Why Elixir Is the Best Stack You’re Not Using (Yet)

Jorge Baez

Jun 27, 2025 • 2 min read

Functional. Fast. Fault-tolerant. And totally underrated.

“You take the blue pill—you keep using the same stacks you’ve always known. You take the red pill—you wake up in a world where applications scale like rebel fleets, crashes heal themselves, and real-time is built-in. Welcome to Elixir.”

The Framework From the Future (That's Been Here All Along)

Elixir is built on top of Erlang’s BEAM VM, a runtime environment that powers some of the most resilient systems in the world—think telecom switches, WhatsApp, and even parts of NASA.

But Elixir modernizes Erlang’s raw power with:

Clean, Ruby-inspired syntax
Built-in tooling and dependency management
A joyful dev experience

First-class support for concurrency, distributed systems, and self-healing apps

In a world of noisy JavaScript stacks, Elixir is the quiet professional—the Blade Runner of backends: elegant, resilient, and deeply human.

Enter Phoenix: The Full-Stack Framework That Just Works

If Elixir is the engine, Phoenix is the starship.

Phoenix isn't just a web framework—it's a full-stack development experience with:

LiveView: Reactive frontends without writing a single line of JavaScript.
PubSub & Channels: Real-time broadcasting built into the core.
Built-in Auth, Routing, HTML Components: The essentials, minus the overhead.

And thanks to the BEAM’s architecture, Phoenix scales horizontally with less infrastructure, less memory, and less DevOps pain.

Want 10,000 WebSocket connections on a $5 VPS? Phoenix says: “I know kung fu.”

💻 Developer Experience: Functional with Flow

Working in Elixir feels like writing prose that runs in parallel:

✅ mix CLI for dependency and project management.

🔁 iex (interactive shell) to test, explore, and live-code.

🔬 Built-in testing and documentation support.

♻️ Hot code reloading (even in production).

You write pure functions, you compose them like Lego, and thanks to immutability, bugs don’t sneak in through side-effects. It’s the Jedi way.

📦 Use Cases: From CMSs to Critical Systems

At Fox Labs Developers, we’re building projects like Osto, a CMS powered by Phoenix LiveView and Elixir that rivals modern JavaScript-heavy editors with a fraction of the complexity.

But we’re not alone.

🧠 Who else is betting on this stack?

Discord: uses Elixir for internal messaging and control systems.

PepsiCo: built high-volume event-driven systems in Elixir.

PagerDuty: uses it for alerting pipelines.

WhatsApp: Erlang roots; still a benchmark in scale and reliability.

🧱 Fault-Tolerance: Let it Crash (It’s Fine)

Erlang introduced a radical idea: let your processes crash, and let supervisors restart them.

Elixir inherited this concept, making it trivial to build:

Self-healing apps

Highly concurrent systems

Zero-downtime upgrades

Picture this:

[Supervisor]
   ├── [GenServer: Cache]
   ├── [Task: EmailSender]
   └── [Process: WebSocketClient]

If any one of these fails, the Supervisor restarts it instantly—like the Force restoring balance.

🤯 Why Aren’t More People Using Elixir?

Good question. It’s not hype-driven.
It doesn’t have a Big Tech backer.
And… it’s just quietly excellent.

“It’s not the language you start with. It’s the one you graduate into.”
– A wise engineer (or maybe Morpheus)

But things are changing. The Elixir ecosystem is maturing. The documentation is phenomenal. The community is helpful. And the performance benchmarks speak for themselves.

🏁 Conclusion: Your Stack Deserves Better

If you're tired of fragile systems, slow build times, and JavaScript fatigue, it's time to look at Elixir. Whether you’re building SaaS, a CMS, a dashboard, or something mission-critical, Elixir + Phoenix will make your stack faster, more resilient, and way more fun to maintain.

✅ What Now?

Try a Livebook: livebook.dev

Follow us: Foxlabs Developers

May your functions be pure, your sockets stay alive, and your supervisors ever vigilant.