At the heart of every Phoenix application is the often “invisible” HTTP server layer.

For over a decade Cowboy has served the community well. In 2020, the pure-Elixir Bandit came as an alternative that later became the default for newly created applications.

Looking at Hex.pm download data, we found out that July 2026 marked the point when Bandit’s steady climb has finally reached parity with the volume of downloads that Cowboy gets.

If you like charts going up to the right, here’s where you see Bandit’s. With that comes also the payoff for Elixir’s specification and library Plug, which makes it possible to replace the underlying HTTP server without code changes.