There are five ways to put someone to work for you in India:
- a freelancer platform
- a recruitment agency
- an employer of record
- your own company in India
- a satellite office
Each one is the right answer for someone. The way to choose is to decide what you want to run yourself, then pick the model that takes the rest.
The five models at a glance
| Model | What you get | What you still handle | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Freelancer platform (Upwork, Fiverr, Toptal) | Access to independent people, paid per hour or project | Briefing, managing, quality, continuity, security, replacing them when they leave | One-off projects and skills you need once |
| Recruitment agency | A candidate, found and screened | Everything after the offer: employment, payroll, equipment, workspace, HR | Companies with their own Indian entity and HR |
| Employer of record (Deel, Remote, Oyster) | A legal employer, payroll and compliance | Finding the person, workspace, equipment, onboarding, performance, the day-to-day of HR | You already found the person and have HR capacity |
| Your own entity | Full control, your own employees | All of it, plus forming and running the company | A large, long-term team and the people to run it |
| Satellite office | A dedicated person in a real office, employed by us, with the lifecycle run for you | The work itself | Companies that want the team, not the operation |
How to choose by stage
You need one piece of work done, once. Use a freelancer platform. A logo, a migration, a one-off audit: there is no reason to employ someone for a defined, finite task.
You found the person already and have HR. Use an employer of record. A former colleague who moved home, a referral you trust: an EOR puts them on a compliant payroll quickly. That is exactly what it is built for.
You have an Indian entity and an HR team there. Use a recruiter, or your own talent team. Finding candidates is the only gap you have.
You are planning a large team for the long term. Look seriously at your own entity. It takes 12 to 18 months and a real operating commitment, but at scale you may want the control. Our honest take on that decision is in should you open your own company in India?
You want the person, not the operation. This is the case for a satellite office. It fits a startup or scale-up that needs a developer, a QA engineer or a support lead, and has no wish to become an employer in another country to get one.
You pick the person from a shortlist and manage their work. We run the rest:
- employment, payroll and compliance
- the office, the laptop and IT
- onboarding, reviews and exits
It is set up in about 3 weeks from a signed engagement, on one invoice.
The scorecard question
Every option above will tell you it is simple. The way to test that is to ask any provider, including us, which parts of employing someone they actually do.
We count 42 touchpoints across 5 phases: find, set up, run, grow and exit. When we mapped each competitor’s published scope against those 42, an employer of record like Deel covered about 10. A freelancer marketplace like Upwork covered two or three. These are our counts, not theirs, and the method is simple enough to repeat: list the 42, then tick what each provider says it does.
The 42 are listed on what’s included. Use them as a checklist on anyone you are talking to.
What none of the five does for you
None of them manages the work. Whichever model you choose, someone at your company still decides what gets built, what good looks like and what ships first. A provider that promises to take that off your hands is offering a different product: output, not a team member.
Compare the models side by side on /compare, or talk to us about which one fits your plan, even if the answer is not us.