Upwork vs. YouTeam: freelancers or dedicated engineers?

In this article, we compare and contrast two similar yet decidedly different digital HR platforms for hiring Tech Talent. The first you will know, as the largest and most established HR platform for hiring freelancers – Upwork! The second is a newcomer called YouTeam, which doesn’t offer freelancers, but instead, offers full-time specialists employed by established and pre-vetted outsourcing software companies.

Hiring a Dedicated Development Team vs. Freelancers

For businesses looking to hire software engineers to work on a project, the temptation is often there to look at freelancers. To some extent, this is seen as the faster and easier route. The alternative, to hire a dedicated development team for your software, app development, or web development, can be a daunting task for companies with little experience in the field. But which choice is best in the longer term?

It’s sometimes possible to break up a project into smaller sub-projects as you go along, outsourcing each individual task to the person who appears to offer the best value for money. Within this industry, it’s not difficult to find and hire developers with the requisite skillset and working part-time looking to make some additional income by completing your tasks as quickly as possible.

However, there are several drawbacks to using freelancers which tend to become apparent fairly quickly. When working remotely with people you aren’t familiar with, it’s common for communication to become a major issue, and many important points may get lost in translation (often literally, since many freelancers may be overseas). Security is another concern, depending on the project you’re working on since it’s hard to judge how trustworthy your freelancers are.

In fact, with little vested interest in your larger project, they are likely to be less careful overall. This not only applies to security concerns but perhaps, more importantly, it affects the quality of work you’re getting back in most cases. It’s not surprising that someone with very limited knowledge of your company, your vision, and your overall project may struggle to produce work that perfectly satisfies all criteria you were looking for.

Some of the advantages of hiring freelancers:

• If the project you have is a short-term one.
• If you know the due date of your project for sure.
• If the quality of the projects is not the highest priority.
• If the fixed price for the project is not very big.
• If you clearly know who you need exactly for this project and you know for sure that requirements will not change during the workflow.

In contrast, hiring dedicated software development teams to work on your project from beginning to end tends to offer a range of advantages. Of course, the initial cost may be higher, but that investment goes into securing the expertise of the individuals in your team for the duration of the project. By integrating a team of top developers with your in-house work, you can quickly give them a much better insight into what you are trying to achieve compared to dealing with freelancers.

When assembling a team, you should be able to find highly specialized and experienced software development outsourcing companies in the UK with people who bring exactly what you need to the table. This allows for a much more considered and detailed approach to your project on the part of those developers, as each team member has a specific focus. This tends to result in much higher quality products than those completed by freelance developers.

Talking about the advantages of hiring a dedicated development team we can see the following:

• If you don’t clearly know the due date of the project.
• If the quality of the finished product is the most important thing.
• If the candidates may change due to some requirements, needed for different processes of the project.
• If the project’s budget is not defined during the work on the project.
• If you have a large project which requires many people in it or you have some unfinished ones.

Ultimately, the costs incurred by hiring a dedicated team are often counteracted by the significantly higher returns you can expect. Too many great ideas are wasted due to poor implementation, often resulting from attempts to cut corners. Putting high-quality work into your product will invariably produce better end results, and if you have full confidence in your product when it’s completed, it has a much better chance of reaching its potential. 

YouTeam vs Upwork: what to choose

Below we will compare and contrast two similar yet decidedly different digital HR platforms for hiring Tech Talent. The first is the largest freelance platform – Upwork. The second is  YouTeam, which doesn’t offer freelancers, but instead, offers full-time specialists employed by established and pre-vetted outsourcing software companies.

Both of them can be described as a talent pool that provides high-rated project management for small businesses but still have their own differences. The table below details why and how these platforms are different so that you can decide which approach best suits your needs.

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Conclusion

In our comparison of two of the world’s most prominent digital platforms for hiring the best talent, UpWork and YouTeam, our conclusion is that there is definitely room for both models.

However, YouTeam Platform provides a newer channel, which is better suited to B2B outsourcing, because it provides:

–  Pre-vetting of Vendor Companies
–  Pre-screening of Engineers Profiles
–  Engineers dedicated to your project
–  Considerably more information about the companies who employ the engineers on their platform
– A more appropriate hiring process for B2B
– Assistance with the legal, financial and communication aspects of the project

So if you are looking for engineers to build or extend your tech team and maybe you have tried Upwork without success, feel free to jump on youteam.io to see who’s available to start work right away.