EF Core vs Dapper - Which is better based on your own experience ?

Question

Please help me to understand - which is BEST ORM f/w in b/w EF Core and Dapper. In terms of performance, usability and security prospective. Wanted to understand based on your own experience and challenges faced during implementation. I am not looking for any readymade links.

Bohdan Stupak · Answer

That depends on the scenario you're using them. For most of the applications, EF Core is a better option since it allows developers to be more productive and deliver features quickly. Still, you have to take care not to forget to use AsNoTracking and avoid complex queries expressed in LINQ. But in case you're writing highload application I'd suggest sticking with Dapper at least for performance-critical paths. Also, you might want to leverage BulkExtensions for EF Core in such a case since insert in EF Core is mostly suboptimal and you might want to execute multiple insert statements at once.

Sachin Singh · Answer

EF is not for complex queries, more often we endup with writing our own SPs, though we can call sp, views etc from EF also, but i find Dapper better in such scenarios. Earlier, managing relationships were tough with Dapper, means one to many or multiple relations were hard to convert into appropriate class objects, that were always easy with navigation properties provided by EF. But now Dapper can easily manage relationships, SplitOn property works well.

Rohan · Answer

Bohdan Stupak Nice explain.

EF Core vs Dapper - Which is better based on your own experience ?

Answers (3)