Hologram works. Elixir runs in the browser today - four feature releases this year, most of the standard library working client-side, a full realtime layer, JavaScript interop, and the first applications running in production.

New to Hologram? My ElixirConf EU 2025 talk is the introduction to what it is and why it exists.

What comes next is bigger than any of it. Local-first: applications that keep working offline and sync automatically when the connection returns, built into the framework instead of assembled by hand from three libraries and a lot of hope. No full-stack framework in any language ecosystem ships this. Hologram is close enough to be the first.

Whether that gets built comes down to the next few months, and to whether companies decide to put weight behind it. I'd rather say that plainly now than have it show up later as a project that quietly slowed down.

Here's where things stand, and how you or the company you work for can help.

What sponsorship built

Eight months ago I wrote that I was at a crossroads, splitting 60+ hour weeks between contract work and the framework. The community answered. Curiosum came on board as Main Sponsor, the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation funded a set of development milestones, and individual sponsors signed up on GitHub.

Four public feature releases came out of it, v0.7 through v0.10 - with v0.11 landing now.

v0.7

Elixir's standard library in the browser

Elixir's stdlib calls Erlang functions underneath, so running it client-side meant porting those functions. A community initiative took client-side coverage from a fraction of the standard library to nearly all of it - 150 Erlang functions ported by 49 contributors, most of them making their first contribution to a BEAM project. The release that concluded it hit the Hacker News front page at 107 points.

v0.8

JavaScript interop

Import npm packages, call Web APIs, use Web Components, and await JavaScript promises as Elixir Tasks. A VS Code extension shipped alongside it.

v0.9

Hologram Realtime

This grew well past its original scope. What began as server-triggered actions became a full realtime layer - pub/sub fan-out, think Phoenix Channels, but built fresh for Hologram and tailored end to end for developer experience.

v0.10

Events and middleware

A much-expanded client-side event system and a server-side middleware layer, plus client-side error handling with full try/rescue/catch/after/else in the browser, and comprehension parity.

v0.11

Regular expressions and client error stacktraces landing now

Elixir's PCRE-based regexes compiled for Hologram's client runtime, with =~ and the rest of the Regex functions, plus client-side error messages and stacktraces that match the server for easier debugging.

And beyond the releases themselves: first-class AI assistant support - llms.txt, usage_rules compatibility, and per-project agent docs, so tools like Claude Code and Cursor write idiomatic Hologram instead of falling back on LiveView patterns.

The numbers moved with the work:

⭐

1,400+

GitHub Stars, up 40%+ since November's funding campaign

📦

3×

Hex downloads since November's funding campaign, still accelerating

📬

350+

Monthly newsletter subscribers

👥

49

Contributors in the porting initiative

• Ecosystem: other developers have started building tooling on top of Hologram, from devtools and IDE support to a testing framework built specifically for it
• Coverage: nine Thinking Elixir episodes over 18 months, a BEAM There Done That episode with Francesco Cesarini and Allen Wyma publishing this week, plus Elixir Radar, Elixir Weekly and Awesome Elixir carrying every release

So what changed? In January I wrote that Hologram had found sustainable funding. What I didn't spell out at the time is how the pieces fit: the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation's support came as an agreed program of four development milestones, each one a defined deliverable, not an open-ended arrangement. Three have been delivered and the fourth is finishing now, with its last piece shipping in v0.11. That program did exactly what it was designed to do, and it's reaching its end.

That isn't the Foundation stepping back. We're working together on a second round, and support earmarked for Hologram by companies through the EEF is what makes it possible - more on that below.

Curiosum continues as Main Sponsor, and individual sponsors are still here. Nothing fell through. What changed is that the roadmap ahead is more ambitious than everything behind it, and the first round of milestone funding covered exactly the stretch it was designed to cover.

Who is behind this

👑

José Valim

Creator of Elixir

📰

elixir-lang.org

José Valim & Wojtek Mach

🧡

Zach Daniel

Ash Framework Creator

Oban

Elixir background jobs

Moss Piglet

Privacy-first software

🤩

Adam Kirk

Jump.ai CTO

The first production applications have shipped, and the response from people using Hologram speaks for itself:

"It really is an amazing piece of work."

"I rolled my first Hologram application into production this week... the dev experience was exactly what was described on the box."

"LOADS of potential with Hologram. The 'NextJS' of Elixir, hopefully done right."

"Hologram has been a joy to use - I default to using it unless I really need some specific capability from LiveView."

