You most certainly can. I've built several Django apps with Elasticsearch-DSL as a backend and another app with a completely custom backend (you need a really

You most certainly can. I've built several Django apps with Elasticsearch-DSL as a backend and another app with a completely custom backend (you need a really good reason to do this). There are tradeoffs of course: you give up the Django admin and a bunch of other things, at which point we might as well have used Flask. But our shop has a number of other "normal" pure-Django apps so it makes sense for us to use Django as a common base. Awhile ago there was a book called "Lightweight Django" in which the authors showed how to use Django in a stripped-down Flask-like manner. Ultimately Django is just a big bag of parts that you can use or not use.