Entity Framework 6 VS LINQ to DB

Compare Entity Framework 6 vs LINQ to DB and see what are their differences.

Entity Framework 6

This is the codebase for Entity Framework 6 (previously maintained at https://entityframework.codeplex.com). Entity Framework Core is maintained at https://github.com/dotnet/efcore. (by dotnet)
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Entity Framework 6 LINQ to DB
2 20
1,407 2,859
0.3% 0.9%
8.3 8.8
6 days ago 3 days ago
C# C#
MIT License MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

Entity Framework 6

Posts with mentions or reviews of Entity Framework 6. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-02-10.
  • ASP.NET Performance optimization question
    2 projects | /r/csharp | 10 Feb 2022
    Additionally, an individual context will also cache the actual sql being performed and their docs go over the caching it does here regarding that.
  • Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Mar 2021
    Every so often, posts from Bruce Dawson's blog get posted here - one such post was about using Event Tracing for Windows to diagnose an issue with an NTFS lock being held causing 63 cores to idle while 1 does all the work.

    https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2019/10/20/63-cores-blocke...

    A few months later, some other people in my team were struggling to diagnose an issue in production where a legacy webapp was struggling to scale up and fully use all 64 cores of the server we needed it to run on. I stepped in to help and remembered that post I'd seen on HN. We used ETW (through Windows Performance Recorder and Windows Performance Analyzer) to profile our app and I looked into the Wait Analysis. Turns out that Entity Framework 6 uses a ReaderWriterLockSlim to guard a cache, and that particular lock performs extremely poorly under heavy contention. Heavy in our case meant that for a single page build of one of this app's "hot path" pages, this lock would be taken a few hundred thousand times. We weren't the first to discover this:

    https://github.com/dotnet/ef6/issues/1500

    What some other people in my team were struggling with for about two weeks was resolved in a single day thanks to me goofing off and reading HN. (We ultimately used a fork of EF6 that didn't suffer from this issue to solve our problem)

LINQ to DB

Posts with mentions or reviews of LINQ to DB. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-06-02.
  • Upserting complex data models from an API into EF Core entities
    3 projects | /r/dotnet | 2 Jun 2023
  • LiteDB: A .NET embedded NoSQL database
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Nov 2022
    Before checking this out, people might want to take a look through the issues and pull requests of which there are 500+ and 50+ respectively [1]. I was really optimistic about this project and it was headed in a great direction, but it's not in a production ready state, and it seems that the main guy behind it has decided to move onto other things. It's been about a year since there was any significant activity.

    I just mention this because a lot of these little issues might only become more apparent after integrating the db into your project and so it can be a bit annoying. I ended up swapping to Linq2DB [1]. It's something, more or less, similar offering an ORM/LINQ type system as well as the ability to also use direct SQL if desired. But the neat thing is that it also uses a standardized API for the LINQ query language, so you can do things like swap from SQLite to PostgreSQL in one* line of code, so long as you're not using any provider specific extensions.

    [1] - https://github.com/mbdavid/LiteDB

    [2] - https://github.com/linq2db/linq2db

  • Flyweight: An ORM for SQLite
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Sep 2022
    I had a positive experience with Linq2db? https://github.com/linq2db/linq2db

    I mention because I had something of the opposite experience with it. It not only ended up yielding the correct queries, but I saw a significant increase in performance. And the neat thing about it, beyond ORM and linq-to-sql, is a common interface amongst providers - so you can do things like swap from SQLite to Postgres with 1 line* of code, so long as you're not using provider specific extensions.

  • .NET 6 - ORM vs Stored Procedures - Azure Functions + SQL Databases
    3 projects | /r/dotnet | 2 Sep 2022
    Temporary tables are covered by linq2db. But better to show Stored Proc maybe your final query just needs several CTE which also supported by linq2db.
  • LINQ to SQL
    1 project | /r/Unity3D | 20 Aug 2022
    check this out as an alternative... https://github.com/linq2db/linq2db
  • Expression trees for LINQ
    2 projects | /r/dotnet | 13 Aug 2022
    My learning path was supporting linq2db, not short way. StackOverflow was original source to find something like, how to do if operator in Expression Tree, how to throw exception in Expression Tree, how to build dynamic filter, ect.
  • Dapper is it worth using now with the improvements in EF in dotnet 6?
    3 projects | /r/dotnet | 25 Jun 2022
    Checkout linq2db No need for Dapper or EF with this library. I wouldn't want to miss it.
  • What is the best PostgreSQL ORM tool for use in a .NET Framework 4.7 application?
    3 projects | /r/dotnet | 15 Jun 2022
  • SchemaTypist: Entity generator for Dapper and SqlKata
    2 projects | /r/dotnet | 18 Mar 2022
    Why not linq2db? Faster than Dapper and has LINQ support.
  • EF Core is good for most things.
    4 projects | /r/dotnet | 31 Jan 2022
    Probably you can understand why linq2db was born 15 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Entity Framework 6 and LINQ to DB you can also consider the following projects:

PetaPoco - Official PetaPoco, A tiny ORM-ish thing for your POCO's

Dapper - Dapper - a simple object mapper for .Net [Moved to: https://github.com/DapperLib/Dapper]

Entity Framework - EF Core is a modern object-database mapper for .NET. It supports LINQ queries, change tracking, updates, and schema migrations.

NHibernate - NHibernate Object Relational Mapper

MongoDB Repository pattern implementation

ServiceStack.OrmLite - Fast, Simple, Typed ORM for .NET

TypeORM - ORM for TypeScript and JavaScript. Supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, SQLite, MS SQL Server, Oracle, SAP Hana, WebSQL databases. Works in NodeJS, Browser, Ionic, Cordova and Electron platforms.

MockQueryable - Mocking Entity Framework Core operations such ToListAsync, FirstOrDefaultAsync etc

RepoDb - A hybrid ORM library for .NET.

FluentMigrator - Fluent migrations framework for .NET