Controllers are the normal "C" inside MVC. That stuff that talks to your Models and passes it to the view / template layer. Plug [0] on the other hand is somet

Controllers are the normal "C" inside MVC. That stuff that talks to your Models and passes it to the view / template layer. Plug [0] on the other hand is something like "rack" in the ruby world, a "A specification for composable modules between web applications". Phoenix is built on plug. I think very simple you could say that plugs are pipes or similar to middlewares - functions that take the connection, transform it or do some checks based on something, then pass it to the next plug. Like a pipe full of functions. Because phoenix is built on it, it is very easy to specify custom plugs and add them to your request / transform pipeline. Someone correct me if I explained that wrong. [0]: https://github.com/elixir-lang/plug https://github.com/elixir-lang/plug