At its core, Elixir is effectively a wrapper of Erlang but with small tweaks/wrappers of the core library, Ruby-ish syntax, piping with `|>`, Mix project management, Hex package management, ExUnit for testing, and several other quality of life improvements. Elixir can easily call Erlang code, which is not easy the other way around. The biggest difference is that Elixir has a vibrant community, big projects like Phoenix, LiveView, and Livebook.