Prisma.
Want a lighter, more performant ORM that feels closer to SQL? Try Drizzle.

supastarter provides a clean integration layer for either approach, with shared conventions around database seeding, auth, multi-tenancy, and migrations.

In fact, we’ve seen many developers switch between Prisma and Drizzle depending on the needs of the project — and supastarter makes that possible without a complete rewrite.

Learn more about how to configure your ORM in supastarter in our database docs.

Final thoughts

Both Prisma and Drizzle are excellent choices, and there’s no one-size-fits-all answer. Your team’s preferences, project needs, and performance goals should guide the decision.

With supastarter, you can explore both — or even prototype with one and switch later — without friction.