One Repo To Rule Them All
For years, the monorepo versus polyrepo debate generated more heat than light. Monorepo advocates pointed to Google, Meta, and Microsoft running massive monorepos as proof that it scales. Polyrepo advocates argued that separate repos give teams autonomy and reduce blast radius. Both sides had valid points. But in 2025, the tooling has matured to the point where the debate is effectively settled for most teams: you should probably use a monorepo, and the tool you use to manage it matters less than the fact that you are using one. Why Monorepos Won The core advantage of a monorepo is atomic changes across packages. When you update a shared component library, you can update every app that uses it in the same pull request. No version bumping. No publishing to npm. No coordinating releases across five repos. Just change the code, run the tests, and ship. In a polyrepo setup, that same change requires updating the library, publishing a new version, then updating the dependency in each consuming repo, then running their tests, then deploying each one separately. That process takes hours. In a monorepo, it takes minutes. Turborepo Made It Easy Turborepo is the reason most small-to-medium teams should consider a monorepo. It is dead simple. Add a turbo.json to your project root, define your task pipeline, and Turborepo handles caching, parallelisation, and dependency ordering. Run turbo build and it builds all your packages in the right order, skipping anything that has not changed. The remote caching feature means your CI pipeline can reuse build artifacts from other developers' machines. A build that takes ten minutes the first time takes thirty seconds on subsequent runs. Vercel acquired Turborepo and has been investing heavily in it, so the future is solid. Nx For Larger Teams If your monorepo has more than a handful of packages and you need more structure, Nx is the answer. It provides a plugin system, code generators, dependency graph visualisation, and affected-based testing that only runs tests for packages impacted by your changes. Nx also supports multiple languages and build systems, which makes it the better choice if your monorepo contains both JavaScript and non-JavaScript projects. The learning curve is steeper than Turborepo, but the capabilities are broader. The Polyrepo Cases That Still Make Sense There are legitimate reasons to keep separate repos. Open source projects that need independent versioning and release cycles. Completely unrelated projects that share no code. Teams with fundamentally different deployment pipelines and security requirements. Microservices with separate teams that genuinely operate independently. But here is the thing — most teams that think they fall into these categories actually do not. If your services share types, utilities, or configuration, you are already in a monorepo in spirit. You are just doing it the hard way. The Package Manager Matters pnpm workspaces are the gold standard for monorepo package management in 2025. pnpm's strict dependency resolution prevents the phantom dependency problems that plague npm and yarn workspaces. Its content-addressable storage means your node_modules is dramatically smaller. And its workspace protocol makes linking local packages trivial. If you are starting a new monorepo today, use pnpm. If you are on yarn or npm workspaces and things are working, there is no urgent reason to switch, but pnpm is objectively better for monorepo setups. Getting Started The easiest path is Turborepo. Run npx create-turbo and you get a working monorepo with a web app, a shared UI library, and a TypeScript config package in under a minute. From there, add packages as you need them. Start with the obvious shared code — your component library, your TypeScript configs, your utility functions. Then gradually move more code into the monorepo as the benefits become clear. You do not need to migrate everything at once. A monorepo with two packages is still better than two repos that share code through npm.