I personally believe ActiveRecord is a gigantic anti-pattern and should be avoided at all costs (by anyone, ever). And I also happen to have had very bad experiences with ORM and feel like most of the time they are not needed at all. So yes. But even if you want an ORM, there's a few popular ORM libraries. You can just include one and start using it, no need to use a framework for that (for ActiveRecord I wouldn't know).