Dapper Service vs Entity Framework Core

When building .NET applications, choosing the right data access strategy is key to performance, maintainability, and development speed. Two popular approaches are Dapper and Entity Framework Core (EF Core). Let’s break them down to help you pick the right one for your project!

Dapper Service

Lightweight & Performance-Oriented

• Dapper is a micro ORM developed by StackOverflow. It maps query results to objects using IL generation, making it very fast and close to ADO.NET performance.

Manual SQL Handling

• With Dapper, you write raw SQL queries manually, giving you full control over joins, filtering, and query optimization. It’s ideal when you want precision.

No Change Tracking / Identity Management

• Dapper is stateless – it doesn’t track changes or manage object states (unlike EF). This means you handle updates manually using explicit SQL.

Easy to Integrate & Use

• It is very simple to plug into any .NET service layer using IDbConnection (typically SqlConnection), and works great with custom repositories and stored procedures.

Ideal for High-Performance APIs

• It’s perfect for performance-sensitive applications like microservices, reporting tools, and mobile backends, where speed and lean data access are critical.

Entity Framework (EF Core)

Feature-Rich & Abstraction-Oriented

• EF Core is a full ORM by Microsoft that allows you to interact with the database using LINQ and strongly-typed entities, hiding SQL complexity.

Change Tracking & Unit of Work

• EF tracks entity states (added, modified, deleted) and can automatically detect changes. It simplifies CRUD operations without writing SQL.

Code-First, DB-First, & Migrations

• EF supports code-first modeling, database-first scaffolding, and schema migrations, making it suitable for agile and large enterprise development.

Relationships & Navigation

• EF understands relationships between entities (1:1, 1:N, N:M) and supports lazy/eager loading, which helps manage complex object graphs easily.

Productivity-Focused

• With EF, you spend less time writing boilerplate code, making it ideal for fast development, especially in CRUD-heavy business applications.

Conclusion

Both Dapper and Entity Framework Core are excellent choices for working with databases in .NET, but they shine in different areas.

• Go with Dapper when you need high performance, raw SQL control, and a lightweight solution — perfect for microservices, APIs, or reporting.
• Choose EF Core when your app involves complex relationships, rapid development, and you prefer LINQ and abstraction over writing SQL.