A workspace is one self-contained project that lives alongside others inside a single repository, also called a monorepo. Each workspace, say a website, a mobile app and a shared design library, has its own code and its own dependency list, while sharing one set of build tools and one history. From the outside it looks like a normal project. From the inside it knows it has neighbours.
Picture an office building where each team has its own floor but shares the lobby, the lifts and the front desk. The teams stay independent and run their own meetings, yet a change to the shared reception affects everyone instantly. That is what workspaces give you: separate projects that still pull from common, shared code. They are usually set up inside a monorepo and wired together by a package manager like npm or pnpm, which knows how the pieces connect and installs everything in one pass.
The big win is consistency. When several apps depend on the same internal library, a workspace lets you update that library once and have every app see the new version straight away. No copying files between folders, no version drift where one app runs an old build while another runs the new one. And when a developer joins, they clone a single repository and get the whole picture, not five scattered projects they have to stitch together themselves.
At TopDevs we reach for workspaces when a client has multiple apps that share logic, so a single fix lands everywhere instead of being repeated across separate codebases.
