ZenStack: Modern Data Layer for TypeScript Apps

What's ZenStack

Read full documentation at 👉🏻 https://zenstack.dev/docs.

ZenStack is a TypeScript database toolkit for developing full-stack or backend Node.js/Bun applications. It provides a unified data modeling and query solution with the following features:

🔧 Modern schema-first ORM that's compatible with Prisma's schema and API
📊 Versatile API - high-level ORM queries + low-level Kysely query builder
🔐 Built-in access control and data validation
🚀 Advanced data modeling patterns like polymorphism
🧩 Designed for extensibility and flexibility
⚙️ Automatic CRUD web APIs with adapters for popular frameworks
🏖️ Automatic TanStack Query hooks for easy CRUD from the frontend

What's New in V3

ZenStack V3 is a major rewrite. It replaced Prisma ORM with its own ORM engine built on top of Kysely while keeping a Prisma-compatible query API. This architecture change brings the level of flexibility that we couldn't imagine in previous versions. Please check this blog post for why we made this bold decision.

Even without using advanced features, ZenStack offers the following benefits as a drop-in replacement to Prisma:

Pure TypeScript implementation without any Rust/WASM components.
More TypeScript type inference, less code generation.
Fully-typed query-builder API as a better escape hatch compared to Prisma's raw queries or typed SQL.

Try It Now

Installation

1. Creating a new project

Use the following command to scaffold a simple TypeScript command line application with ZenStack configured:

npm create zenstack@latest my-project

2. Setting up an existing project

Or, if you have an existing project, use the CLI to initialize it:

npx @zenstackhq/cli@latest init

3. Setting up manually

Alternatively, you can set it up manually:

npm install -D @zenstackhq/cli
npm install @zenstackhq/orm

Then create a zenstack folder and a schema.zmodel file in it.

Documentation

https://zenstack.dev/docs/

Community

Join our discord server for chat and updates!