[Matthias247]

I would agree that in both Akka and Erlang message passing works in an asynchronous way.

For me the difference is more that Akka has a push-style approach to message processing in the receiver (the receive message is automatically called) whereas Erlang and also e.g. the F# Mailboxprocessor use a pull-style appproach (you call receive to fetch a message). I like the latter approach better, because it allows one to start also different asynchronous operations which won't be interrupted by the reception of a new message.