The Great ORM Pivot: Why Teams are Moving to Drizzle in 2025

Source: Dev.to

The Prisma Approach

Prisma uses a powerful query engine written in Rust. It’s robust and safe, but it’s a heavy binary. In a long‑running server this overhead is negligible, but in a serverless function that wakes up for only a few milliseconds, the extra ~10 MB binary adds noticeable cold‑start latency.

The Drizzle Shift

Drizzle is TypeScript‑native—there is no binary, just a thin, type‑safe wrapper around raw SQL. The bundle size is measured in kilobytes rather than megabytes.

Schema Definition

You define tables using standard TypeScript objects. No code‑generation step is required; types are inferred instantly.

// Example schema definition (TypeScript)
export const users = pgTable('users', {
  id: serial('id').primaryKey(),
  name: varchar('name', { length: 255 }).notNull(),
  email: varchar('email', { length: 255 }).unique().notNull(),
});

Querying

If you know SQL, you know Drizzle. Queries map directly to SQL statements.

// Simple select query
const result = await db.select().from(users).where(eq(users.id, 1));

Performance

Because Drizzle does not abstract SQL away, you can write complex JOINs and CTEs that Prisma historically struggled to optimize. This makes it a natural fit for edge environments where every millisecond counts.

Choosing Between Prisma and Drizzle

• Stay with Prisma if you are building a massive enterprise application on a traditional VPS (e.g., AWS EC2, DigitalOcean) and you value the “battery‑included” ecosystem (Prisma Studio, Pulse, advanced migrations).
• Pivot to Drizzle if you are deploying to the edge (Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare Workers, Bun) and cold‑start time directly impacts your conversion rate.

The “DX vs. UX” debate has finally reached the database layer. In 2025, “good enough” performance is no longer sufficient for edge deployments. Drizzle isn’t just a trend; it’s a response to the technical requirements of modern cloud computing.

The ORM you choose is no longer just about how fast you can write code—it’s about how fast your users can run it.