Compare

Side-by-side comparison

Pick up to four tools and compare adoption, momentum and maintenance at a glance. The crown marks the leader in each row.

Classic SQL query builder and migration runner; still common but superseded by typed builders.

Schema-first TypeScript ORM with a generated type-safe client and migrations; v7 dropped the Rust engine.

Lightweight, SQL-like TypeScript ORM with zero dependencies that works well on serverless and edge.

Decorator-based ORM with Active Record and Data Mapper patterns; long the NestJS default.

Head to head

Metric	Knex.js	Prisma	Drizzle ORM	TypeORM
Stars	20.3k	47.7k	36.3k	36.7k
Weekly downloads	6.7M	26.1M	49.3M	6.7M
Download growth	+14%	+35%	+103%	+16%
Popularity score	81/100	88/100	89/100	83/100
Forks	2.2k	2.6k	1.8k	6.7k
Open issues	771	2.8k	2.1k	739
Last commit	4mo ago	today	1d ago	4d ago
Latest version	3.3.0	8.0.0-rc.33	0.45.4	1.1.2
License	MIT	Apache-2.0	Apache-2.0	MIT
First released	2012	2019	2021	2016
Signals	Legacy	Popular	Trending	None
Listed in	Backend › ORMs & Query Builders (JS/TS)	Backend › ORMs & Query Builders (JS/TS)	Backend › ORMs & Query Builders (JS/TS)	Backend › ORMs & Query Builders (JS/TS)

Hover for exact values; switch to log scale for tools of very different sizes.

Classic SQL query builder and migration runner; still common but superseded by typed builders.

Schema-first TypeScript ORM with a generated type-safe client and migrations; v7 dropped the Rust engine.

Lightweight, SQL-like TypeScript ORM with zero dependencies that works well on serverless and edge.

Decorator-based ORM with Active Record and Data Mapper patterns; long the NestJS default.

Metric	Knex.js	Prisma	Drizzle ORM	TypeORM
Stars	20.3k	47.7k	36.3k	36.7k
Weekly downloads	6.7M	26.1M	49.3M	6.7M
Download growth	+14%	+35%	+103%	+16%
Popularity score	81/100	88/100	89/100	83/100
Forks	2.2k	2.6k	1.8k	6.7k
Open issues	771	2.8k	2.1k	739
Last commit	4mo ago	today	1d ago	4d ago
Latest version	3.3.0	8.0.0-rc.33	0.45.4	1.1.2
License	MIT	Apache-2.0	Apache-2.0	MIT
First released	2012	2019	2021	2016
Signals	Legacy	Popular	Trending	None
Listed in	Backend › ORMs & Query Builders (JS/TS)	Backend › ORMs & Query Builders (JS/TS)	Backend › ORMs & Query Builders (JS/TS)	Backend › ORMs & Query Builders (JS/TS)

Hover for exact values; switch to log scale for tools of very different sizes.