As someone who's just started with Ruby/Rails what are the benefits of switching to Elixir?

If you're going to write websites, stay with Rails. I'm a long time Erlang developer and even today there is no good web framework (sure, a few exists, but none of them make it as pleasant to develop websites as Rails).

If you're going to write a server application, even REST and HTTP, Erlang and Elixir is a superb choice (I would argue better than Ruby with Sinatra, for example) because of the concurrency model and the ability to handle protocols and binary data.

There are also a few nice template libraries for Erlang (for example https://github.com/mojombo/mustache.erl) so if you just need some templating and don't mind writing some glue yourself it could still be a good option.

In terms of frameworks, no, nothing competes with Rails because Rails is simply too big an ecosystem to compete with on even terms for a relatively niche language. Chicago Boss is pretty nice, with a very friendly community, though. It's worth a look.

The Erlang VM. Ruby on Rails is in a different category honestly. Elixir and Erlang are not web frameworks.

elixir doesn't have a mature framework like Rails, but I could easily see using Elixir for things that I would use sinatra for.

Key Advantages: * better performance * easier to write services that stay up thanks to OTP * better memory management

The common strength that elixir shares w/ Ruby is that is also very expressive

Better execution model.

The main loss is a much drearier ecosystem.