I have used all three in production. Prisma on TOPO Contabil (42 NestJS modules). TypeORM on two older Yooga services. Raw SQL on performance-critical reporting queries. After years of using them, I have a clear preference.
Prisma wins, mostly
Prisma wins on developer experience and it is not even close. The schema file is beautiful. You define your models in one place and get generated types, a query client, and migrations. The type safety is incredible. If your schema says a field is required, the TypeScript types will not let you forget it. Auto-complete in your IDE actually works because the generated client knows every field, every relation, every possible query shape.
The migration system is solid. prisma migrate dev generates SQL migrations from schema changes. You can review them, edit them, and they are versioned in your repo. No more wondering what the current state of the database should be.
Where Prisma struggles: complex queries. Anything involving subqueries, window functions, CTEs, or dynamic filtering gets ugly fast. The Prisma Client API was not designed for analytical queries and it shows.
I would skip TypeORM
I genuinely cannot recommend TypeORM for new projects. The decorator-based entity definitions look nice until you need to debug a type mismatch and realize the TypeScript types and the runtime behavior are two completely different things. TypeORM decorators lie to you. A column marked as type: "varchar" with nullable: false will happily accept null at runtime and silently insert it.
The query builder is powerful but the API is inconsistent. Some methods return the entity, some return a raw result, some return a wrapper object. You are constantly checking the docs to see which one you are dealing with.
TypeORM supports both Active Record and Data Mapper, and I do not think it handles either well. Pick one and half the examples online use the other.
The migration story is the worst part. Auto-generated migrations frequently produce incorrect SQL. I have seen it generate DROP COLUMN followed by ADD COLUMN instead of ALTER COLUMN. This was in production, on a table with 2 million rows.
Raw SQL when you need it
Sometimes you just need to write SQL. Prisma has prisma.$queryRaw for this and it works great. You lose type safety but you gain the full power of PostgreSQL. Window functions, recursive CTEs, lateral joins, complex aggregations. All the stuff that ORMs struggle with.
For TOPO Contabil, about 15% of our queries are raw SQL. These are all reporting and analytics queries where the Prisma Client would either be impossibly verbose or literally cannot express the query.
What I use
Use Prisma as your primary ORM. Use prisma.$queryRaw when Prisma cannot express what you need. Do not use TypeORM. If you are starting a new project with TypeORM in 2026, I need you to reconsider your choices.
Prisma plus raw SQL covers 100% of use cases. I have not found better developer experience: the types hold up in a way TypeORM's do not, and the migration system works.