Consultancy vs Product Company vs Agency in Web Development, what’s the difference today?
I spent the last 7 years of my career working in the coding industry mainly working on .NET. Of those, two years in consultancy firms, one year in agencies, three and a half years in product companies.
I will try to link here some resources produced by other people that I think are quite accurate if you want to understand the differences between the industries.
Consultancy vs Product Company
Would say this video from Jayme Edwards is great:
Consultancy firms vs Agencies
The differences here are a bit more faded.
I think these resources provide a nice insight into what was the classic distinction between the two:
In short, when something hurts, you should be hiring a consultant to get the diagnosis and the recommended treatment. Hire an agency to carry out the treatment.
So agencies would be more focused on execution while consultancies on goals.
These days and based on my experience in web development, I could not see much of this difference.
How the work is done however still retain some:
- In agencies, you would generally bill a customer hourly while in consulting you would bill daily (or half daily)
- In agencies, your customers generally come on your premises while in consultancy firms you generally go to work on customer premises
Conclusions
While working on code, how one does it can make a huge difference.
