Phoenix channels don't really depend on MVC. It's common to make use of them in MVC apps, but they can be used standalone. I'm using Phoenix channels as a PubS

Phoenix channels don't really depend on MVC. It's common to make use of them in MVC apps, but they can be used standalone. I'm using Phoenix channels as a PubSub implementation in production, entirely separate from any web framework or HTTP request handling. As for the transport itself, Phoenix channels do have native support for both websockets and long polling, but I'm not sure offhand if it automatically falls back when websockets aren't available.