[atemerev]

Akka is quite good in terms of reliability (I developed in both Akka and Erlang). All actors in Akka are supervised by default, and restarted if any exception happens.

This allows skipping most of error handling in Akka code. If something's wrong, your actor will be restarted. Works great!

[strmpnk]

This assumes failure is clean. Some failures are tougher, for example, imagine code going into an infinite loop. It either system, you have waste but the scale of the disruption in Erlang is kept isolated where Akka would fail to release the thread. Otherwise, I'd definitely agree that Akka handles vanilla failures just fine by using supervision trees.