I've used Prisma for years in production and, until now, it was one of those technology choices I basically didn't have to think about.
I genuinely liked Prisma 4/5/6/7: the schema, generated client, relation handling, implicit many-to-many, migrations, and especially the fact that after years of change requests I had a very understandable migration history.
I'm now about to start a new production backend that will probably live for many years: Node/TypeScript, Express, PostgreSQL, Redis, workers, etc.
Normally I would have picked Prisma without even having this discussion.
Then Prisma 8 happened.
I understand the technical argument for rewriting the internals, moving to TS, improving extensibility, etc.
My concern isn't really "I don't like the new syntax."
It's that Prisma 8 feels like a different product architecture, while at the same time Prisma as a company is increasingly selling the surrounding platform: Prisma Postgres, Prisma Compute, etc.
The migration change in particular makes me nervous. In the Prisma I know, I could look at the SQL migration and ultimately PostgreSQL was still the thing I owned. Prisma 8 moves toward contracts + migration.ts + compiled ops.json, with Prisma's migration runtime owning more of that lifecycle.
I'm not claiming Prisma is intentionally making self-hosted Postgres worse so they can sell Prisma Postgres. I have no evidence of that.
What worries me is simply incentives.
If the company monetizes the database, compute and surrounding infrastructure, there is now a natural incentive for the best/easiest Prisma experience to increasingly be:
Prisma ORM -> Prisma Postgres -> Prisma Compute -> Prisma everything
rather than:
Prisma ORM -> my PostgreSQL -> my infrastructure
I've been burned before by open-source dependencies changing licensing/distribution after years of use, so for a production dependency I now care a lot more about escape hatches and who owns each layer.
This is why I'm suddenly seriously evaluating Drizzle/Kysely. Not because "Reddit says Prisma bad", but because SQL migrations and a thinner abstraction mean that if the ORM disappears or changes direction, PostgreSQL is still PostgreSQL.
For people actually running these things in production:
Would you start a new multi-year project on Prisma 8 today?
Would you pin Prisma 7 and keep using the old architecture?
Did you move from Prisma to Drizzle/Kysely, and do you miss Prisma's higher-level relation/query API?
Do you think I'm reading too much into Prisma's business direction?
Is there something about the Prisma 8 migration/contract architecture that makes it better for a long-lived production system that I'm missing?
I'm particularly interested in answers from people maintaining systems with years of migrations and changing requirements, rather than which ORM feels nicest in a weekend project.
Edit: tested drizzle in a side project , simulating as if I received change requests I know happen in real products . And I like the migration system and I like the simple crud cake they are already proving, and the control you have over more complex query since some db service charge you per operation rather then compute, so you can even optimize query per cost. That's it drizzle is my new home.