Leading Companies Using Elixir: 7 Use Cases
Last updated:
July 13, 2026
5 min read
Elixir
Alexandra Lozovyuk
Content Strategist
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A strong language, with an enormous amount of attention to detail, the Elixir language itself is a new dynamic language that run on top of the BEAM virtual machine with elixir code which has been around for a while and is well-regarded throughout the world for its strengths when dealing with:
If you're interested to know, when Elixir makes business sense, Elixir isn't an information technology silver bullet, but has a great expertise for real-time software, applications that can solve heavy concurrency, and generally for applications and accessible framework that are designed to "just work", even in the face of failure, for every company and business in need.
Consequently, this is why a variety of startups using Elixir are increasingly adopting it as their choice of tech for:
The Elixir language is built atop of the BEAM virtual machine, that, the world over, is recognized for the most recognisable points (that you can also see in Elixir open-source projects):
The benefits of the BEAM to Elixir is in providing all of those aspects at speed without the complexity that can arise from system faults.
This post doesn't focus solely on Elixir based startup hiring teams (that one you can find in Elixir Startup Case Studies) - but examines a variety of successful companies and real-world Elixir demand case studies within established enterprise businesses, providers and industries (as AI, for example, and more of it you can also find in Elixir for agentic workflows post).
These ELIXIR based software examples showcase:
Why Modern Companies Choose Elixir
There is really no way to argue against the fact that the Elixir language is being used in today’s workplace because nearly all of our modern applications are implicitly concurrent in nature - they are designed to handle a lot of aspects all at once, and that system can help with it.
It's not at all uncommon to encounter Elixir companies leveraging BEAM's native ability to run lightweight processes in isolation instead of trying to engineer custom workarounds for what are essentially core requirements in real-time software systems.
Elixir also gives developers - both your team and on demand workers - an experience they will find familiar. Teams gain all the reliability models from Erlang’s stack in the form of easier-to-write syntax with up-to-date tools.
For enterprises trying to figure out what is Elixir, the short answer is it's a system that particularly shines in areas requiring high concurrency, fault-tolerant systems and real-time coordination.
Discord: Erlang VM’s power through a user-friendly language
Perhaps the most well-known example of Elixir usage is Discord, with over 200 million active monthly users and 690 million all-time registered users in 2026
The challenge of their core product perfectly mirrored BEAM. At its heart, massive scale messaging and communication needs to handle:
Discord picked up on the possibility that Elixir offered very early on and even originally prototyped using the language, allowing access to BEAM capabilities via a more contemporary language. As CNBC put it, if Slack is a conference room, Discord is a bar. It offers more customization, it has no messaging limits, and its free version provides access to numerous communities.
They needed lightweight processes, per-client process isolation, and fault-tolerant message routing at extreme scale. In such a system, an isolated process being saturated and having a failure should not affect a user in another part of the system, and that’s what Elixir offers with processes in BEAM.
Elixir beat more conventional alternatives here because it aligned naturally with the product model.
That is one of the clearest Elixir use cases in production. The company continues to use Elixir and shares the development experience in the blog.
Spotify: dealing with heavy traffic efficiently
The team at Spotify took Elixir in a different and no less practical direction. Elixir helped the team to break through some issues and deal with a ‘JVM-built backend service handling thousands of requests per second.’
The platform provides different services for music and podcast enthusiasts and has more than 626 million people use Spotify once a month, 246 million are subscribers.
Their production environment is a high-traffic system dealing with:
The technology not only dealt with the high traffic load, but “significantly decreased development time due to not having a distinct single page application front end and JSON API back-end” (according to Spotify engineering observations).
So the Spotify use case is interesting because it illustrates a two-fold value from Elixir:
According to Joel Camp, Phoenix LiveView’s programming model enabled the team to build the app in half the time and with half the team involved, compared to a single-page app with a JSON API backend.
Pepsi Co: marketing intelligence with Elixir apps
Elixir isn’t just for chat and dev tools - PepsiCo is proving it works even in an enterprise.
Its success owes a lot to Elixir and the Phoenix framework, but first things first.
