| Simple to develop relative to microservices where skilled developers are required in order to identify and develop the services. | Skilled developers are required to work with microservices architecture which can identify the microservices and manage their inter-communications. |
| Easier to deploy as only a single jar/war file is deployed. | Independent deployment of microservices is complicated. Being a distributed system, it is much more complex than the monolothic applications. Its complexity increases with the increase in number of microservices. |
| The problems of network latency and security are relatively less in comparison to microservices architecture. | Microservices are less secure relative to monolithic applications due to the inter-services communication over the network. |
| Debugging is easier here as control flows in same application. | Debugging is difficult as the control flows over many microservices and to point out why and where exactly the error occurred is a difficult task. |
| It becomes too large in size with time and hence, difficult to manage. | It is easy to manage as it is relatively smaller in size. |
| If there’s any update, we need to redeploy the whole application even for a small change. | If there’s any update in one of the microservices, then we need to redeploy only that microservice. |
| As the size of the application increases, its start-up and deployment time also increases. | Microservices are self-contained and hence, deployed independently. Their start-up and deployment time are relatively less. |
| For any new developer joining the project, it is very difficult to understand the logic of large Monolithic application even if his responsibility is related to a single functionality. | It is very easy for a new developer to on-board the project as he needs to understand only a particular microservice providing the functionality he will be working on and not the whole system. |
| Even if a single part of the application is facing a large load/traffic, we need to deploy the instances of the whole application in multiple servers. It is very inefficient and takes up more resources unnecessarily. Hence, horizontal scaling is not feasible in monolithic applications. | If a particular microservice is facing a large load because of the users using that functionality in excess then we need to scale out that microservice only. Hence, microservices architecture supports horizontal scaling. |
| It is very difficult to adopt any new technology which is well suited for a particular functionality as it affects the whole application, both in terms of time and cost. | Each microservice can use different technology based on the business requirements. |
| It is not very reliable as a single bug in any module can bring down the whole monolithic application. | If a particular microservice goes down due to some bug, then it doesn’t affect other microservices and the whole system remains intact, continues providing other functionalities to the users. |
