I have used both (though Clojure less). I have not built distributed applications in Elixir yet, so I do not focus on those features in this comment. I prefer Elixir because:

1. My brain thinks in terms of editing lines, not s-expressions; I didn't get the hang of paredit, and editing without paredit required really tedious edit operations.

2. Elixir's understanding of types matches Erlang's and the host VM, while Clojure invents its own uni-typed IObj but runs on a typed VM. Interop with Java required adding type annotations. Elixir/Erlang interop seems to be almost entirely pain-free.

3. Elixir has a lot of syntax niceties like triple-quoted strings that automatically remove indents. And pattern matching everywhere.

4. I can feasibly (and in fact, have) audited and built all of my Elixir and Erlang dependencies from git repositories, while doing the same with the Maven dependencies needed for a typical Java project would be almost impossible. I wouldn't even know where to begin with bootstrapping all the necessary Maven plugins.

5. Elixir/Erlang has per-process garbage collection and memory limits, though I haven't taken advantage of these yet.