Hey!

At Hashnode, we use Mongoose as our ODM. 😄

Personally ... Mongoose is, and has been, my go-to choice whenever I've had to work with MongoDB. Things can get pretty hairy if there are no rules imposed on the data in your database and your database is rather large. Mongoose is the perfect answer to this.

That being said, Siddarthan Sarumathi Pandian is the in-house expert on this topic. Hit him up if you want to have a more in-depth discussion on pros and cons. (He has quite the opinion on this. 😛)

We use Mongoose to access the DB.

I quote the purpose of Mongoose from their docs: "Mongoose provides a straight-forward, schema-based solution to model your application data. It includes built-in type casting, validation, query building, business logic hooks and more, out of the box."

Using the native mongo driver is basically the same thing as accessing the DB directly, which is obviously risky not just for a big project, but any project. That being said, we do use mongodb driver for quick DB migrations.