Where Hologram goes next

Local-first

Hologram is positioned to become the first full-stack framework in any ecosystem with local-first built in. Applications that are offline by default: they keep working without a connection, hold the data you choose on the client, and sync automatically when the connection returns - backed by a declarative auto-syncing data layer instead of hand-rolled plumbing.

Nobody ships this built in. Not Rails, not Next.js, not Phoenix. It normally means bolting together a sync engine, a client store and a conflict resolution strategy, then maintaining all three forever. Hologram already runs Elixir in the browser, so the hardest part of the foundation is done.

I gave the talk on this at ElixirConf EU 2026, and it's the throughline of my upcoming ElixirConf US and Goatmire talks too:

One codebase, not two

The usual full-stack app is a backend in one language, a TypeScript frontend, and a contract between them that both sides have to keep honoring. Every feature touches all three, in two languages, on top of an npm dependency tree nobody has fully audited. LiveView spares Elixir teams most of that - until the app needs real client-side logic, and the JS hooks and npm tooling creep back in at the edges.

Hologram closes that gap. One language, one codebase, no JavaScript stack to maintain.

That doesn't mean giving up the JavaScript ecosystem. When a library is worth using - charts, maps, a payment widget - Hologram's JavaScript interop imports the npm package and you call it from Elixir, with Web APIs and Web Components covered too. JavaScript becomes something you reach for when it earns its place, not a second stack your team owns.

Most of what that saves shows up outside the code. A feature stops needing a backend developer, a frontend developer and a meeting to agree on the shape of the JSON between them - one person can carry it end to end. There's no API contract to design, version and keep in sync, and no class of bug that exists only because two sides drifted apart. One toolchain, one CI pipeline, one dependency tree to audit. Onboarding is one stack to learn, not two.

The hiring argument is not that Elixir developers are easy to find. It's that the ones you already have can own the whole feature, instead of your team being sized by how many frontend specialists you can also afford.

That matters more in 2026 than it did in 2019, because of who reads the code now. An AI agent working across a split stack has to hold the backend, the frontend and the contract between them in context at once, and it gets the seams wrong. A single Elixir codebase is small enough for an agent to reason about end to end, with far fewer places to get it wrong.

That's not theory - it's already how people build with it:

"Writing Hologram was almost disappointingly simple. I asked Codex to port our payment terminal simulator and it was done so fast I had to check it actually did it."

Less work for the teams already shipping

Hologram is in production today. The rest of the roadmap is about making that path shorter for everyone who follows: auth and forms out of the box instead of written by hand, security hardening built in, a proper testing toolkit, readable client-side stacktraces, and a standalone mode that installs in two terminal commands - run Hologram inside your Phoenix application as you do today, or on its own when you don't need the rest.

None of this is a prerequisite for shipping - teams are shipping now. It's the difference between a framework you can build on and one that does the repetitive parts for you, which is the same distance Phoenix covered in its own early years.

Where this leads

Offline support is only where local-first starts. An application whose data layer already works without a connection and reconciles when one returns is most of the way to being a mobile application, and most of the way to being a desktop one.

🌐

Web today

Elixir in the browser today, with the local-first data layer being built now to make it offline-capable.

📱

Mobile

The same codebase, on mobile.

🖥️

Desktop

And on the desktop.

That's the direction the roadmap points: one Elixir codebase, running on the web, on mobile and the desktop, offline by default and syncing across all of them.

Companies pay for that today by staffing separate teams and separate stacks to get it. I won't put a date on it - but the sequence is deliberate: the foundation is already built, the local-first layer is going on top of it now, and it's what makes this more than a nicer way to write frontends.

For companies

Curiosum backs Hologram as Main Sponsor, and that support is what makes full-time work on the framework possible at all. They came in early, before most of what I've described here existed. Here's their CTO, Michał Buszkiewicz, on why:

"Supporting Hologram was a conscious choice among a variety of open-source projects that use Elixir to bridge client-side and server-side code. Properly executed, its ambitions make it an alternative not only to Phoenix, but to popular JS solutions for isomorphic, offline-capable development such as SvelteKit or Next.js."

"Many applications for a broad audience eventually go offline at least briefly - especially collaboration tools, chats, and anything for mobile. Phoenix LiveView is great and battle-tested, but that's not where it shines, even if you can work around its server-side state management with LiveSvelte, Inertia.js, or custom JS. With offline and local-first built in, Hologram fits this niche: live, reactive, offline-capable UIs with almost zero JS."

The roadmap ahead - local-first, the batteries-included work, the tooling story - is bigger than everything behind it, and there is room for more companies alongside them.

