Micro Frontend vs Microservices: What's the Difference?

"Micro Frontend is just Microservices for the frontend." I hear this in every architecture discussion. And it's wrong . They share the same philosophy — decompose a monolith into independently deployable units. But the implementation? Completely different layers, different tools, different problems they solve. Here's what most articles won't show you: The real confusion starts when you need BOTH. Your Products MFE calls the Product Service. Your Cart MFE calls the Cart Service AND the Logistics Service. Your Auth MFE and Account MFE both call the same User Service. One-to-many. Many-to-one. Through an API Gateway. With a shared axios singleton handling JWT refresh across every MFE. In this article, I break down: 📐 Side-by-side comparison across 14 dimensions (layer, communication, deployment, database, scaling, gateway, team ownership...) 🔗 How MFEs connect to Microservices through a shared API config pattern — real production code 🏗️ What a real Express.js microservice looks like (COR