The nice thing about Django is that there's nothing stopping you from doing that. You'll have to give up the Django Admin if you use SQLAlchemy for models but

The nice thing about Django is that there's nothing stopping you from doing that. You'll have to give up the Django Admin if you use SQLAlchemy for models but you can still do it. I have several projects that use Elasticsearch as a backend and one that's based on JSON documents in Git repositories. You can totally do it!