Comment by Marcus on "Which one between Phoenix and Rails should I choose for our next project?"

I will give both sides but my answer over all is Phoenix hands down(my opinion).

Rails has more people using it and has more developed open source tools to work with. Ruby is a robust language with many great features but I find myself doing the can I fit this in one line dance too often. However Rails is the real issue since it has problems on the back end with user connections. If you plan on having server rendered I would stay away from Rails because it sounds like with a single server you might want to have the ability to have better load balancing.

Phoenix is new, it does not have all tons of open source projects that fix all the issues. However, it uses Elixir, a language that also makes use of Erlang. If you didn't know Erlang was invented by Ericsson a telecommunications compony so keeping open feed was most important. Also it runs on BEAM and you can easily implement multi core processing with elixir. It is definitely a language I would choose for a project that is about to go big and get many users. However I would use Scala for something like financial stuff for banks or stocks or ML. Elixir still does not have a "great" open source ML lib yet.

I hope this helps. If you would like to learn more about Elixir and BEAM let me know. BEAM and Erlang OTP really out class other languages in this realm. Also Elixir was created to be a smooth transition for Ruby programmers.

I don't believe that the issue would be that Rails couldn't handle that many but that rails wouldn't handle as many as Phoenix. I would say if you don't plan on your number of users to grow very then stay with Rails, especially if your team has more rails experience and this is production.

However if you plan on the users to grow large and you want to stay up to date with incoming technologies then I would migrate to Phoenix. For me I know just as much about rails as Phoenix but I wouldn't choose Rails over Phoenix. I wouldn't choose NodeJs over Phoenix either. I wouldn't place your preference of rails over the possibility of your fellow coworkers getting to learn Phoenix better. I took a course on it over a week and learned how phoenix worked. It took me a month or so to figure out how rails worked. However.. Elixir the language has a lot to learn since it uses its own virtual machine BEAM. And certain methods you have to be careful not to use incorrectly.

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