Most comparisons of outsourcing destinations are written by companies in one of them. This one is too — we are a development partner in Hanoi, and you should read it with that in mind. What follows is the comparison we would give a buyer who asked us honestly, including the cases where we would point them elsewhere.
The short version: India, the Philippines, and Vietnam are strong at different things, and the hourly rate is the least predictive number in the decision. What predicts outcomes is engineering seniority on your specific problem, communication overhead, and continuity of the same people over the life of the system.
At a glance
| India | Philippines | Vietnam | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scale of talent pool | Largest by a wide margin | Mid-sized | Mid-sized, growing quickly |
| Deepest strength | Enterprise IT, large programs, breadth of specialization | English-first support, BPO, customer-facing operations | Product engineering, mobile, AI/data teams |
| English | Widespread professional English | Strongest of the three, near-native accent neutrality | Good in engineering leadership; more variable below it |
| Time zone (vs Europe) | Workable overlap | Limited overlap | Workable overlap |
| Time zone (vs US West) | Limited | Better | Limited |
| Typical relative cost | Very wide range, lowest floor | Comparable to Vietnam | Mid-band, narrower spread |
| Common failure mode | Team churn and layered subcontracting on large accounts | Thinner senior product-engineering bench | Smaller vendor pool for very large programs |
Rates in all three markets vary more within the country than between countries. A senior engineer at a specialist firm in Bangalore can cost more than one in Hanoi, and both can cost less than a mid-level engineer at a global systems integrator with a delivery center in either place. Treat published country averages as noise; ask for the rate of the specific people who will be on your project. Our own guide to software outsourcing to Vietnam covers the Vietnamese bands in detail.
Where India genuinely wins
If your program is large, multi-year, and needs many specializations at once — SAP alongside data engineering alongside a 24/7 operations desk — India's depth is unmatched. No other market can staff that breadth as quickly, and the mature vendor ecosystem means audited processes, formal certifications, and delivery governance are readily available.
The risk to manage is dilution on large accounts: strong people win the pitch, and continuity of those same people over years is the thing to contract for explicitly. Ask who is named, what the replacement notice period is, and whether any work is subcontracted.
Where the Philippines genuinely wins
For anything voice-facing or customer-facing, the Philippines is the strongest of the three. English fluency and cultural alignment with US buyers are real advantages, and for support desks, back-office operations, QA, and content operations, it is often the correct answer.
For deep product engineering — distributed systems, applied AI, complex mobile — the senior bench is thinner than in India or Vietnam. That does not mean it is absent; it means you will search harder for it and should test it more carefully.
Where Vietnam genuinely wins
Vietnam's strength is product engineering at mid-market prices with low churn. The market is smaller, which cuts both ways: fewer options for a 300-person program, but far less of the churn-and-substitution dynamic that damages large offshore accounts. Teams tend to stay together, which matters more than any rate difference on a system you intend to run for five years.
Concretely, the work coming out of Vietnam that we see hold up under scrutiny clusters in a few areas: consumer and enterprise mobile (see the Azuki fashion-tech app), high-traffic commerce platforms (Ensogo merchant super-app), applied AI with strict accuracy requirements (Magic Circle legal AI agents), and public-sector systems built to transparency standards (MRB tender portal).
The honest limitation: if you need 200 engineers next quarter, Vietnam is the wrong shortlist. If you need eight strong ones for four years, it is a very good one.
The comparison that actually predicts the outcome
Country choice sets a price band. These four factors set the outcome, and they vary by firm, not by country:
- Seniority on your specific problem. Ask for the CVs of the people who will do the work, not the company's best CVs. Then ask them to walk you through a system they built that resembles yours, including what went wrong.
- Continuity. Average tenure at the firm, and the contractual notice period before someone is rotated off your team. Churn is the most expensive thing in offshore delivery and almost never appears in the rate card.
- Communication load. Not English test scores — whether the engineers can disagree with you clearly. A team that cannot say "that requirement will cause a problem" will build the wrong thing politely.
- Compliance and IP posture. Where your data lives, which standards the delivery process is aligned to, and whether IP assignment is unambiguous on payment. This is a contract question, and it is where regulated buyers should spend their diligence.
A practical way to test a shortlist
Run a small paid pilot before the main award — two to four weeks, a real bounded piece of work, fixed price. It costs a fraction of the program and reveals what no reference call will: how the team estimates, how they behave when they hit a surprise, how their code reads, and whether the senior person in the pitch is actually on the project. Run the same pilot with two firms in different countries if the decision is close.
Our 12-point vendor checklist is the longer form of this diligence, and the cost guide covers what a pilot of this shape typically runs.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which country is cheapest for software development?
India has the lowest floor, but the floor is not where good engineering lives. Within any of the three markets, the spread between a commodity supplier and a specialist firm is larger than the spread between countries, so a country-level cheapest answer is not usable for a decision. Compare quoted rates for named, equivalently senior people.
Is the time-zone difference a real problem?
It is manageable in all three, but it shapes how you work. With Europe, Vietnam and India give several hours of daily overlap; with the US West Coast, all three require deliberate async practice — written decisions, recorded demos, and one reliable synchronous window per day. Teams that write things down handle this well; teams that rely on meetings do not.
How do I protect intellectual property when outsourcing to Asia?
Contract for it rather than hoping for it: written IP assignment effective on payment, covering source code, infrastructure configuration, and design assets; your own cloud and repository accounts with the partner granted access rather than ownership; named confidentiality obligations for individuals as well as the firm; and a defined offboarding process for credentials. Enforcement varies by jurisdiction, which is exactly why control of accounts matters more than the clause.
Should I choose one country or split work across several?
Splitting works when the boundary is clean — for example, engineering in one country and a customer support desk in another. Splitting a single codebase across time zones and firms rarely pays for the coordination cost it creates.
What about Eastern Europe or Latin America?
Both are strong, and for buyers who need heavy overlap with US or EU working hours they often win on that basis alone. They typically sit at higher rate bands than the three markets compared here. The evaluation framework in this article — seniority, continuity, communication, compliance — transfers unchanged.
If Vietnam is on your shortlist
We are happy to be assessed the hard way. Ask us for the CVs of the people who would be on your project, a walkthrough of a system we built that resembles yours, and a small paid pilot before you commit to anything larger. Start that conversation here, or read how we work in public sector and fintech environments where the diligence bar is highest.
