I found Prisma to be super basic. Anything complex like joins or a composition of where’s and ors and it didn’t work.

It also nests related objects where for my purposes I wanted everything to be flat. So if a list has a user associated with it, I want to flatten it like: { list, user }.

I also didn’t like how Prisma has a generate cli to integrate end developer models that must be integrated into your build step to deploy if you’re using typescript.

Its schema cli command worked but in weird ways that I didn’t like. Sharing Prisma types with the client was not automatic. For example, Prisma coverts datetime columns into dates, which sounds nice, but when I send that data as an api response it turns into a string. Now I can’t use their interfaces without plucking the date times and converting it to a string. It just wasn’t as useful as I had hoped.

Knex does exactly what I want and nothing more. All of my raw sql queries were easily converted and worked perfectly. I build the interfaces and knex uses them. There’s no special command that converts their schema format into something I can kind of use.

Their typing was nice once I got it working however, and for simple things it worked fine. I just noticed I had to write a lot of raw sql.

A lot of people like it so don’t let me critique shy you away from using it. It probably works best if you are using graphql since it automatically nests the models which I would imagine works well with query resolvers.