Appreciated for being one of the most loved languages, Elixir is chosen by more and more developers and technology managers. Companies using Elixir praise its elegant syntax and scalability. You’d be surprised how many big apps and websites are built with this language - we have already described them in our latest article.
At Appunite, as one of the biggest Elixir companies in Poland, we can confirm that the trend of choosing this language is well established for good reasons. Except for the obvious Elixir fans, there are many companies using Elixir that you should definitely hear about. Let’s take a look at them.
1. Change.org
Change.org is a platform to launch online petitions but to also question global decision-makers: elected officials, companies and associations.
It was founded in California in 2007 by Ben Rattray, a young entrepreneur who wanted to become a trader. Presently in over 20 countries, it is the world's leading petition platform. The site is mostly financed by donations from Internet users that sponsor petitions.
On the official Elixir site we can read that at some point developers in change.org experimented with implementing 4 languages: JRuby, Akka Streams, Node.js, and Elixir.
The goal was to evaluate performance, developer experience, and community support for their specific use cases. Each technology had to process 100k messages as fast as possible. (...) After two evaluation rounds, the team chose to go ahead with Elixir.
2020, Elixir.com
It was a big success and developers still use Elixir in change.org today.
2. Pagerduty
PagerDuty Inc. is a cloud computing company headquartered in San Francisco, that provides incident management solutions and platforms. The company was founded in 2009 by three former Amazon engineers, Alex Solomon, Andrew Miklas and Bhaskar Pvanashasan.
On the official PagerDuty site, there is an article that explains fully how the company decided to switch from Scala language to Elixir. In the article, Cees de Groot says:
Elixir has been mostly selling itself: it works, it sits on a rock-solid platform, code is very understandable (...). By now, it’s pretty unlikely that anything that flows through PagerDuty is not going to be touched by Elixir code.
Needless to say, the company was satisfied with the transition and its developers still use Elixir today.
3. X-Plane
Do we have any gamers here? X-Plane is a fairly popular flight simulation game, accessible both for PC and mobile platforms. It’s worth mentioning that this game can also serve for analytics and prediction research. The simulator created by Laminar Research makes it possible to calculate the flight qualities of several types of aircraft.
No surprise, X-Plane also on this list as one of the companies using Elixir. Lately, developers have decided to introduce a mobile multiplayer server working with this very language.
In the article on the official Elixir site we can read:
Elixir processes are cheap, isolated, concurrent, and are fairly scheduled by the runtime. This design allowed the X-Plane team to fully leverage the properties of robustness and predictable latency that first attracted them to the platform.
4. Frame.io
Frame.io is a cloud-based video collaboration and review platform that enables creative teams to upload, review and share video content privately. Including communication, collaboration and creative integration tools, Frame.io helps users streamline the video creation process. It also allows users to collaborate from anywhere via their native iOS mobile app.
In 2018, the company made a major leap towards implementing Elixir into their projects. On their official website there is an article where we can read:
Frame.io recently made a major move to Elixir, implementing nearly all of our API on a pure Elixir stack. This has been an amazing success for us so far, allowing us to leverage a very powerful stack (...) to make a clean, efficient api codebase for our entire platform.
In Frame.io developers use Elixir mostly for its Elasticsearch libraries. In general, they praise Elixir as a dev-friendly ecosystem
5. FontAwesome
FontAwesome is the second-biggest shareholder, after GoogleFonts, in the market of external font scripts. It’s a toolkit used to design icons and fonts based mostly on CSS and LESS languages.
But interestingly, FontAwesome started to use Elixir. In the blogosphere thinkingelixir.com, we can find a whole podcast episode where Rob Madole, a developer from FontAwesome, explains why companies using Elixir inspired his organization to do the same. As top reasons, Madole mentions that the language was easy to introduce to the team and that many helpful resources can be found in the community.
6. Find Hotel
FindHotel is a platform allowing users to search for hotels and choose among their best price offers. An emerging competitor for booking.com and Trivago, FindHotel found its place on our list, as it’s one of the companies using Elixir language.
On its official blog, we can find an article that goes through the process of adopting Elixir as its prior coding language. We can read:
At FindHotel we have engineers with many years of experience developing in Ruby. Those skills and expertise were naturally put in use when developing our Elixir applications, making the transition totally smooth.
7. BlockFi
Founded in 2017, BlockFi was one of the first companies to offer loans collateralized by crypto assets. In addition to this, the company allows users to generate interest in their cryptocurrencies by storing them on the platform.
The startup is also one of the very few in this sector that uses Elixir for its backend coding. Growing faster than most of its competitors, BlockFi is constantly on the search for Elixir engineers and developers.
8. Telnyx
One of the next companies using Elixir is Telnyx, a Voip-SIP software for professionals. It’s often used in the tertiary and services sector, by small and medium sized companies and for IT - DSI and administrative jobs. Just as the previous startup, Telnyx’s developers use Elixir to build the software.
In several job descriptions we can find their reasoning: Elixir is the language that covers the advantages of both Ruby and Erlang, but also offers better coding experience and easier transition from one language to another. To prove that point, Telnyx usually emphasizes that the candidates don’t have to know Elixir in advance. As a company that delivered Elixir projects to over 100 million users, we can confirm: Elixir is one of the best languages for your developers to learn and to provide the highest quality software.
9. Hubs by Mozilla
Mozilla is a free and open source web browser available for PCs and mobiles, developed and distributed by the Mozilla Foundation since 2003, with the help of thousands of volunteers. In 2018, the Hubs project came into life, which was intended to be a virtual space where users can move, connect and communicate. From the beginning developers saw the benefits of using languages like Elixir and Phoenix. As we can read on the official Elixir website:
Overall, Elixir and Phoenix reduce the effort needed to cause the largest impact possible across our whole product.
10. Moz Pro
Founded in the USA and created by SEOmoz company, Moz Pro is a highly efficient web analytics software. It’s not just a tool, but rather a set of SEO tools that allow performing actions that range from keyword targeting to reporting. Its most valuable features allow users to increase traffic, visibility and rankings.
In 2016, engineering manager Devin Ellis officially stated that the company is moving to the new solution:
We are abandoning MySQL database storage—our current infrastructure’s decisive bottleneck—in favor of a database-free architecture and an Elixir-driven data indexing model.
February 16, 2016, moz.com
Not only that, in the following blog post, Ellis stated that Elixir helped to “dramatically reduce storage requirements, speed up the data processing pipeline, and deliver rankings data in our app through a blazing-fast API.” (2016, moz.com).
There is no doubt that Elixir has become more and more popular with developers over the last couple of years. If you are interested in choosing this language for your project, don’t hesitate to contact us! We’re happy to answer all your questions and help you start your journey with Elixir.
