Let’s cut through the noise. If you’ve spent enough time building, scaling, or salvaging digital products, you’ve probably been hit with the “microservices vs monolith” question more than once. Everyone has a strong opinion. And like most tech debates, the right answer is: “It depends.”
A monolith is your all-in-one app. Everything is tightly integrated—your backend, frontend, and logic live together in one place.
I still remember building our first productivity tool as a monolith. It let us move at lightning speed.
Microservices are independent services that talk to each other over APIs or queues. Perfect for scalability, but they come with overhead.
While building a logistics platform, the load tracking started dragging billing. That’s when we split into microservices—it saved us.
In another case, I moved a cloud-based microservice app to an on-prem monolith for a client in China—it got insanely faster.
One of our HR tools never needed splitting—it was clean, single-use, and stayed that way. Overengineering kills momentum.
Architecture isn’t permanent. It evolves. Be honest with your bottlenecks. Refactor when needed. Don’t choose one style forever—choose what lets you ship fast and sleep well.