Drizzle ORM Is What Prisma Should Have Been

I used Prisma for two years. I have nothing personal against it — it solved real problems and the DX during the honeymoon phase is genuinely good. Then I hit a production AI SaaS with heavy query patterns, a tight latency budget, and Planetscale, and I switched to Drizzle. I haven't looked back. This isn't a "Prisma is bad" post. It's a "here's the tradeoff table, make an informed decision" post. If you're building TypeScript backends in 2026 and haven't evaluated Drizzle, you should. The core philosophical difference Prisma is model-first . You define a schema.prisma file, Prisma generates a client, and you query through that client's API. The SQL Prisma writes is an implementation detail you're not supposed to think about. Drizzle is SQL-first . You define your schema in TypeScript, and the query builder is a thin typed layer over the actual SQL you'd write anyway. There's no magic. The output is always predictable because it maps 1:1 to SQL. // Prisma — you write this const users =