[lawik]

Beyond the very subjective syntax, docs and whatnot I would say adoption. At this point there are a lot of Elixir libraries and frameworks that are built with Elixir and are quite popular that might not work from Erlang. Elixir is a steadily growing language with a strong enthusiastic following. Erlang is super cool but on comparison does seem to remain quite niche.

Some would say the Elixir advantage is marketing. I think there is more to it with an approachable web framework, an interesting DB library, pushing into current trends around SSR with LiveView even before Rails got Hotwire.

There's a lot of interesting work around Elixir, I've blogged about why it has me hooked a few times. Things like the Nerves project, Membrane Framework and Scenic are very cool in my book.