In-House Development vs. Outsourcing: Overview of Pros and Cons

When you have the perfect startup idea, you are ready to whip up team of developers, QA engineers and designers. But now the question raises whether to go for in-house development of outsource a team of experts. Both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages but different factors come into play when you make the final decision.
In today’s article we are going to go in depth of the pros and cons of both of these methods to see what you should select in which situation. But before you start with this one, why don’t you take a short detour and go over these two articles about blockchain consulting services solution and technology that will rule software development in 2022.
What’s Outsourcing?
Outsourcing is when a company hands over its tasks to a third party or a vendor because it believes that they will handle it well.
The main reason that outsourcing has become famous is not only the reduction in development costs. More and more businesses are looking into outsourcing. It is because you don’t have to optimize complex processes in order to grow in-house competencies and use large sums of money on it. Instead you can get the skills you require right away from the right professionals by opting for outsourcing.
Pros
- Work with Top Professionals: As with outsourcing you’re not restricted to a specific geographical location, you can just go for any talented person with the right skills and experience that is fit for the job you want done.
- Cost: Since you don’t have to bear the costs of retaining, recruitment and salaries, all of which are inherent with in-house development, outsourcing becomes much cheap.
- Reduced time-to-market: As you get a team that knows what it’s doing, your product is developed much faster and is launched in the market relatively early as well.
- No management mess: The outsourced team will be self-managed so you won’t have to make efforts or spend resources on managing them.
- Flexibility: It will be much easier to mould the outsourced team according to your needs.
- Effective solutions and streamlined processes: The processes of the team will be mostly automated, refined and established according to the best practices. So the whole development process will be very streamlined and the solutions presented for the problems rising will always be effective since they’d have experience.
Cons
- Less Control: The development process with an outsourced team is less transparent so you won’t have much control over it.
- Gaps in Communication: If the members of the team are from some other country, the varying time zones, cultural and various other differences might make it difficult to communicate.
- Risk of breaches: The risk of confidentiality breach is always present with an outsourced team.
In-house Development
In this type of software development, you bring together a team of your most competent employees who understand the goals of your project and the business specifics well. But you do require time, budget, management resources and more work for later to make the team work.
Pros
- Better control: In-house software development lets you oversee the whole process, so you will have full control over the process.
- No communication gaps: As the team will be physically present in front of you, there will be no trouble in communication.
- Improved security: As the team members will be your full time employees, you will be able to keep all the information inside the company. There won’t be many chances of info leak.
- Post-delivery support: The in-house team that develops the product will always be there for the maintenance, fixing issues and solving any problem that arises post launch.
Cons
- Time consuming: If you start from the process of recruitment of developers then it will take you very long to finalize and launch the product. As the team will not only take time to understand your company but each other as well. Also you can’t be sure that the team you have hired has all the expertise you need.
- Team costs: The costs of retaining the team, their salaries, IT maintenance and training will take a toll on your budget.
Final Words
When making the final decision of choosing outsourcing and in-house development over each other you have to be mindful of time, budget and software complexity. You may even go for a hybrid strategy, combining the advantages of both.