I'd avoid the cluster module, its not the recommended way to scale Node.js. It exists mostly as a way to make naive Node.js benchmarks perform better in multi-CPU comparison testing... like yours! :-) Many cloud providers charge per-CPU, so node's "mostly not threaded approach" is reasonable, IMO and that of many other users. Node is scaled by spinning up more instances, each instance being one of the cheapest "one CPU" variety. I'd be more interested in seeing a version of your benchmark that limited each of the language instances to a single CPU, and/or that spun up multiple node instances equivalent to one multi-cpu instance of go/elixir --- this latter may sound weird, but its a "cost equivalent" comparison, which is ultimately what's important: transactions served per $$.