Agency Or Freelancer; Whom should you select!

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Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

It’s not confined to the local talent pool to create the right team for a project. Upwork, Fiverr, Freelancers, HubSpot and Riseup Labs Hire talent have made it easier to grab skills overseas. It’s easy to grab one but hard to get the right one. We often get confused about whom to outsource for our next project. There are agencies and freelancers. Both agencies and freelancers have their specific reasons and criteria to be chosen. Let us find out in what situation whom we should hire.

What is the Agency?

Agencies are a group of peoples who create an organization to provide services for another organization or person. There are different agencies like travel agencies, advertising agencies, government agencies, employment agencies, news agencies, etc. All these agencies do work for other companies, and they have specific people for specific kinds of work. They have got a particular type of work structure to complete the task. In agencies, there is a hierarchy that has to be maintained by everyone.

What is a Freelancer?

A freelancer is an individual who works by himself, but he works for other persons or companies. A freelancer always works by himself, and there is no structure in between. He can choose his works as an independent individual. As he works for himself, three is no hierarchy to maintain. Freelancers are not considered as employees but as a contractor of a particular work or project.

Structure & Workflow

The structure of an agency helps to communicate with clients adequately. There is a person who will meet with the clients and get ideas about the project. After that, he will give the creative brief to the creative team. There is a project manager who will handle everything and look after the project. The creative team will then make a sculpture and send this to the client; if the client likes that, he will give a positive response to the project manager. But if there is an adjustment that needs to be made, the client will inform the project manager, and he will again sit with the team and make the adjustments. This is the workflow structure of the agencies.

On the other hand, the workflow structure of freelancers is pretty simple and suitable for small projects. A person will contact the freelancer. He will tell the freelancer the work that needs to be done, and after the brief, the freelancer will start working on that project. And he will do the whole project in his own way; he usually does not maintain a work schedule. He will contact the person who has given him the work if he finds any difficulties in his work or, in other words, the person who will hire a freelancer should contact him and watch the progress of the work.

Monitoring

Agency requires less monitoring from your side to get intricate work done. You can give the instructions to the account manager and get it done within the deadline. Actually, the structure of the Agency helps it in this. Usually, agencies will hire experts in their particular field to get their work done to handle the job properly. If there are any problems, then the agencies will address that problem in a very professional way.

On the other side, freelancers mostly require monitoring, as the work process involves only one person. If a person is handling a job and is not well optimized, it may need plenty of monitoring for that. As a client, you have to give lots of suggestions about what you want from the guy you have hired for your work.

Cost

Outsourcing always helps to reduce costs for all types of work, like application development. Here we have a misconception that the agencies charge more. Let’s see why we think differently, Agencies from Developing countries almost charge the same as freelancers or maybe a bit higher, but the team has a proper structure. The agencies mostly charge only the hours of the designer. So you are getting the hour of other professionals as complementary. As it requires less monitoring, so you can save almost 80% of your time.

But in some instances, it’s better to hire a freelancer to get the job done, like when you have a small or a simple project ( such as official informational website development ) that doesn’t require you to do the monitoring. Freelancers usually charge a lot less than the agencies. So if saving money is your concern, then you can go for the freelancers.

Long term commitment

Some projects require long term commitment to get accomplished. In that case, the Agency is the ultimate choice for you. Agencies always provide legal and official guarantees for their works. If you are making software from an agency, then it definitely requires further maintenance. In those kinds of scenarios, agencies are the ultimate place as they will not just complete the work, but they also look after it and are well equipped with modern and latest technology.

Some freelancers provide guarantees, but it could be a bit risky to find one with all the capabilities required for the project to be done as there is no guarantee that you will find the freelancer who has worked for you previously. They move from one location to another for their work, so it is challenging to get track of them.

One touchpoint

Agency could be your one touchpoint to satisfy multiple needs. A project from scratch to end and further look after for maintenance. You do not have to go to numerous places to get your work done. It really helps the clients to save up their time.

Typically, a freelancer mostly has the expertise of doing a particular work. You will need to hire multiple freelancers and then manage them, which will consume much more time than yours than dealing with the Agency. Agencies can always hire new talents and keep serving you with any requirements that you have.

Effectiveness

When there is a structure, the workflow of that project is usually excellent. People know and understand their particular work, what they are dining with, and that is the case for the agencies. As a result, the productivity rate is very high. So the effectiveness of the agencies is really high.

On the other hand, freelancers usually work from their homes, and they do not maintain a proper structure. As a result, the productivity rate for freelancers is not as high as the agencies. So the overall effectiveness of freelancers lacked due to their unstructured nature of work.

To conclude

The segmented work style of agencies leads to greater efficiency, meaning more work will get done for the same time and money spent. A single freelancer can be highly experienced, but it will be hard to replace the expertise of an entire team an agency can provide. But If you or your team are strong strategically and have invested in solid research, you can get excellent results working with freelancers. I do think you need to be selective in tapping into either path.