Toptal vs Gigster: Comparing Freelance Platforms

The most productive thing you can do to supercharge your business is to connect with the perfect team of developers, tech staff, and project managers to match your organization. Modern freelance platforms have developed over many years to meet precisely this need. But which platform is best for you? Here, we compare two leading options in Toptal vs Gigster to find out which platform offers the flexibility, innovation, and knowledge you need in your teams today.

In this article, we'll take a close look at both platforms in summary before diving into the details of project cost, quality assurance, and user experience to help you make a well-informed decision for your next big project.

Toptal vs. Gigster: A Summary

Toptal

Toptal is a premier software marketplace designed for mid to large-scale businesses. Delivering teams into businesses since 2010, Toptal's platform has a well-deserved reputation for being able to connect industry-leading organizations with the top-tier technical talent necessary to deliver strong results.

With skilled technical experts across all modern software technologies, Toptal's services can be relied on to connect with teams in every discipline and niche specialization necessary in today’s tech teams.

Toptal's success has come as a result of placing reliability and dependability above all in its teams — something it has done by utilizing only the top 3% of software providers for its services.

Key Strengths of Toptal Vs Gigster

1. A Rigorous Screening Process: Toptal's detailed vetting process accepts only the highest quality applicants onto its system.
2. Providing Tailored Expertise: Toptal's teams deploy industry-specific skill sets and expertise that businesses need to thrive in an increasingly competitive marketplace.
3. Maintaining a Long-term Focus: The relationship Toptal creates between software providers and tech-focused businesses is designed to be ongoing and collaborative. Flexibility is built into this process in allowing businesses to scale the number of hours they need up or down at critical points in the project.

Gigster

Initially founded as Liquid Labs Inc. in 2013, Gigister takes an alternate approach to building teams and providing expertise. Gigster is a platform built around its technologies — enabling businesses to assemble teams of developers, designers, and project managers using capable AI tools. Gigster will then take on projects on behalf of organizations to manage the end-to-end lifecycle of a new software solution.

In practice, Gigster can undertake projects all the way through from initial idea to product launch and beyond. Project managers take charge of development right the way through to ensure businesses get the most out of their teams and avoid any missteps along the way.

In short, Gigster provides businesses with fully managed development teams and communication channels through dedicated project managers who oversee the demands of their projects to ensure smooth execution and on-time delivery.

Key Strengths of Gigster over Toptal

1. Provides Simplified Development Processes: Gigster is built around streamlining software development and partnering with businesses to take care of the most challenging and time-consuming aspects of software development.
2. Enables Enhanced Software Development: Gigster speeds up projects using AI-assisted processes, a rich and vast code library, and years of experience in every industry and specialization related to tech.
3. Takes Complete Project Ownership: Gigster takes full ownership of the development process, from conception to delivery, ensuring comprehensive management and seamless integration. Software is simply signed over to your business on completion to allow you to take over control.

Pricing and Cost Comparison

Toptal Pricing

• Rates range from $60 to $250 per hour based on scope, complexity, and experience.
• Businesses can choose as many hours as they need to accomplish specific parts of a development project.

Toptal offers a long and well-proven track record of industry experience and an expert level knowledge of the technologies they deploy. The pricing of services obtained through the platform trends towards the high end of the scale in comparison to other marketplaces as a result.

Gigster Pricing

• Gigster offers a per-gig fixed-rate pricing that can assist in cost management.
• The price-per-project quoted by Gigster includes development, design, project management, and QA processes.

Gigster offers a fully managed end-to-end project management solution that comes with fixed licensing costs and high minimum fees that make the platform well-suited only for projects of reasonable size or complexity. Think of the marketplace as a cost-effective solution for projects where you'd expect to spend a lot even if you were using in-house developers.

Project Quality

Toptal's Quality Control

Toptal is trusted by businesses at the leading edge of the industry because it provides guarantees about the quality of its services and teams. Using rigorous screening processes, the platform filters out 97% of technical applicants to provide businesses with elite developers and managers who can deliver strong results.

Gigster's Quality Control

Gigster employs its own robust vetting processes, but it's one that relies more heavily on cutting-edge AI tools to create the ideal fit between businesses and providers. While the platform can't offer quite the same guarantees as Toptal, it invariably delivers quality results through industry experts and carefully managed teams.

Services Offered

Toptal's Services

Toptal provides a team of remote software developers in much the same way as if you were hiring in-house. For large-scale projects and well-established businesses, the capabilities of Toptal enable software solutions to be built rapidly and effectively using any technology or tool vital to software development today.

The key advantage of Toptal's services comes from enabling high-quality teams with the skills, experience, and credentials to undertake any new project.

Gigster's Services

Gigster provides an end-to-end management solution that undertakes development projects on behalf of businesses. In comparison to Toptal's teams, Gigster offers comprehensive project development to handle everything from design and development right through to deployment.

Businesses working with Gigster work with dedicated project managers to communicate and update their project requirements to their team as the project evolves. Similar to Toptal, Gigster employs its own rigorous screening process and tests candidates' abilities and portfolio thoroughly to ensure quality candidates make it into their pool.

The Advantage of Pangea.ai in the Software Marketplace

When thinking about the ideal marketplace best suited to serve your business, you have to consider all the leading players working within the industry. Pangea.ai's AI-powered team-building solution is one of the key marketplace tools you can't afford to miss.

Built using cutting-edge AI technologies to match software teams with ideally fitted organizations — Pangea.ai creates the perfect fit solution for groundbreaking new projects. The combination of these technologies and the expertise and marketplace knowledge necessary to use them has created a best-of-both-worlds solution to building better teams.

Countless organizations across MedTech, Blockchain technologies, AI, and beyond have used the Pangea.ai marketplace to innovate in their hiring practices and build better products to great success.

Toptal Vs Gigster: The Verdict

Both Toptal and Gigster offer different advantages to different sectors of today's tech marketplace.

Toptal offers a premium option that engages a curated team of software professionals for long-term projects at scale. For large businesses undertaking major new projects, it's often considered the default option in some software companies.

Gigster, in comparison, provides teams with a fully managed development service that steps in to take over a project and deliver a software solution to businesses. This option is highly attractive to companies seeking comprehensive project oversight and autonomous development with limited practical input.

Choosing the right option between both of these extremes requires careful consideration of how you manage projects, budgets, and time scales over the course of a project.

To approach this challenge with the advantages common to both platforms, Pangea.ai delivers powerful AI technologies, curated development teams, and personalized technical advice to realize your goals.

Using a cutting-edge AI-powered matchmaking system, Pangea.ai connects businesses and providers with precision and speed—turning around a selection of high-quality options in just 72 hours. If this feels like an ideal fit for you then just fill out our smart-match form and let our technologies connect you to the perfect development teams for building your bespoke software solutions.