If you are coming from Laravel and trying out Prisma for the first time, the two ORMs feel surprisingly different even though they do the same job. This post walks through how each one thinks about your data, why the differences matter, and how to pick a mental model that fits the tool you are using. The headline difference: where the truth lives This is the single biggest thing to internalize. Laravel Eloquent stores the truth in migration files. You write migrations one at a time. Each migration is a step. The current shape of your database is the result of running all of them in order. The model class itself does not list your columns. It lists relations, accessors, mutators, and what is fillable, but if you want to know what columns the users table has, you read the latest migration that touched it. Prisma stores the truth in schema.prisma . You declare the whole shape of your database in one file. Models, fields, types, relations, indexes, all of it.…