I don’t really understand the N+1 issue. Most ORMs I’ve used make it very easy to generate the exact query you’d generate without it, with the added benefit that you define the relationships at the model level. This helps a lot when you need to make changes like renaming a field without having to worry about propagating these changes in every query and migration in your app. When you build a statement with an ORM, you can also output it and tweak it to be what you would write as raw sql. You can look at generated migrations and tweak your models until migrations are efficient, etc. if you’re generating N+1 queries I don’t know if you would do better with raw sql. Besides, most ORMs today let you switch between 3 levels, default ORM, query builder and raw sql. You also get to choose if it converts the results into your models or if it just returns raw results. Maybe I’m missing something but so far it seems like the problem with ORMs lie on not understanding when and how to use them?.