Offshore vs Onshoring — what’s better for your business?

Introduction

If your business is currently looking into the software development world, then you’ll most likely have heard about the terms ‘onshore’ and ‘offshore’ development, and be wondering what’s best for you and your company.

Hopefully, we’ve come to save the day to help in your decision making.

What is ‘onshoring’ and ‘offshoring’ development?

‘Offshoring’ has been around for decades, and is the process of sourcing your development outside of your current country with places like India, Philippines and Pakistan — with work ranging from design creation to application development, websites, and so on. The main reason many people consider offshoring their development work is the price tag. With the way the digital world currently is, it makes it easier than ever to be able to communicate with anyone, no matter where they are in the world — therefore, offshoring demands have rapidly increased over these past few years to facilitate this.

Thus, ‘onshoring’ is the complete opposite. All designers, developers and marketers live and work locally within your country, for example, if you were an Australian company, you would ideally look for developers in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney areas. The main benefit with this is that your business can communicate with the software development process easier, quicker and more efficiently without the language and timezone barriers.

Should I consider ‘offshoring’ development?

It depends on where your business is at and what values are most important to you. The trends are ever-increasing for offshoring with every day that passes by. Like we mentioned earlier, it’s very cost-effective and allows you to focus your money on other things meanwhile. However, as with anything, there are various disadvantages that you should consider before deciding to outsource your development such as the following:

• Language barriers — Lack of communication can cause serious issues in terms of your applications since you can’t understand one and other, and therefore, it will not be done.
• Absence of physical evidence — If you can’t see something in front of you, how do you know it’s being done? If your business is offshoring development, you can find it extremely difficult to know what people are doing and if your application is tracking along the way you think it should be without physical proof (that you can understand!)
• Proven abilities — Most of the time it’s difficult to know what abilities developers have in other countries as degrees/qualifications may not be the same in their country. Therefore, it could mean that development costs could increase in the long run, in terms of getting other businesses to correct the work that’s already been done.
• No control — Your business loses control of your development immediately. By dealing with timezones, new laws, cultures and languages, it can seem like a very difficult process to get your development up and running. You don’t know who is developing your app, running your marketing and/or doing your designs. Whereas, with local development, it means you can schedule meetings to see if they are the right fit prior. By meeting the designers, developers and marketers beforehand, you can get a real sense of who will be dealing with and who will be injecting themselves into your business. You’ll be able to have multiple workshops and be able to test it there with them.
• Quick process — Usually what seems like an advantage, but in the case, speed is not always the best asset in the software development world. Meeting deadlines is something that can be worked towards (once both sides agree on the time it takes). But, generally speedy applications means less testing and bug squashing, causing bad experiences for the end-users. Loose code will always cause the application to be slower.

Does price tag outweigh control?

‘Onshoring’ development is the more ‘traditional’ way of doing development as it can seem a more viable option for your situation. However, the main drawback would be the amount of money it costs to get your application built with the right knowledge, expertise and timeframe.

• Management — You can entirely manage the work (if you want to). When you hire an ‘onshore’ team, your business can have various meetings and workshops with your team to ensure you’re all on the same page and tracking the way you should be with daily updates. Before any work is produced, you can see if the team you’ve chosen is the right fit for you and your company.
• Training — If you hire an onshore developer or development agency, you can ask to see their qualifications and technical knowledge, as well as case studies on what the team have worked on before starting your project.
• Expertise — If you engage with a development agency, they know the system. They can guide your business and projects in the right way and offer their advice where needed.

Let’s create trust and build a partnership

At Sprint Digital, we ensure that there is quality in everything we code, create, build and market. We first walk through your business processes and ideas so that we understand before we touch any code. This is to ensure that we are both the right fit for one and other, causing a great working relationship.

With our everyday Agile development practices, we can eliminate the risks of hiring an ‘offshore’ team by providing you with efficient and effective use of our custom-built, in-house client portal. This shows your business exactly what we’re working on your project, and how long each point is taking us (as well as having an open-door policy, whereby you can come in for a meeting/workshop whenever you please).

Conclusion

Cost is the main factor between these two types of development as the cost of hiring someone/agency in Australia, USA, or the UK for example, will be a significantly different price from hiring someone in a developing nation. To conclude, it does depend on what’s most important for you and your business. Is it experience, skills, communication and/or dedication? Our advice to you would be to do your homework before deciding — see what technical abilities and knowledge they have to help you with your project and see what they’ve created and built before for proof.

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