The trade-offs, stated.

These compare structures rather than suppliers: how the work gets charged for, and who should be doing it. Both are decisions made once and lived with for a year, and both are usually made on the wrong axis — comparing a fee to a salary, or a retainer to a project, without asking what each arrangement rewards when nobody is supervising it.

We have an obvious interest in one answer on each page, and both say so in their own copy. Where the honest conclusion argues against hiring us — a bounded technical problem that should be a project, or a senior in-house hire who would beat any agency arrangement — the pages say that too, because a comparison that always arrives at the author is not a comparison.