Point 1 is not an issue IMO, you definitely don’t need to model anything schema-wise into SQLAlchemy ORM to make Alembic useful, since Alembic operations transl

Point 1 is not an issue IMO, you definitely don’t need to model anything schema-wise into SQLAlchemy ORM to make Alembic useful, since Alembic operations translate pretty much directly to SQL. I’ve just built a project last month that uses Alembic but otherwise connects to the database and issues SQL directly. Point 2 is indeed a big factor though. Alembic doesn’t have much first-class operation support beyond data storage constructs, and if most you need is op.execute() (which runs plain SQL) one might just as well build their own tool like you did.