why am I getting password mismatch by bcrypt compare even though both password and hashed password from database matches?

Question

For user authentication, I'm storing passwords by hashing using bcrypt which is stored in MongoDB cluster but when I try to authenticate the user using the same string I get the wrong comparison with bcrypt.compare says mismatch. Here is the code I'm trying to run both for saving and authenticating

import bcrypt
salt = bcrypt.gensalt()    
password = bcrypt.hashpw(request.form['password'].encode('utf-8'), salt)

here is nodejs code for authenticating based on user entry

userSchema.methods.comparePassword = function (passw, cb) {
    var user = this;
    console.log((passw === user.password) ? 'passwords match' : 'passwords dont match' );
    console.log(passw +" "+ user.password )
    bcrypt.compare(passw, user.password, function (err, isMatch) {
        console.log(passw +" "+ user.password +" " +isMatch )
        if(err) {
            return cb(err)
        }
        cb(null, isMatch)
    })
}

here is the print of generated hashed password for string '123'

hashed password b'$2b$12$URN6pyD4SsOgIXALvr.jIuy2hvxlxva.ioamDNtMhAwvWb9/nLdhO'

in mongo db it stores it as binary password:Binary('JDJiJDEyJFVSTjZweUQ0U3NPZ0lYQUx2ci5qSXV5Mmh2eGx4dmEuaW9hbUROdE1oQXd2V2I5L25MZGhP', 0)

when I try to authenticate with the user-entered password I get a mismatch even though I entered the same string while hashing

123 $2b$12$URN6pyD4SsOgIXALvr.jIuy2hvxlxva.ioamDNtMhAwvWb9/nLdhO null

it throws null even though both are the same for the user which got saved in a database

user found{ _id: 60479960c20181a14badf6e0,
  Name: 'boolbool',
  phoneno: '2828',
  uploadid: 'dilshan',
  password: '$2b$12$URN6pyD4SsOgIXALvr.jIuy2hvxlxva.ioamDNtMhAwvWb9/nLdhO' }

I tried encoding & checking password

bcrypt.compare(utf8.encode(passw), utf8.encode(user.password), function (err, isMatch)

but still, it says null what am I doing wrong? can someone point out my mistake? that will be very helpful