Microfrontends sound amazing on paper. Independent teams, faster deployments, no more stepping on each other’s code, what’s not to love? The reality is messier. While the benefits are real, they come with headaches that can make you question whether breaking up that monolith was worth it.
This article explores the four most recurring challenges that emerge when teams transition to microfrontends, along with battle-tested solutions that have proven effective in production environments. In other words, here’s what actually goes wrong and how to fix it.
Challenge #1: Shared State Becomes a Nightmare
Here’s the bitter irony: teams tend to be more coupled with microfrontends than they were before. You can’t get around the fact that apps need to share things: user authentication, shopping carts, preferences. What starts out as tidy separation ends up as a tangle of entanglements when Team A needs user data from Team B while Team C owns the auth flow they both depend on.
When someone alters their user state structure without telling anyone, development teams frequently have to spend weeks troubleshooting the problem. So much for autonomy.
The answer is to directly stop sharing state. Data from other teams should be treated with appropriate contracts and versioning, just like external APIs. Instead of using shared variables, use events.
According to M&S Software Engineer Nikolay Gushchin, “Keep microfrontends as decoupled as possible… using clearly defined event contracts or shared services helps keep it manageable.”
Challenge #2: Performance Takes a Hit
Independent builds mean every team bundles their own React, date libraries, and utilities. Your sleek 500KB monolith suddenly becomes a 2MB+ monster as each team optimises in isolation.
Users notice. Pages feel sluggish with layout shifts as different microfrontends load at their own pace. The browser downloads multiple vendor chunks, and nothing gets cached efficiently.
Break up the large things, don’t touch the special things. Module Federation in Webpack 5 enables you to share React and shared libraries while keeping business logic decoupled. Use progressive hydration: render essential content first, interactive components second. Investigate CDN-level module federation for better caching. This reduces the network overhead of independent deployments while maintaining the flexibility teams need.
Gushchin highlights this trade-off: “Properly done, microfrontends can improve performance. you only load what you need for a given page,” although he warns that “serving multiple large bundles can slow down initial load times” when not done correctly.
Challenge #3: Your UX Starts Looking Frankensteined
Users undoubtedly notice the subtle variations that arise from each team shipping independently. Inconsistent loading patterns, different button hover states, and inconsistent form validation all contribute to an uneven user experience.
Design systems are beneficial, but only if teams use them regularly. You will drift if there is no enforcement. Teams need both technical guardrails and cultural practices that prioritise cohesive user experience over team-level optimisation.
Automating consistency checks is the answer. To identify design deviations prior to production, use tools such as Stylelint. Put design tokens into place at the infrastructure level to make things more difficult to break by accident. “Without a shared design system or common UI library, you could end up with each microfrontend looking and feeling slightly different,” cautions Gushchin.
Challenge #4: Deployments Get Scary
Until your change disrupts someone else’s routing or results in navigation issues you didn’t observe during testing, independent deployments seem fantastic. These integration problems are cunning; they frequently only manifest when production load is applied. As a result, teams lose confidence in deployments, leading to longer release cycles and more coordination overhead than the original monolithic approach.
The remedy: invest in integration preview environments and contract testing. To see how changes impact the entire app, use tools such as Storybook.
Establish clear ownership boundaries with documented APIs and service-level agreements between teams. When the checkout team updates their routing structure, they should provide migration guides and support periods for dependent applications.
Consider implementing canary deployments at the microfrontend level, allowing teams to gradually roll out changes while monitoring integration health metrics. This approach catches deployment issues early while limiting blast radius
When Should You Actually Use Microfrontends?
Not every application benefits from microfrontend architecture. The decision should be based on organisational structure and technical requirements rather than architectural trends.
Go for it when:
- You have multiple teams with different release schedules
- Coordination overhead is killing your productivity
- You have strong DevOps practices and automated testing
- You need to integrate legacy or third-party systems
Skip it when:
- Your team is small enough to coordinate directly
- Features are heavily interdependent
- You don’t have mature CI/CD practices
- Performance is your top priority
In summary, people’s technological issues are resolved by microfrontends. When the organisational advantages outweigh the technical difficulties, they function at their best. Stay with the monolith if your team can work together well and performance is more important than autonomy.
Choose microfrontends when coordination is your bottleneck, not when you’re chasing the latest architecture trend.
