Almost each Symfony project uses FOSUserBundle because it speeds up the development and provides useful features to manage users. It has a few built in storage layer implementations: one for Propel and a few for Doctrine (both ORM and ODM). It's great, but there are some cases when you have to use another storage. Luckily, FOSUserBundle is flexible enough and provides a way to implement a custom storage layer.  You just need to implement your own user manager to use all features of FOSUserBundle.