Freelancer vs Authorized Agencies or Companies

Upwork Portal

Upwork, formerly Elance-Odesk, has given opportunity to millions of professionals and providers across the globe. This concept was introduced in 1998 when Elance was founded, and the concept became a buzz after ODesk formed in 2003; The concept has gained a lot of popularity and success. Elance and Odesk were acting as competitors until they merged in 2013 and rebranded as Upwork in 2015. 

Indian IT professionals and companies have grabbed this opportunity in the early years and since then have dominated in providing the services through these portals.

Although a lot of quality work and business has been delivered, with the increase of opportunities it has attracted a lot of below average performers and a few immature and Irresponsible clients.

Further, the increase in competition between agencies and individuals to win assignments has created confusion for the good potential providers at Upwork.

Clients were the ones who suffered the most in the end while choosing freelancers over the agencies where an agency could have delivered more or agencies over the freelancers where an individual professional can perform well. 

Even today It’s important for clients to make the right decision when a freelancer is required or when an agency should prefer to get the product delivered with quality and honesty. 

It’s a longstanding debate that every client must face whether to select an agency or a freelancer. 

Freelancers will be helpful if

1. The client is technical enough to understand what standard of work is getting delivered. 
2. Has managerial skills to manage multiple freelancers and get the tasks done on time.
3. Client needs a specific talent only to get technical stuff done. 
4. If the client prefers to pay less and can compromise with the quality and long-term usability of the output delivered.
5. If the assignment is not an end-to-end delivery and does not require a proper project development life cycle and does not require a team to take care of each stage of the development starting from the feasibility study, wireframing, UI UX designing, development, quality assurance and the deployment.
6. The client is willing to pay isolated freelancers for various stages of the project. 

 

In today’s era Freelancing has become a buzz. A lot of professionals are into Freelancing as it has become easier to deliver the services at home with a Laptop/PC and good configuration. Although many of them are doing good enough as individuals, it’s always a risk to rely on an individual, especially when your project needs multiple skills and has multiple stages. 

Being in this industry for a long time now, we have learnt many facts about Freelancing. We have noticed that multiple clients have chosen the freelancer over the companies and the same clients had gone back to a team to get the project converted into a product.

 Here are some of the advantages of choosing an agency/company/team/organization over a freelancer:

1. Authenticity: You can get any good freelancer onboard anytime easily. However, you won’t be too assured about the authenticity of that person as the freelancers are individual entities and they don’t have any top or lower hierarchy for making any decisions. They can leave you with or without giving a notice period and will leave you and your project hanging in between. Whereas a good company will always have a well-defined structure and follow all the processes. A Company or agency does have a presence over social media and other platforms, and they are committed towards maintaining their repo.
2. Commitment: Having Freelancers in your team cannot assure you that you have a long-term commitment. Hiring isn’t a straightforward process, you post the job interview people, then shortlist a few, and finally hire one person. Although for Freelancers this is a daily process, they might move forward if they get a better opportunity mostly monetary wise.
   However, well-organized agencies or companies like Qualhon are more committed towards their deliveries and ensure to maintain a long-term business relationship. Because a company has a liability to pay its resources, build the repo among the talent and the clients, so they cannot afford to leave a client and keep moving to the next one.
3. Skills: A Freelancer might have extensive knowledge of the technology he is working on, which is sometimes good enough to convince the client and get hired. However, that individual cannot understand the overall purpose of the project that is very much required to convert it into a product. Although, sometimes that knowledge which seems extensive earlier in-reality is the partial or fragmented knowledge that cannot help the client to complete his vision towards a project with the required efficiency and quality.
   On the other hand, an organization, if it has a well-defined team of skillful resources that is required in various stages of the project can provide a 360-degree coverage to get the project converted to the product.
4. Back-up plans: Well, Life is completely uncertain, and you cannot expect that someone can keep working in good health or without having any chaos in their life. Now imagine a situation when Your project is ready to roll out of production and you just need final tweaks done from your developer and the freelancer has fallen sick or got caught up with any other emergency at his place. Now here you need to put your project deliveries on hold, and you need to postpone all the events that were depending on your project deliveries.
   
   So, the good news is a well-organized company is well equipped to manage these scenarios. Companies or agencies have multiple resources in a specific team and even if you have hired only a single member from an agency for your project, a project manager or the team lead keeps an eye watch on your project progress. So, if this situation arises, the agency can provide you with additional resources and would not let your plans be hampered.
5. Feedback: Humans are continuously evolving and to evolve better we need some guidance and right directions. In case you want to provide any feedback to a Freelancer then it would completely depend on your Freelancer’s learning curve and how much he/she can absorb.
   Whereas in agencies or the company, there is always a process for sharing feedback. Companies always seek timely feedback for their resources while working on their project so that they can deliver more quality work and gain more business in future.
6. Security:
   • Intellectual property rights and Confidentiality: Any project that eventually needs to become a product has been conceived with an idea of someone who has the complete right to keep it confidential until it is launched in the market under his brand name. You can go for an NDA with the freelancer but that has almost no authenticity and it’s impossible to take an action against a remotely placed freelancer.
     Whereas a company registered under the companies act in India or any other country cannot be run away for a signed document, and you can easily litigate against any violation.
   • Data Security: Freelancers, while working in isolation normally do not have proper firewalls, network security installed, do not follow proper Continuous Integration Process, client must rely upon the luck and blind trust of a freelancer. In case any data loss or mishappening with your project will put you in great trouble, freelancers will simply move to the next project by bidding with few connections on the portal. Even the Portal (Upwork) or any other do not take any such guarantee and taking legal action is almost impossible.
     Whereas a well-organized company like Qualhon has well defined network security, firewalls and CI setup on the development servers and you can always litigate against any data loss.
7. Lack of Supervision: As mentioned above, the client is the only one who is supervising the freelancer, whereas companies like Qualhon always have well defined team structure to monitor the work quality and delivery on time.
8. Long term product Management: While working with the freelancers, you can expect only the technical output, but you need to take care of the project and converting it into a product by yourself, whereas the companies like Qualhon can provide end to end service starting from the feasibility study till product, deployment, quality control, maintenance and even the customer support. So, you can get everything done for your product under one roof.
9. Nature of Projects – Freelancer is not an ideal fit in case you have long-term projects, high-stakes projects, projects that require constant research, discussions, and professional guidance.

So, Client chooses wisely; go for a freelance service provider if you think you can take that risk or do collaboration with a company like Qualhon that can convert your idea into a project then to a product.