Background <p>Over the past two decades, significant changes have occurred in the microbial inoculant industry. These microbes confer tolerance to host plants against different biotic and abiotic challenges which includes plant pathogens, drought, salinity, frost, heat, flooding, etc., by different mechanisms. Beyond these plant-microbe interactions, recent insights into microbe-microbe interactions revealed their symbiotic roles in nutrient uptake, stress resilience, and soil health. Microbial alternatives improve plant growth and health while ensuring environmental sustainability.</p> Main body <p>Since microbe live in community, not in isolation, the performance of bioformulation is also affected by the microbe-microbe interaction in different spheres, which can’t be ignored. The plant roots, leaves, seeds, rhizosphere, phyllosphere, etc. are rich and complicated microbial ecosystems where bacteria-bacteria, bacteria-fungi, fungi-fungi, and with many other microbial interactions occur. In this review, the microbe-microbe interactions have been discussed with respect to the crop resilience. Unlike other reviews, the present compilation critically integrates microbes with plants and other microbes as well along with their formulation part. This review critically synthesizes the current knowledge on plant-microbe interaction with specific reference to their integration with the microbial formulations to develop strategy for utilizing microbial formulations for climate resilient agriculture.</p> Conclusion <p>This review highlights context dependency of bioformulation, ecological stability, and the bottlenecks in popularization which pave the way for next generation bioformulation for climate-resilience in agriculture. This review integrates the ecological interaction with microbial formulation and presents a system-level perspective for successful microbial inoculant.</p>