Prisma & Mongoose

Overview

This page compares Prisma with Mongoose. Here is a high-level overview:

In the following, you find a detailled comparison of the Mongoose and Prisma APIs.

Fetching single objects

Prisma

const user = await prisma.user({ id })

Mongoose

const user = await findById(id)

Fetching selected scalars of single objects

Prisma

const userFragment = await prisma.user({ id }).$fragment(`
  fragment NameAndEmail on User { id email }`
`)

Mongoose

const user = await findById(id).select('id email')

Fetching relations

Prisma

const postsByUser = await prisma.user({ id }).posts()

While the $fragment and the $graphql APIs each return a user object that includes a posts array, the fluent API returns just the posts array and no data about the user.

See the following GitHub issues to learn more about planned iterations of the Prisma client relations API:

• Improved relational client API: $nested queries
• Extend fluent API for relations

Mongoose

const userWithPosts = await User.findById(id).populate('posts')

Filtering for concrete values

Prisma

const users = await prisma.users({
  where: {
    name: 'Alice',
  },
})

Mongoose

const user = await User.find({
  name: 'Alice',
})

Other filter criteria

Prisma

Prisma generates many additional filters that are commonly used in modern application development:

• <field>_ends_with & <field>_starts_with
• <field>_not_ends_with & <field>_not_starts_with
• <field>_gt & <field>_gte
• <field>_lt & <field>_lte
• <field>_contains & <field>_not_contains
• <field>_in & <field>_not_in

Mongoose

Mongoose exposes the MongoDB query selectors as filter criteria.

Relation filters

Prisma

Prisma lets you filter a list based on a criteria that applies not only to the models of the list being retrieved, but to a relation of that model.

For example, you want to fetch only those users that wrote a post with the title "Hello World":

query {
  user(where: {
    posts_some: {
      title: "Hello World"
    }
  }) {
    id
  }
}

Mongoose

Mongoose doesn't offer a dedicated API for relation filters. You can get similar functionality by sending a raw SQL query to the database.

Pagination

Prisma

const posts = await prisma.posts({
  skip: 5,
  first: 10,
})

In addition to skip and first, the Prisma API also offers:

• last
• before & after for cursor based pagination
• Relay-style pagination

Mongoose

const posts = await Post.find({
  skip: 5,
  limit: 10,
})

Creating objects

Prisma

const user = await prisma.createUser({
  name: 'Alice',
  email: 'alice@prisma.io',
})

Mongoose

const user = await User.create({
  name: 'Alice',
  email: 'alice@prisma.io',
})

Updating objects

Prisma

const updatedUser = await prisma.updateUser({
  where: { id },
  data: {
    name: 'James',
    email: 'james@prisma.io',
  },
})

Mongoose

const updatedUser = await User.findOneAndUpdate(
  { _id: id },
  {
    $set: {
      name: 'James',
      email: 'james@prisma.io',
    },
  },
)

Deleting objects

Prisma

const deletedUser = await prisma.deleteUser({ id })

Mongoose

await User.deleteOne({ _id: id })