After years of Express and NestJS, I switched to AdonisJS and haven't looked back.
Most Node.js developers' framework journey goes: Express, then either NestJS (if they want structure) or Fastify (if they want speed). AdonisJS rarely comes up in these conversations, which is a shame, because it's the closest thing Node has to Rails or Laravel.
What Adonis actually is
AdonisJS is a full-stack MVC framework for Node.js. It comes with an ORM (Lucid), authentication, a query builder, migrations, a CLI for generating models and controllers, and a template engine. It's opinionated about how you structure an application in a way that Express isn't and NestJS is only through conventions.
The comparison to Laravel is intentional — the API design clearly draws from it. If you've worked with Laravel, AdonisJS will feel familiar in the best way.
The ORM is genuinely good
Lucid is an Active Record ORM that handles relationships, eager loading, and transactions cleanly. I've used TypeORM and Prisma extensively. Lucid is less powerful than Prisma's type generation, but it has a simpler mental model and stays out of your way more often.
For projects where you control the schema and don't need Prisma's edge runtime support, Lucid is often the better choice.
Where it falls short
The ecosystem is smaller. If you need a specific integration, there may not be an Adonis-specific package for it, which means dropping down to the underlying Node.js ecosystem and wiring it together yourself. This is usually fine but occasionally frustrating.
The community is smaller too, which means fewer Stack Overflow answers for edge cases.
When to use it
Internal tools, APIs, and full-stack apps where you want a batteries-included framework and don't need the ecosystem breadth of something like NestJS. It's the framework I reach for when I want to build something real without spending a week setting up project structure.
I built a spa access logging system for a hotel on Adonis and the development experience was smooth from start to deployment. That project alone converted me.