YouTeam vs Arc vs Turing: The Best Platform for Hiring Contractors

Following the rise of cloud services, cutting hiring costs, and the aftermath of the pandemic that left many specialists at home, companies have begun searching around the world for talent. Moreover, remote work can be more productive than on-site development because the former attracts self-motivated tech talent, gives developers flexibility, and reduces overall workplace stress.

As the remote trend is on the rise for businesses of nearly all sizes, we’ve decided to compare YouTeam with two other popular platforms for hiring full-time remote contractors — Arc and Turing — and highlight these platforms’ best features.

How Do Platforms for Hiring Full-time Contractors Work?

“You choose who to hire, and we handle all the paperwork,” the Arc website says, and that pretty much sums up the hiring process for each of the three aforementioned products. The user flows are very similar:

• Book a call to explain hiring needs
• Review shortlisted, pre-vetted candidates
• Schedule interviews with developers
• Sign the contract

Each company has a vetting process, helps with onboarding, and provides a risk-free trial period to ensure that the chosen developer is a perfect fit. The time to contract usually takes about 1-2 weeks, which depends mostly on the client’s interviewing procedure. 

The hiring platforms’ blogs contain interviews with experts, hiring tips, and resources on technology and upskilling. One particular YouTeam feature is the interview questions generator to help hiring managers assess the personality and remote readiness of a future team member. Meanwhile, Arc collects opinions from industry experts about remote work management and puts them in the Remote Work FAQ section.

Now we’ll take a closer look at each platform to understand the differences.

Platform Overview: YouTeam, Arc, Turing

In this section, we’ll briefly cover the history of each platform, their hiring options, the geography of talent, and go into detail about the vetting process, developer rates, and hiring costs.

YouTeam

YouTeam helps tech companies augment engineering teams with multiple senior contractors at a time, and provides plug-in-and-out teams. This flexibility is enabled by its network of talent from outsourcing agencies. Founded in 2017 by Yurij Riphyak and Anton Mishchenko, YouTeam is a company headquartered in Mountain View, California, backed by Y Combinator, Horizon Capital, and Digital Future. Employers who use the platform to ramp up development include PricewaterhouseCoopers, LINX, Maxwell, and JustGiving.

YouTeam only works with development agencies, not individual freelancers, and access to the network is invitation-only. Before adding the agency to the network, YouTeam meets with its CEO, CFO, and project managers, while its legal team runs compliance checks into the agency’s background and previous clients.

YouTeam’s partner agencies conduct a multi-step screening process. YouTeam, for its part, individually interviews every developer and verifies their skills with HackerRank for Work. Its contractors aim for long-term cooperation, the average engagement lasts two years.

For each customer, the company appoints a Customer Success Manager, who facilitates communication, legal, and financial aspects of the engagement. YouTeam also automates contract signing and billing between customers and software development agencies.

Most of the YouTeam developers are based in Europe and Latin America.

YouTeam Costs

YouTeam’s commission is 10% of the engineer’s monthly rate. The average rate of a senior engineer is $60/hour or $9K/month. YouTeam has also created a directory of developer rates, sorted by technical skill.

Browse 500+ Dev Teams Available for Hire

Arc

Arc.dev was launched in 2019 by Weiting Liu, who founded Codementor, an online platform for software development mentorship. Arc grew out of a previous freelancing platform, CodementorX, built on top of the vibrant Codementor community. Employers who use the platform to hire developers include Automattic, Spotify, Hims, and HubSpot.

According to its website, Arc was built around the concept: “The best developers are not only in Silicon Valley, they are everywhere”. The platform offers four hiring options: permanent full-time engineers, part-time hourly freelancers, co-located engineering hubs, and distributed development teams. It also contains a salary explorer to compare remote developer salaries in different regions.

During the verification process, software engineers record a self-introduction video, which Arc reviews for remote job compatibility, English proficiency, and soft skills. Applicants also take a coding challenge or a tech interview. The company claims only 2.3% of registered mid-level to senior developers pass technical and behavioral assessments before being offered to a customer. In addition, the Arc team regularly reviews developer projects to ensure performance meets their quality standards.

Arc developers are based across the globe, with most of them located in the U.S., Europe, and Latin America.

Arc Costs

For permanent hires, developers set their own expected annual salary, which can range from $50,000 to $200,000. The customer pays a one-time fee based on the candidate’s yearly salary when deciding to hire. Contract-to-hire options are also available by speaking with an Arc Hiring Consultant.

Hourly freelance contractors set their own rates and typically charge between $60 to $100 per hour. They will log their hours daily, and the customer will be invoiced weekly. The client is required to make a $300 deposit before Arc begins finding the freelance developer.

The company has also partnered with Deel and Remote, compliance and payroll platforms, to make hiring across borders easier.

Turing

Founded in 2018 by ex-Stanford graduates and entrepreneurs Jonathan Siddharth and Vijay Krishnan, Turing is a job platform based in Palo Alto, California. Turing’s Intelligent Talent Cloud uses artificial intelligence to connect remote software developers with American companies. According to the company’s website, Turing’s customers come from such sectors as banking, finance, healthcare, media and entertainment, ITES and FMCG.

In 2021, the company entered unicorn territory with a Series D round of financing and was named one of America’s best startup employers by Forbes. In 2022, Turing launched a developer community with virtual events designed to learn from industry experts, master interviewing skills, and improve English proficiency.

Turing offers full-time contractors, billed monthly. Its platform provides automatic time tracking, virtual daily stand-ups, and time zone management to give customers more visibility into remote developers’ work.

Turing claims its vetting process is designed to select the top 1% of remote developers ​​who have applied to its platform. The company tests developers for English fluency and knowledge of programming languages, data structures, algorithms, system designs, and frameworks. Each programmer also goes through an automated work experience survey comprising questions in five areas — project impact, engineering excellence, communication, people, and direction.

Turing has developers in 150 countries. Since most of its customers are based in the U.S. and work on PST (Pacific Standard Time), remote workers are required to have a 4-hour overlap within this timezone to ensure successful communication.

Turing Costs

Turing does not provide information on how much it charges for hiring a developer using its services, nor does it mention salary ranges.

Please view the comparison table to learn more about the differences between the platforms.

Comparison Table

Final Thoughts and Highlights of Each Platform

While Arc and YouTeam handpick candidates, Turing uses artificial intelligence for matching. We can’t verify whether the machine picks candidates better than a human, but Turing can definitely save time by using AI tools while its talent pool increases significantly. Another standout feature is Turing’s Workspace, with automated time tracking and virtual daily meetings that add transparency to the remote work. 

YouTeam‘s strength is in its ability to scale engineering capacity with full-time talent on demand. Its vetting process and customer support are unique in that YouTeam not only interviews engineers, but also checks the backgrounds of agencies and their previous clients.

The main distinction between Arc and its competitors is that, in addition to permanent contractors, it offers hourly freelancers who are ready to start work within 72 hours and can be helpful for small tasks and projects.

Choosing the most cost-effective hiring platform is difficult because, for one thing, Turing does not provide information about fees and developer rates. We know that Arc’s in-house contractors’ annual salaries range from $50,000 to $200,000, while YouTeam developers charge an average of $9,000 per month or $108,000 per year. YouTeam’s commission is 10% of the developer’s rate, while Arc’s hiring fee is based on an annual salary, but the amount is not disclosed. Thus, the cost of hiring can vary depending on the customer’s required skill set, years of experience, and geographic preferences.

We hope that this article has helped you understand the differences between platforms for hiring contractors. And if you’re choosing between dedicated engineers and freelancers, be sure to read our blog comparing YouTeam and UpWork.