Source: https://appunite.com/blog/top-10-elixir-companies-to-follow With an increasing number of available software development solutions, choosing the right programming language has become challenging. How to find the balance between following the trends and satisfying actual technical needs? However, if Elixir is one of the options you’re currently considering, you’re in the right place.
As a company that has successfully implemented over 40 Elixir projects that serve nearly 100 mln users, we’re happy to provide you with a glimpse of top projects using this technology. Let’s take a look at its advantages and stories behind successful Elixir companies.
Benefits of Elixir development
If you’re not yet familiar with Elixir, it’s time to change it! Elixir is a programming language designed for web applications, brought to life back in 2011. It is based on Erlang VM, the technology which has been successfully applied for more than 30 years. Elixir can also be supplemented with additional architectures and frameworks - such as Phoenix, Ecto, Mox or ExUnit - which increase its functionality.
According to the Developer Survey Report 2019, Elixir has become one of the most loved languages. As former Ruby on Rails developers with more than 6 years of experience in Elixir development, at AppUnite we must admit that this language has literally taken our hearts.
What exactly made us switch from Ruby and stay with Elixir for such a long time? You can learn that from one of our Elixir developers, who had his speech on this topic during the ElixirConf2018. However, to provide you with a short summary of Elixir benefits and advantages, we appreciate Elixir because it is:
Scalable Elixir is typically a perfect fit for all products that are 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-tolerant and concurrent Elixir companies claim that error recovery is easy with this technology. The language was designed for handling big data loads and a high volume of requests from external sources. It has also built-in safety mechanisms, which ensures its undisturbed work even in the face of a significant amount of events.
Easily maintainable Elixir-powered code is simple and neat. It means that Elixir companies develop their products fast, and their generated bugs are easy to detect and fix. Moreover, it’s also easy to upgrade the software with new features.
Complex Elixir development enables the creation of extremely comprehensive and functional websites integrated with third-party platforms. It means that your customized solutions can be equipped with nearly non-limited functionalities.
Top 10 Companies Using Elixir
Obviously, as one of the biggest Elixir-powered product development companies in Poland and one of the biggest in the EU, we may 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 catch a glimpse of the top 10 Elixir companies.
1. PepsiCo
This worldwide-known beverage company doesn’t need an introduction. Surprise - they are fans of Elixir! They highlighted this statement even during ElixirConf US 2019 by saying that Elixir is now one of their main technologies used for developing critical business solutions.
What do they apply Elixir for? They use this language mostly to design software for marketing and e-commerce automation. Thanks to this decision among others, they optimized their sales and grew their annual net revenue to 70.3 billion USD in 2020. Now they successfully introduce Elixir to new business areas and make it a main engineering language used for backend applications.
2. 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 to find the technology allowing to handle and process thousands of requests per second.
As fast responding to user’s requests was a priority for this kind of service, Elixir turned out to be 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 app and platform.
3. Discord
The provider of a chat for gamers, exactly as Spotify, also needs to handle big volumes of data and significant traffic. Imagine that the platform allows nearly 300 thousand users to join the same voice call, and exchange text, voice and media. There was simply no other option but using Elixir which made it possible to handle even a few million users in real-time.
Discord executives claim that the original prototype of their platform was built in Elixir, and they continued to use it for extending their infrastructure. As they applied it in building their entire system, now it is the main language in their technology stack.
4. WhatsApp
WhatsApp is the Elixir company taking advantage of this technology. As one of the most popular messaging apps worldwide, it requires efficiency in handling huge traffic and a big volume of requests. The application was first written fully in Erlang and then improved by introducing Elixir-powered elements.
5. Allegro Lokalnie
Allegro is a leading e-commerce platform in Poland and one of the top 10 e-commerce platform in the world. In 2020, in the period of the pandemic, they managed to hit the net revenue of nearly 4 bln PLN (870 mln EUR). One of their products, a multilevel platform called Allegro Lokalnie, was also built with the use of Elixir and Phoenix. This is how Allegro Lokalnie became one of the top companies in the world benefiting from those technologies.
6. Lonely Planet
Lonely Planet is a renowned publisher of travel guides and tips. They create rich content for their website and actively collaborate with third-party publishers. As they need to update their website instantly and constantly, they were making efforts to find the most efficient method to keep up with the pace.
After a few unsuccessful attempts, they 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.
7. Pinterest
Pinterest is an app allowing users to browse pictures and create personalized, inspirational boards. The platform needs to process nearly 30 000 requests and events per second. Elixir is one of a few languages that can be applied and successfully handle such amount of requests. Thanks to Elixir, Pinterest became the next worldwide-known platform. Moreover, they also reduced their volume of code and their operating costs, which is an unquestionable advantage.
8. Toyota Connected
Back in 2002, the Toyota enterprise launched a platform connecting their cars and providing drivers with traffic information in real-time. They also built a car-sharing program in which vehicles can be booked via a mobile app. Managing such a large fleet required processing a huge number of events and requests. The company used Elixir for building back-end systems and API integrations designed for geoprocessing.
How does Elixir transform businesses that were primarily devoted to different technologies? What made those companies switch to Elixir from other languages? Let’s take a look at a few examples:
9. Bleacher Report
As the second-largest sports website in the world, the company has to process even 1.5 billion page visits each month. The service was initially built on Ruby on Rails, but after a while, it turned out that this technology is not able to handle dynamic growth and maintain scalability.
Engineers and executives were searching for new, more flexible solutions that would be able to process the growing traffic. Switching to Elixir helped them to improve the performance of the service and made it more scalable and prepared for further development.