apps/blog/content/blog/prisma-orm-manifesto/index.mdx
This manifesto outlines Prisma’s vision for the future: addressing key challenges, setting clear priorities, and empowering collaboration to build a better experience for our community.
Prisma has come a long way, and we’re proud of what we’ve achieved together. From Accelerate to TypedSQL and Prisma Postgres, the tools we’ve built have grown alongside an incredible community of developers who rely on Prisma every day.
But as the scope of Prisma ORM has expanded, we’ve faced challenges in governance, issue management, and communication. Priorities haven’t always been clear, deadlines haven’t been consistently met, and over time, we’ve accumulated 3.2k open issues and a backlog of preview features stretching back years.
We want to do better—so here’s what we’re changing.
This manifesto is a declaration of what we’re going to do differently—how we’ll set clear priorities, manage our work more effectively, and involve you, our community, every step of the way. If you feel something important isn’t represented here, open a discussion—we’re listening.
Prisma powers 547,000 repositories on GitHub, serves over 400,000 monthly active developers, and delivers upwards of 9 million monthly NPM downloads. Over the years, we’ve achieved a lot:
These numbers highlight our progress, but we know there’s more to do to ensure our community feels valued and supported. With so many developers and organisations depending on Prisma ORM, it’s important that development happens in close collaboration with the community, and that the Prisma team work according to a clear and well defined set of principles.
We’re setting a clear path for the future so you know what to expect from us, focusing on product direction, issue management, feature development, and building a stronger relationship with the Prisma community. Here’s how we’re moving forward:
We’re going to be focusing heavily on the databases that matter most to our community, customers, and our partners (derived from usage data and community engagement to date). Moving forward, Prisma Postgres, PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, MongoDB, and MariaDB will be our First-Class Databases (FCDBs).
What This Means:
By focusing on this core set of databases, we want to ensure the highest quality and reliability for the tools you depend on, while also empowering our community to expand Prisma’s reach. As usage and demand change, we’ll re-evaluate our First-Class Databases to ensure they reflect the needs of our community, customers and partners.
With over 3,000 open issues on our GitHub repository, it’s been challenging to respond quickly and effectively. To address this, we’re adopting a more structured approach to ensure your feedback shapes our priorities and drives meaningful progress.
Why This Matters
A well-organized set of issues helps us focus on what’s most important and impactful. We deeply value the time and effort you’ve put into raising and discussing issues—it’s what drives Prisma forward. To ensure clarity and sustainability, we’re committing to organizing our backlog, closing outdated issues, and using automation to scale our ability to engage with you.
What You Can Expect
By streamlining issue management and focusing on what matters most, we’re building a foundation for faster responses and more meaningful progress.
We’re making a big change to how we handle preview features. From now on, if we release a feature to Preview this quarter, you can expect it to reach General Availability (GA) next quarter. Work we’ve done should get into your hands as soon as possible, not sit indefinitely in Preview.
What’s Changing:
By committing to a predictable timeline from Preview to GA, we’re ensuring features don’t stagnate and the work we do benefits you as quickly as possible. Preview will now mean progress, not uncertainty.
Prisma’s architecture has historically limited community contributions. Core functionality—such as query parsing, validation, and execution—has been managed by our Rust engine, which has been opaque to our TypeScript-focused community. Expanding capabilities or fixing core issues often fell solely to our team.
We’re addressing this by migrating Prisma’s core logic from Rust to TypeScript and redesigning the ORM to make customization and extension easier.
What This Means:
By making Prisma more open and extensible, we’re ensuring the project evolves through collaboration—not just by our team, but with contributions from the entire community.
Open source thrives on collaboration, and we’re making changes to ensure our connection with our community stays strong and transparent:
As we move forward, these principles will shape how we work and deliver value to our community:
These aren’t empty promises—we’re here to deliver. In the coming weeks and months, you’ll see us organizing issues in our repository, fixing bugs, and delivering preview features. If we ever fall short, call us out.
We’ll prioritize what matters most to you. Raise an issue, contribute code, or share your thoughts - we want you involved. Join us on Discord, keep pushing us on GitHub, and let’s build a better Prisma—together.
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Will Madden Prisma Engineering Manager, Core Team