It's worth being clear about the scale. In a single codebase, Hologram is the equivalent of several major frameworks at once - a compiler that turns Elixir into JavaScript, a client runtime, a component and template system, a realtime layer, and now a local-first data layer. Each of those is normally a team's multi-year project. This is one person building all of it, with a community porting the standard library alongside - and sponsorship is what keeps that work full time.

The Scope

Compiler + Client Runtime + Template System + Realtime + Local-First

What sponsorship gets you

🏷️

Logo placement

Your logo on the Hologram homepage, documentation and README

📣

Release announcements

Recognition in every release announcement - around 30,000 first-days impressions across LinkedIn, X, Reddit, Bluesky, Elixir Forum, Discord and community newsletters

📬

Monthly newsletter

Placement in every issue, read by 350+ subscribers who signed up specifically to follow Hologram

🎤

Conference visibility

Visibility in my conference talks - this year that includes ElixirConf US and Goatmire Elixir

Recent peaks, each from a single post:

20.4K

LinkedIn impressions and 243 reactions on the post that launched the Erlang porting initiative

17K

Reddit views and 178 points on the funding announcement, among r/elixir's highest-scoring posts

13.6K

X impressions and 192 likes on the porting initiative announcement

107

Hacker News front page points and 29 comments when the v0.7 release was posted there

Company sponsors also get a say in what gets built next. If your team needs auth or a batteries-included forms layer before anything else, that's a conversation we can have and it moves up the roadmap. Same for the testing toolkit, standalone mode, or anything else on the list.

You're not paying into a general fund and hoping your priority surfaces eventually. The full roadmap is public - and if what you need isn't on it at all, tell me. That conversation is open too.

Two ways to do this

Both routes carry the full sponsor benefits above - and the EEF route adds the Foundation's own recognition on top.

MOST LEVERAGE

Erlang Ecosystem Foundation

The route where your money goes furthest

The EEF backed Hologram this past year through an agreed program of four development milestones - three delivered, the fourth wrapping up now. A second round is on the table, and company support earmarked for Hologram through the Foundation is what unlocks it. That makes a contribution here worth more than its face value: it funds the work, and it enables the Foundation to keep backing the project alongside you.

Many finance departments prefer this route anyway:

✓ The money goes to an established foundation

✓ It's invoiceable

✓ Your company is recognized by both the EEF and Hologram

The details are the Foundation's to set, so if this fits how your organization works, get in touch and I'll connect you.

GitHub Sponsors

Simple and immediate

$250/mo

Logo on the homepage and README

$500/mo

Prominent placement across the documentation, homepage and README

Set it up in a couple of minutes:

Prefer something else? A one-off contribution, funding a specific piece of work, consulting, technical support, training for your team. Tell me what fits how your company actually spends money and we'll work something out.

Let's talk

Email me at bart@bartblast.com, or reach me on LinkedIn if that's easier. I answer everything.

For everyone else

Individual sponsors have been the foundation of this from the start, and several were here long before any company was. If Hologram is useful to you, GitHub Sponsors has tiers at $14 and $29 a month - and custom amounts work too, whatever fits.

And let me be straight with you about where this leaves me. I'm not asking for more money to do more work. What's in place today doesn't add up to a sustainable living, and it was never meant to rest on a single sponsor. Hologram needs a few companies behind it for full-time work to make sense at all. I'd rather say that plainly than quietly slow down and leave you wondering what happened.

So if sponsorship isn't on the table for you, there's still something that costs nothing and helps more than you'd think. If your company uses Elixir, you probably know who handles this kind of budget. Forward this to them, or send me a name and I'll take it from there. Reach me by email, on LinkedIn, Discord or in a DM on the Elixir Forum, whatever's easiest. A name is enough.

Thank you to Curiosum as Main Sponsor, and to the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation as Milestone Sponsor. Their support is what made this stretch of full-time work on Hologram possible.

Thank you as well to everyone backing Hologram month by month on GitHub Sponsors - Innovation Partner Sheharyar Naseer, Framework Visionaries @absowoot, Oban, Robert Urbańczyk and Moss Piglet, and Early Adopters Daniel Calancea, @pasila, Jonatan Männchen, James Harton, Ian Asaff, @Makesesama, Dawid Danieluk, and backers Andrew Haust and Zach Daniel. Thanks also to the past sponsors who backed earlier stretches of this work, and to every contributor who got Hologram this far. The local-first work starting now is the most ambitious thing the project has attempted, and I'd like to keep building it in the open.

- Bart

Sponsored by

Main sponsor

Milestone sponsor

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