What is Dapper? Dapper describes itself as "micro-ORM" because it provides much less functionality than Entity Framework does. It still counts as an ORM, though, because Dapper allows you to retrieve entity objects from relational tables. As part of "micro-izing" ORM functionality, rather than requiring you to create a context object as Entity Framework does, Dapper works as a set of extension methods for ADO.NET's Connection classes. Further, out of the box, Dapper supports only querying and updating through raw SQL, does not support configuring classes to match database tables, and doesn't support code-first development.Having said that, there already exist multiple third-party extensions to the Dapper library that do, for example, support object-oriented updates and class-to-table mapping. If Dapper proves popular enough, you should expect more extension libraries to appear. It's at least conceivable that much of Entity Framework's functionality could be available through Dapper ... some day.What is Entity Framework? Entity Framework was first released in 2008, Microsoft's primary means of interacting between .NET applications and relational databases. Entity Framework is an Object Relational Mapper (ORM) which is a type of tool that simplifies mapping between objects in your software to the tables and columns of a relational database.Entity Framework (EF) is an open source ORM framework for ADO.NET which is a part of .NET Framework.An ORM takes care of creating database connections and executing commands, as well as taking query results and automatically materializing those results as your application objects.An ORM also helps to keep track of changes to those objects, and when instructed, it will also persist those changes back to the database for you.