Phoenix is definitely production ready, as I am using it in many production systems now. 1) You have to eventually get into OTP. Elixir language is ok but all the stuff which makes it attractive is OTP and it's concurrency. If you are building a very small API you don't have to learn OTP ans you can get very far with that. 2) I find Phoenix documentation very good and the number of examples are increasing a lot day by day. 3) The default included bootstrap is just to show the landing page. You have to add your own css which you have to do if you use any other framework or library. 4) Phoenix is nothing like Django or Rails. Phoenix is very modular. See http://theerlangelist.com/article/phoenix_is_modular