C# person here and big fan of Entity Framework (but I have used NHibernate in the past). I find the the main benefit of ORMs is type safety. Provided you're us

C# person here and big fan of Entity Framework (but I have used NHibernate in the past). I find the the main benefit of ORMs is type safety. Provided you're using the ORMs to also manage your schema (which you really should if you're using an ORM), then the compiler can guard you from a whole class of mistakes. You're also able to change table and column names with trivial effort and without fear of missing updating some SQL query string somewhere and only finding out during runtime that something is wrong. While it's possible to write LINQ which results in bad SQL, if you didn't have an ORM it would still be possible for developers to write bad SQL anyway. Either way your developers should understand SQL at least a bit and be able to use something like SQL Profiler to ensure that their queries are performant. There is no substitute for competent developers. There is a performance overhead to Entity Framework in the way it tracks changes to objects in contexts. If you're needing to work with a lot of objects from/to a database, then for these particular use cases you can opt out of some of these convenience features to avoid the performance costs. ORMs are an incredibly useful tool if the trade-offs make sense for your project and you know how to use them correctly. But as with any tool, if you use it inappropriately, you're going to have a bad time.