The benefits of using Elixir for back end development: Our perspective

The most obvious difference between Phoenix and Rails is the leaning on code generators. You run a mix command to generate out the data models, migrations, and controller / live view and all the code is there in your project. It makes use of functions from the phoenix library, but if you don't like how something is working you just change the code. This very much removes the "magic" and makes changing the behaviour as simple as reading your code.

This was a big difference for me when I was trying out Rails vs Phoenix to figure out which direction to go in. It made the experience feel simpler as I spent more time reading standard "elixir" code and very little time reading special "phoenix" DSL code. When I was exploring rails, this dynamic felt like flipped to me.