Although Elixir is a relatively new programming language, it is gaining popularity thanks to its concurrency, scalability and high fault tolerance.

Many market leaders recognized that potential and are choosing it for their new projects or replacing previous technologies with Elixir. Among the most commonly mentioned benefits coming from choosing Elixir are:

concurrency for those already handling millions of users or with systems with a high number of requests generated

for those already handling millions of users or with systems with a high number of requests generated reliability and scalability recognized by companies looking to scale or grow

recognized by companies looking to scale or grow maintainability and easy development for those wanting a fast development, bug fixing and ease of use

Here is a list of top 10 companies that started using Elixir to boost their businesses

#1 Pinterest

Pinterest is a social media web and mobile application designed to be a catalogue of ideas. It allows users to browse and save pictures, graphics, short videos etc. to personalized boards.

Being one of the most popular platforms for finding inspirations from hobbies, interior design to fashion and recipes, Pinterest handles around 30 000 events every second and has more than 200 million users!

This is why they are using Elixir to handle routing of events thanks to BEAM and its ability to deal with big amounts of concurrent connections.

What is more, Pinterest managed to reduce the number of code lines, which means they are using fewer servers and lowered their operating costs.

#2 PepsiCo

This gigant does not have to be introduced to anyone. At the most recent ElixirConf the eCommerce team at PepsiCo shared that Elixir has become the core part of their software stack and is crucial for powering business solutions. This is a huge deal that a company this big is proudly speaking about the benefits of using Elixir.

#3 Slack

A workplace communication tool meant for instant messaging, video chats, file sharing etc. Slack provides its users with lots of add-ons and allows group chatting within channels as well as direct messaging.

Slack utilizes Elixir to build a media server for p2p and group calls.

#4 Adobe

Digital and media solutions company standing behind products like Flash Player, Photoshop, Illustrator, Adobe Reader etc.

Adobe uses Elixir to build a client/cloud application for a collaborative photography workflow.

#5 Discord

Free voice and text chat directed towards the video gaming community, supporting text, image, video and audio communication between users. Discord is the leading provider of chat solutions for gamers and they allow up to 300 000 (!) users to join the same voice call - so Elixir was a perfect match.

#6 Postmates

An American logistics company operating food delivery services.

Postmates uses Elixir in their internal projects like inventory system, tools portal and is planning on sourcing a Thumbor library.

#7 Toyota Connected

A company founded by Toyota in 2000 that launched a Mobility Service Platform for connecting their cars and sending events like traffic information or driver behaviours in real-time.

Due to a large number of vehicles creating concurrent traffic by regularly sending events to the cloud Elixir was an obvious choice.

It uses Elixir for the backend of Toyota’s car-sharing application - Hui.

#8 Moz Pro

Moz Pro is one of the leading SEO analytics companies in the world. They were looking for alternatives to MySQL databases and decided to use Elixir to create a distributed indexing data system. This allowed them to improve the speed of responses to from 800ms to 50ms!

This was possible thanks to Elixir’s ability to be distributed across different nodes while maintaining clear communication between them, which has a major impact on speed.

#9 Financial Times

An international daily newspaper focused on business and economic news made use of Elixir’s meta-programming ability and the Absinthe framework in Elixir to develop DSLs. Their senior software developer said that Elixir was easy to pick up by their team and that the learning curve is rather low.

Financial Times uses Elixir for microservices in their system.

#10 Lonely Planet

A great example of using Elixir with Phoenix Framework by a website handling millions of users while managing requests to external booking websites.

Elixir allows creating a pool of workers to access external APIs while Phoenix is a system for building complex websites. Phoenix makes documentation and extensibility easy.

Summary

As you can see, companies from various different industries are using Elixir to gain speed, reliability and performance. It is ideal for websites accepting heavy traffic, high numbers of requests or need to be seamlessly integrated with 3rd party solutions.

Even if those are not applicable to your project, you can still enjoy the ease of use of Elixir, which can compete with well-known languages like Ruby.

To find out more information on that, read our post on Why choose Elixir.

And if you need help in developing your new Elixir project, check out our expert development team.