How to Find a Good Magento Developer

Despite the size and age of your business, reliable business partners are essential on your journey to success. When it comes to Magento eCommerce, a trustworthy developer is the backbone of your business - the speed of your growth and overall performance is dependent on their skills and experience.

If you plan to outsource the development work, there are two options - hire a freelancer or hire an agency. Both options come with their advantages and disadvantages that we are going to analyze further.

Concepts

In the case of a Magento agency, you hire the entire team of developers, project managers, and other fundamental people that ensures that the work needed is delivered. You don’t have to bother with managing people and most of the communication happens with project managers.

When hiring a freelancer you hire one person that operates as a self-employed person. You’ll be in charge of managing the freelancer and doing the project manager duties, as well as dealing with sick leaves and vacations.

Pros of an Agency

Expertise: Although the community of Magento is huge, working with it requires expertise. Magento is not the easiest platform out there and crafting truly customized and perfectly working solutions requires expertise. How to know who is an expert? Magento has a list of reliable solution partners.

High quality: For most agencies, it’s highly important to keep the quality of the service growing. Agencies have strict review and QA services that ensure that the solution works perfectly and on all the most popular devices.

Low risk: Agencies are stable and legal organizations. They won’t just leave you hopeless with no ready solution, because they changed their mind or just simply are not inspired to work. Furthermore, in most cases the work speed and quality won’t be affected by a sudden sick leave or vacation of a developer.

Teamwork: Instead of one person, you are hiring a team with different expertise and experience. The team knows each other, they know how to work together and on top of that, the manager keeps the team together and ensures the quality and speed of the work to be done.

Low maintenance: Because of the previously mentioned teamwork, you won’t have to bother with managing people. You are leaving this work to professional and experienced project managers and you’ll have more time to focus on other more important tasks to grow your online business.

Pros of a Freelancer

Lower rates: Freelancers can be and mostly are slightly cheaper than an agency. That’s because freelancers don't have that many overhead costs and you are hiring just one person, not a team.

Flexible: Since freelancers work alone they are not dependent on others and can be more flexible. Most of them will be able to work late hours and perhaps have a longer workday if necessary.

Cons of an Agency

Higher costs: Costs of the agency work are higher if compared to freelancers, however, the value is bigger. You are paying not just for the developer’s work, you are hiring an entire team that will work on your project.

Bunch of other clients: Some agencies might not start to work on your issue as fast as you would wish since they have other clients too. However, nowadays such services as 24/7 Magento support and dedicated Magento developers are available, which guarantees immediate action if needed.

Cons of a Freelancer

Lack of experience: When hiring a freelancer you are depending on the experience of one person and there can be times when this person is lacking experience or skills in one particular field, for example, Magento payment gateways or Magento front-end. In the case of an agency, they will ensure that each task is done by someone who understands what exactly needs to be done.

High risk: Hiring just one person not a team comes with a high risk, for example, if a freelancer falls sick there won’t be anyone to continue the job. Agencies won’t stop the work on your project just because the developer who worked with your project got sick, went on vacation, or has any other reason to have a day off.

Limited capacity: One human can’t handle the work of a team, so the delivery dates will be longer. Additionally, if there are things that are holding the freelancer back, he will try to Google things - in case of the agency, the developer can always ask the colleagues or the manager for advice if needed.

Possible lack of quality: A single person most likely won’t be able to deliver work in the same work as the agency could. Agencies have engineers for each field to ensure the quality delivered, for example, QA for testing, sysadmins/DevOps for proper infrastructure, and code deployment procedures. Additionally, the project manager does the task management for you, and HR deals with discipline problems, if there are any, and makes sure that everyone stays motivated.

Conclusion

When choosing one of the two Magento developer hiring options it is important to understand your expectations and how much you're willing to involve yourself. Based on the above-discussed pros and cons, we have concluded that freelancers are best to hire for:

• One time and small Magento tasks that don’t require a lot of continuous work;
• Low budget projects - that won’t end with huge financial losses, if things don’t work out as planned.

However, agencies are the best Magento service providers, when it concerns:

• Multi-phase projects that requires continuous work and will need a long-term relationship with the developer;
• Large enterprises’ websites - the bigger the website, the bigger are potential losses. It is better to cooperate with a reliable and legal organizations that can guarantee quality and security;
• Complex projects as Magento is very flexible, but it requires proven expertise and experience to achieve the set goals.

If your business can afford to hire a professional Magento agency, we advise you to go with it. Saving money on Magento developers might work in the short-term, but in the long run, you’ll have to pay way more to fix the bad quality code that stagnates that growth and overall performance of your Magento eCommerce.