@jws Yes and no. There's a class, Object, which you need to subclass in order to use Realm. Otherwise there's no real set up. No .xcdatamodeld file, no stack nothing. And reading/writing are done in transactions which run on background threads.
The only thing I like about Core Data is the NSFetchedResultsController, which you don't have in Realm. There are third party libraries that give you something like that for Realm, but you don't really need those. Instead you can read your data with an optional predicate in just one line of code and have Notifications handle the UI changes for updates in the database.