The common choice which is to be made when you search for an offshore software development vendor is: “Whom to choose – an outsourcing company or a freelancer?”. As the prevailing advantage of outsourcing is lower cost, clients, especially new to outsourcing, usually choose freelancers as their services are cheaper. But they often get a negative experience of such type of outsourcing. So what should a client consider deciding on an outsourcing vendor?

Project Management

Project Management services

Communicating and coordinating work of a single freelancer can be easy, but when your team grows to 3 or more freelancers it becomes very time-consuming to synchronize their work, make everyone working on separate tasks and then integrate results of their work. Company, on the contrary, provides project manager for a development team, who is coordinating their work in a professional way, tracking timeline, budget, other project parameters and delivering results to you.
Companies use established software development process, which implies frequent releases for your review and requirements clarification (if you do not review alpha releases frequently, then you may get to situation when the final product significantly differs from what you expected to see – you can get to such situation with freelancers, but not with a company). After review of each preliminary release you can update your requirements so the development of your product goes the right way.

Full cycle software development services

Freelancers usually offer single type of services, such as software or web development. They are usually not able to act as business or system analysts to collect requirements from you and create a specification for the project. Specification is a required attribute for projects larger than 1-2 man-months. Without specification you and development team will not have common understanding of requirements, this may lead to a significant waste of time for redesign and redoing the project. Companies provide requirements analysis services and can develop specification if you do not have one.
Freelancers often do not have testing skills, also consider the factor of that when the same person is developing and testing something this may be not the best approach comparing to two separate people for development and testing. Companies provide software testing services, they employ skilled testers specializing in this type of service.

You often need to set up your IT infrastructure or a remote server, then you have to hire an independent system administration freelancer for this type of work, because usually developers can do only basic system administration tasks. A company can easily provide system administration services of their expert-level administrator for a couple of hours.

So the company can provide wide range of services in contrast to freelancer who is specializing only in one type of work. This may be a considerable advantage if you do not have much time to release the product and do now want to waste it finding freelancers for all types of work you need to be done. A company helps here. You may forget about your headache.

Development team at a single place

All developers from a company are co-located and they easily communicate with each other managed by the project manager, so there’s no need to synchronize distributed team of freelancers using various tools. Companies also have enough software and hardware infrastructure which freelancers may lack as they are usually working from home.

Stability, image, reputation and recognition

Lower risks

On large, long term projects you may encounter is your freelancer disappearing due to some personal problem, this will significantly affect your timeline. Professional companies are much more stable and guarantee delivery in time, they can even provide a replacement for one of developers and they spend their own resources to avoid impact on your schedule.

Availability of experts for consultation

A freelancer can come to the situation when he does not have enough skills and expertise to resolve a problem. Companies employ experts in a wide range of technologies which are always available to help development team to resolve complex problems.

Legal issues

With companies you are much better protected against legal issues and intellectual property theft.

Long-term support

When you have developed first release of your product with a team of freelancers, they may be unavailable for future support and development of further releases. It will take significant time to find a new team of freelancers and get them up to speed. There is also a risk of that the new team will inform you that they are not able to continue development basing on the current codebase, because it is written in other standards than they use or it is written in not expandable way. Companies provide long-term support for projects they implement.

Higher potential to expand development

Companies offer a much wider range of supported technologies, programming languages and services. It will be easy to use some new technologies in your project. With a freelancer you will have to find additional freelance resources each time you want to use some new technology. And I already said above, companies provide a wider range of services: business/system analysis, software development, testing, QA, project management, system administration – comparing to a single freelancer.

Cost

Of course, usually companies offer their services at higher rates/prices, so you need to decide if you want to economize your money and spend your time performing all these activities which company can do.

Сhoose freelancers if you have a small and simple project

Usually freelancer is the best choice if your project is less than 1-2 man-months, or if you require a team of less than 2-3 developers. Otherwise it will save your time and money to choose a company as a reliable offshore software development vendor.