Elixir’s journey there started in 2016 with a search marketing workflow app. Initially, this app provided workflow automation for managing search marketing operations. Now, this Elixir app plays a crucial role in a data pipeline, providing sales and marketing teams with advanced tools.
Elixir was the right tool for PepsiCo to make rapid, assured progress.
If you're trying to consider Elixir a wise business decision, PepsiCo is just a great reminder that the language is as good for enterprise automation and internal platforms as it is for those exposed to the outside.
Toyota Connected: bringing Elixir to automotive
Toyota Connected, for example, is one of the clearest examples of Elixir in automotive and IoT-style infrastructure. The company manages telemetry-based technology in over 9 million Toyota and Lexus vehicles in North America alone.
The Mobility Services Platform drives Elixir-based technologies that facilitate various aspects of connected vehicle services:
Because of this, systems must handle a large number of events that originate from vehicles, mobile apps, external APIs and cloud services.
Elixir’s model provides advantages in dealing with these requirements.
Managing millions of connected cars that will send messages to the cloud requires:
- and the whole system still works.
That makes Toyota Connected one of the most compelling companies using Elixir outside the software-native startup world.
For businesses that are exploring the Elixir telecom platform or other real-time connected systems, this case shows why BEAM’s reliability matters.
Pinterest: fewer servers, less code, more efficiency and growth
Pinterest is a visual tool that allows users to create virtual pinboards and organize their content, and is often cited as one of the strongest performance stories among companies that use Elixir.
Elixir provided savings estimated to be more than $2 million in infrastructure costs a year in one example.
It highlights how Elixir’s efficient concurrency model, powered by BEAM, enabled them to reduce many more of their necessary server requirements for a real-time notification system and helped simplify a real-time notification workload that had previously required much more server capacity.
This is one of the most persuasive Elixir use cases because it links architecture directly to measurable infrastructure savings.
Square Enix: handling high concurrency
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Square Enix (many of us know them thanks to famous titles such as Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest) deployed Elixir for a gaming context where concurrency is at the core of the business problem. In practice, that means handling large amounts of concurrent player identity activity across a distributed ecosystem.
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One of the latest Square Enix game releases
They also need to integrate with multiple internal services and external identity sources. Elixir works well here because it gives teams tools to manage concurrent operations more cleanly than many traditional stacks.
By utilizing Elixir, they have given their team the capacity to address concurrency in ways not easily possible in traditional stacks.
That makes Square Enix another strong example of companies using Elixir for distributed, high-concurrency backends.
Sketch: collaborative design process with Elixir
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Sketch a good example since it shows how Elixir supports real-time collaboration outside communication apps. The platform combines native and browser-based tools that let users:
Sketch, where concurrent editing and low-latency synchronization are enabled and drive much of the user experience, so making Elixir part of the real-time collaborative experience only made sense for a productivity tool used by product teams; it’s a core part of the backend infrastructure supporting this model.
It also shows why Elixir remains relevant for design and productivity software, where user experience depends on smooth real-time coordination. You can find more details on the GitHub page.
Common Patterns Across Companies Using Elixir
Looking at all these different examples, you can see the same underlying technical trends appear repeatedly.
The first is Concurrency.
In all instances here, you see that a company is using Elixir to handle those:
The next one is Fault Tolerance.
Companies don’t pick Elixir just to go fast; they want Elixir for their large concurrent systems precisely because BEAM can help you:
Last here, distributed systems.
Elixir systems are widely applicable here, where the software is not composed of a single monolithic app server. Many companies using Elixir rely on it as a network of:
And all of those that must stay coordinated in real time, and Elixir can provide that.
Why Elixir Continues to Power Modern Scalable Systems
The biggest takeaway from the above examples of companies that use Elixir is that it is a great help where modern systems crave:
- it’s where Elixir proves highly effective.
It's an ideal language for any:
For teams building distributed systems, real-time applications, or fault-tolerant platforms, Elixir remains a strong engineering choice.
At Freshcode, we help businesses design and build scalable systems where BEAM’s strengths translate into measurable product value. If you are looking for an Elixir development company or need support for platforms like an Elixir ERP system, schedule a free 1:1 consultation with the Freshcode business development manager to discuss your Elixir project and our solutions.
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