Yeah it's crazy, people use Django and they think the things that are making them productive are all these little contribs and built-ins, but the reality is it's the solid foundation that is the ORM. BTW, I discovered after writing my comment that tortoise ORM is essentially Django ORM, but written on asyncpg, making it way faster. So, if you're stuck in some other non-Django framework and would like to use the Django ORM, that's probably your closest bet.