With increasing software development solutions available on the market, choosing the right programming language has become challenging. Decision-makers face a dilemma: how to stay up to date with trends while addressing actual technical needs? Fortunately, Elixir allows you to get the best of both worlds.
As a development company that has successfully implemented over 40 Elixir projects serving nearly 100 million users, we are happy to provide a glimpse of top brands using this technology and the stories behind their success.
Benefits of Elixir Development
First, let's start with a short introduction to Elixir programming language. If you are still unfamiliar with this technology, it's time to change it! Elixir is a programming language designed for web applications and brought to life in 2012. It is based on Erlang VM, the technology that has been successfully used for over 30 years. Elixir can also be supplemented with additional tools and frameworks - such as Phoenix, Nerves, Plug, Ecto, OTP, or ExUnit - which increase its functionality.
According to the 2023 Stack Overflow Survey, Elixir is the second most admired language, and Phoenix is the most esteemed web framework among developers. As a former Ruby on Rails agency with over nine years of experience in Elixir development, these fantastic results are no surprise to us.
What exactly made us switch from Ruby and stick with Elixir long-term? You can learn that from one of our Elixir developers, who gave a speech on this topic during a well-known conference in the Elixir community - ElixirConf 2018. For those who prefer short overviews, here is a summary of the main advantages of Elixir:
- Scalability: Elixir is typically a perfect fit for all products intended to be used by a broad audience. Supplied with additional frameworks, it ensures great scalability and reliability. This makes Elixir a technology frequently used by companies expecting to grow at a rapid pace.
- Fault-tolerance and concurrency: Elixir companies claim that this technology makes error recovery easy. The language was designed for handling big data loads and high volumes of requests from external sources. It also has built-in safety mechanisms, ensuring its undisturbed work even in the face of a significant number of events.
- Maintainability: Elixir-powered code is simple and neat. It means that Elixir companies develop their products fast, and the generated bugs are easy to detect and fix. Moreover, it is also easy to upgrade the software with new features and functionalities.
- Complexity: Elixir works great in building extremely comprehensive and functional websites integrated with third-party platforms. It means that your customized web development solutions can be equipped with nearly non-limited functionalities.
Top 10 Companies Using Elixir
As one of the biggest Elixir-fueled product development companies in the EU, we could discuss the benefits of this technology for hours. But that's definitely not the point!
To prove the advantage of this language over all the others that we know and used to use, let's have a look at some of the successful Elixir companies worth following in 2024.
PepsiCo
This worldwide-known beverage company doesn't need an introduction. What might surprise you is that they are fans of Elixir! They even highlighted this fact during ElixirConf US 2019 by saying that Elixir is now one of their principal technologies for developing critical business solutions.
What exactly do they apply Elixir for? It's primarily used to design software for marketing and e-commerce automation. The team appreciates how it supports changes and operations across numerous storage systems. The technology direction contributed to PepsiCo's sales optimization, increasing their annual net revenue to 86.4 billion USD in 2022. Now they're successfully introducing Elixir to new business areas, making it the main engineering language used for backend applications.
Spotify
Executives of Spotify claim that Elixir is crucial for their backend development. With such a significant database and a number of active users, it was critical for them to find the technology suitable for handling and processing thousands of requests per second.
Since fast responding to users' requests was a priority for this kind of service, Elixir was a perfect match. It provided the company with a level of concurrency that is simply unavailable with any other programming language, helping them to grow to a worldwide known music and entertainment platform. Their tech team also benefits from one of the elixir frameworks called Phoenix LiveView, using it to run a debugging portal in the artist advertisement service.
For those hungry for more juicy details, Joel Kamp, Spotify's Staff Software Engineer, elaborated on Spotify's technical choices in a Thinking Elixir Podcast episode.
Discord
The gamers' chat provider, like Spotify, must handle large volumes of data and significant traffic. Imagine the platform allowing nearly 300,000 users to join the same voice call and exchange text, voice, and media. There was simply no other option but to use Elixir, which made it possible to handle even a few million users in real time.
Discord executives stated that the original prototype of their platform was built in Elixir, and they continued to use it to extend their infrastructure. As they applied it to building their entire system, it now is the primary programming language in their technology stack. They take full advantage of Elixir's scalability and maintainability to support their dynamic growth (and with Discord, we're talking about millions of users on a single server, making them one of the most popular tech companies in the world)!
