I think Django's ORM is a product of its time, when limitations about the expressibility of the "active record" concept were not fully understood. I like to de

I think Django's ORM is a product of its time, when limitations about the expressibility of the "active record" concept were not fully understood. I like to describe it as Django's ORM will satisfy 80% of your needs immediately, 90% if you invest and sweat, 95% if you're quite knowledgeable in the underlying SQL. But there are still some rather common query shapes that are inexpressible or terribly awkward with Django's ORM. SQLAlchemy on the other hand never tries to hide its complexity (although to be fair they've become much better at communicating it in 2.0). On Day 1 you'll know maybe 20% of what you need to. You might not even have a working application until the end of week 1. But at the end of, idk, month 6? You're a wizard. The long-term value ceiling of SQLAlchemy/Alembic is higher than Django's, but Django compensates for it with their comparatively richer plugin ecosystem, so it's not so easy to compare the two.