Agency, freelancer
or in-house?

Short answer

Choose an agency when the task is large, spans many disciplines and you need to be able to scale quickly. Choose a freelancer when you want an experienced specialist close by without the agency overhead, and the task does not require a whole team. Choose in-house when the task is large and continuous enough for a full-time role, and you want someone present in the daily operation. Most companies end up with a mix, not one definitive choice.

Agency

An agency gathers several specialists under one roof and can therefore lift large, composite tasks where you need technical SEO, content, links and advertising at the same time. The advantage is capacity: there are more hands if the task grows, and typically backup if an employee falls ill or leaves.

The downside is layers. The sales meeting is often held by a senior, while the daily work is done by a junior, and it can take time to get information through the project management. The price also reflects the overhead, office, management and sales, not only the work itself.

Freelancer

A freelancer is one person who does the work themselves, without a layer of project management between you and the person actually doing the job. The advantage is a short path from decision to action, a lower overhead in the price, and someone who keeps all the knowledge about your case in one place instead of spreading it across a team.

The downside is capacity. One person has an upper limit to how much can be delivered, and if the freelancer falls ill or is busy elsewhere, there is no automatic backup. It therefore fits best for tasks that can be solved by one experienced specialist, rather than large, composite projects with many parallel tracks.

In-house

Hiring your own person gives you someone who is present in the daily operation, knows the product and the organisation from the inside, and does not bill by the hour. It is often the right solution when the task is large and predictable enough to fill a full-time role year after year.

The downside is that recruiting and onboarding take time, and that one employee is rarely an expert in everything from technical SEO to Google Ads to email automation. Many companies therefore end up with a hybrid: an in-house marketing manager who draws on freelancers or an agency for specific disciplines.

What it costs, roughly speaking

Exact figures depend on the task and the agency or person, but the order usually holds: agencies have the highest hourly rate, because it covers overhead on top of the work itself. Experienced freelancers typically sit a fair bit below, because the overhead is lower. A full-time hire does not have an hourly rate in the same sense, but a fixed cost regardless of workload, which only pays off once the task is large enough to use it fully.

How to choose

Some questions that usually point to the answer:

• How large and composite is the task? Many disciplines at once speaks for an agency. One well-defined discipline speaks for a freelancer.
• How close do you want to sit to the work? Do you want to talk directly to the person doing the job, or are you fine with a layer of project management?
• Is the task continuous and large enough for a full-time role? If yes, in-house is worth considering, possibly supplemented with freelance specialists.
• What do mistakes cost? The more expensive a misjudgement is, the more it speaks for experience over the cheapest hourly rate.

There is no single right answer. What works for a webshop with one product rarely works for a B2B company with a long sales cycle. Judge from your own situation rather than from what happens to be most popular right now.