Remote
They're building a top global employment platform, offering solutions and tools for contract management, payroll, and HR processes. They bet on Elixir because of its concurrency and scalability - properties that cannot be ignored in a global solution like Remote's. They're also benefiting from the ever-growing community of Elixir developers open to joining new projects and supporting Elixir novices. In 2021, Jose Valim, Elixir's creator, became Remote's official advisor, pushing the team even further to reach their tech goals, achieve greater maturity, and get the most out of the language.
Appunite's Elixir specialists started collaborating with Remote last year. We're using the technology to address challenges related to payroll management.
Allegro Lokalnie
Allegro is a prominent Polish e-commerce platform and one of the global leaders in the e-commerce field. In 2020, during the pandemic, they hit a net revenue of nearly four billion PLN (870 million EUR). Their C2C platform, Allegro Lokalnie, was also built using Elixir and Phoenix. As a result, Allegro became one of the top companies in the world benefiting from those technologies. The Allegro Lokalnie app handles significant traffic of over 16M users/month thanks to Elixir's high concurrency.
Our team has been involved in the development and growth of the platform, building a strong, long-term relationship with Allegro. Feel free to check out the details in our case study.
Lonely Planet
Lonely Planet is a renowned publisher of travel guides and tips. It creates rich content for its website and actively collaborates with third-party publishers. As Lonely Planet needed to update its website instantly and constantly, it made efforts to find the most efficient method of keeping up with the pace.
After several unsuccessful attempts, the Lonely Planet's tech team finally tried Elixir. They used the language to write a few of their microservices, such as API sub-services or servers of inventory of books and e-books. Elixir, supported by Phoenix, allowed them to build complex, functional, and easy-to-update websites, reaching millions of users globally.
Heroku
Heroku provides developers with tools and services to build and run apps in the cloud. Since its conception in 2007, this PaaS pioneer has adopted multiple programming languages for different purposes. One of them is Elixir, which was first used by Heroku's Vault team to rewrite one of their internal services. The developers loved the experience and found the language productive and easy to maintain. Heroku's Frontend team also fell in love with Elixir when they used Plug, the Elixir library, to solve the data fetching problem. Both teams have also used Phoenix as their go-to framework for web applications.
The Elixir team is still growing organically, and new employees are encouraged to learn the language with the support of more experienced colleagues. Being experts in Elixir mentorship ourselves, we can only applaud!
Pinterest is an app that allows users to browse pictures and create personalized inspirational boards. The platform needs to process nearly 30,000 requests and events per second, coming from over 200M active users. Elixir is one of a few languages that can be applied to handle such a large number of requests. This tech choice led Pinterest to become the next worldwide-known platform. Moreover, the team also reduced their code volume and operating costs, which is an unquestionable advantage in app development. They actually managed to save $2M a year in server costs.
Sparkmeter
Sparkmeter is a Washington-based company offering low-cost metering solutions, giving access to electricity even in hard-to-reach areas. In an effort to build a reliable infrastructure, their team turned to Elixir and Nerves, an open-source platform combining the Elixir ecosystem and Erlang virtual machine, which worked great for embedded development. The team created a unified and efficient grid edge management unit. Similarly to the Heroku case, the developers were enthusiastic about both technologies and decided to train more staff in them. Some of their internal case studies and challenges addressed with Elixir were even topics of panels at ElixirConf in 2021 and 2022. The team's appreciation for Elixir was also discussed in one of the Elixir Wizards' episodes!
Financial Times
The famous international newspaper decided to become the next Elixir-powered company in order to provide the GraphQL API for their internal systems dedicated to user and subscription management. After the implementation, they also decided to build the next major application in Elixir, which turned out to be another success, cementing Elixir as the Financial Times' leading technology. Their software requires low memory, and its development and debugging are way more convenient and easier than with any other solution.
Connect with Elixir Experts and Elevate Your Digital Projects
The top 10 Elixir companies to follow in 2024, presented by us, are just part of the many examples of successful Elixir companies. Did you get intrigued by Elixir's possibilities after reading the article? We hope so! If there is a digital project you would like to discuss, contact us - our team is happy to talk and share their expertise.
Did you find the article interesting and helpful? Take a look at our Elixir page to find out more!
#language #phoenix #programming #framework
