What are Freelancers?
Freelancers are self-employed professionals who work as independent contractors. They work for one or more companies concurrently on either short or long-term projects. These freelancers are experts in specific skill sets, like frontend, UI/UX, or data analytics. Usually, freelancers are not committed to a particular employer on a long-term basis, and often have various clients at a time. They generally avoid offices and work from homes, cafes, or famous downshifting spots.
What are Agency Developers?
On the other hand, the agency encloses a development team that specializes in almost all the skill sets needed to build a software application. They are a well-established team of professionals typically consisting of project managers, developers, designers, business analysts, and quality assurance. Most agencies can provide complete system development life cycle (SDLC) facilities, from the initial project idea to the deployment of the project in the marketplace.
But what makes one business choose a freelancer while another chooses a development agency?
Let’s move towards the pros and cons of hiring freelancers vs agency developers to help find the one ideal for your business.
Advantages and disadvantages of Hiring a Freelancer:
| Advantages Of hiring a freelancer | Disadvantages of hiring a freelancer |
| Cost Efficient: A business doesn’t need to pay much as compared to an in-house or outsourced development team. At the beginning stage of your business, when you want to cut costs and expenses, hiring a freelancer becomes more economical. But keep in mind that you acquire what you pay for, so when you hire more than one freelancer, the cost can rapidly mount up, even though it may appear inexpensive at first. | Riskier: Hiring freelancers can be riskier, not because they don’t know how to, but because they do not work in a team. The freelancer you have hired could be one of the most truthful people, but, in case, they encounter an emergency, get sick, go on vacation, etc. then your entire project comes to an unnecessary stop. |
| Flexible: Another profit that comes with hiring freelancers is ‘flexibility’. They do not have to follow traditional working hours and can easily adjust their schedule according to your priorities and requirements, making them highly flexible | Limited Capability: You cannot risk overloading freelancers as it could negatively impact their performance. Besides, there is only so much a single person can achieve. And finding a freelancer who can design, code, and test without compromising quality is a really difficult task itself. No doubt, you can hire more than one freelancer, but it will increase your expenses. Moreover, you will have to sustain standards and communication among them. |
| Specialized Skills: Freelancers are normally specialized in one area. So it is important to study their portfolio to identify their skills and if they match your requirements or not. If you want to add visual components (front-end) to your website, you will need someone with experience in HTML, CSS, j-Query, Bootstrap, JavaScript, or other frontend technologies. | Work Quality: Not every freelancer that you will hire will be careful of the work already accomplished by others. Freelancing platforms like PeoplePerHour and Upwork invest their time in properly examining the freelancers they have. So, the probabilities of interacting with someone who just wants to earn quick cash by quickly delivering projects are higher. Therefore, the quality of your work can be extremely affected. |
To avoid such circumstances, you can either find a couple more candidates in advance or move with plan B, i.e., hiring a software development agency.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Hiring agency developers:
Pros and cons of Hiring Agency software development agency is a solution for whatever business needs you may have. In simple terms, you can get all your work done by a trustworthy and accountable team of professionals. All the processes involved in the system development life cycle are divided into small stages where analysis, monitoring, and required customizations are planned.
Advantages OF hiring agency
Teamwork: While hiring multiple freelancers for a project, you don’t have a guarantee that they will work together in cooperation or not. On the other hand, if you hire an agency with a team of professionals working together frequently, you will get unmatched cooperation from the team members. Besides, they are familiar with each other’s strengths and weaknesses; they can easily avoid all the difficulties that might occur during development.
Reliability: By hiring an agency you will get a proper quality control mechanism over the development team that follows work ethics. They are more reliable than freelancers to complete the given tasks without abandoning you at the last moment because they work to deliver results on time.
Long-term Approach: If you are looking for a long-term contract or partnership, then the agency will be the perfect choice for you. No doubt that the individuals working on your project might change over the years but the value and consistency of work you will get from an agency will be the same.
Extended Expertise: Unlike freelancers who have gained expertise over a certain set of skills, an agency has many professionals with extensive expertise. In an agency, each team member specializes in different development areas you might need to complete the project.
Better Project Quality: Although the quality of work is not always bad for freelancers, agencies hold their work to more rigorous quality standards. On the other hand, a freelancer might submit a project without much thought after completion from his/her end, an agency will use strict quality analysis and review processes
Continuous support and development: As agencies are more or less qualified companies, they tend to focus on developing long-term relationships with their clients. Hence, they will provide continuous support and maintenance for the project to fix errors, provide functionality modifications, and other improvements.
Disadvantages of Hiring agency
Higher Development Cost: Undoubtedly a software development agency will be higher in cost as compared to freelancers. The reason is simple: they have higher costs including software, office space, equipment, systems, etc. That’s the reason why agencies are most likely to focus on large-scale projects than a freelancer.
Which One is perfect for Your Business?
Both freelancing developers and agency developers have their pros and cons. Although there’s no perfect answer for whom you should hire, we will help you out by listing a few scenarios where one of them will be great for company.
Reason of Hiring a Freelancer:
- Building small or almost-completed project
- Little budget tasks
- Extremely specialized jobs
- Projects that require high involvement from you
