Monorepo or Polyrepo?: Explained

Monorepo or Polyrepo? Explained

Answer a few questions about how tightly your projects are coupled, whether you need atomic cross-project changes, how your teams are organized, and your build-tooling appetite to choose between a monorepo, polyrepo, or a hybrid setup.

A monorepo puts many projects in one repository; a polyrepo gives each project its own. The choice turns on coupling: do your projects change together, or independently? A monorepo makes atomic, cross-project changes trivial and sharing code free, at the cost of heavier tooling. A polyrepo keeps each project simple and independent, at the cost of coordinated changes. Answer below to get a recommendation, ranked against the alternatives.

Decision guide · 3 options

The options

Monorepo

One repository holds every project and shared package.

One product built by a tight team, where projects share code, change together, and benefit from a single build, test, and release pipeline (pnpm workspaces, Turborepo, Nx).

Polyrepo (multi-repo)

Each project lives in its own repository.

Independent products, separate teams, or open-source libraries that version and release on their own schedules and must stay decoupled.

Hybrid

A core monorepo plus separate repos for independent parts.

A shared core product in a monorepo alongside semi-independent services, vendored dependencies, or submodules owned by different teams with their own release cadence.

Which one fits you?

Answer a few questions to get a recommendation.

Question 1 of 4