Top VanHack Alternatives for Hiring Remote Developers in 2024

Navigating the remote developer market in search of a hire can be confusing, especially if you’re new to it. There are loads of platforms to choose from, and it can be challenging to decide if the ones recommended are as good as presented. In this article, we discuss one of the popularly recommended remote hiring hubs that is probably already on your to-try list: VanHack Inc. 

VanHack is a tech talent-hiring platform that claims to be the fastest way to hire developers remotely. It was founded in 2015 and has a talent pool of thousands of tech professionals from across the globe, including fully remote workers and digital nomads. We will also show you some competing platforms that may offer more than this hiring agency does, but not before we give you a balanced overview of VanHack’s selling points and inadequacies. 

VanHack Platform Features 

According to the platform website, VanHack aims to offer a hiring service that transcends national borders, empowers tech developers, and makes their services readily available wherever needed. This goal explains the following positive features of the platform. 

• As a tech-only hiring platform, VanHack is free of the distraction of catering to other remote hiring sectors. All attention and resources are focused on providing the best tech talent hiring it can. 
• VanHack sources the developers (VanHackers) in its talent pool from over 100 countries around the globe, enabling you to find developers from different regions and cultural backgrounds.
• The platform claims to be very budget-friendly, potentially saving you up to 30% in hiring costs. 
• If you would prefer to have your developer migrate to your location to resume work, VanHack can offer some assistance with that. The website says it has an in-house team of global mobility experts who will help with the visa and relocation process. 
• If the process of onboarding your developer feels like some stress you’d rather not bother with, VanHack can take care of it for a fee. 
• VanHack’s AI-powered applicant tracking system (ATS) uses matching algorithms to scan through its database of available candidates and provides a preview of viable ones within 12 minutes. It also handles everything from interview scheduling to job posting and candidate tracking.
• VanHack hosts virtual hiring events that allow employers to interact with the in-house talent pool. 

Why Consider a VanHack Alternative? 

We have seen VanHack’s main selling points. Now, let’s shine the spotlight on its subpar aspects. 

• Due to a lack of pricing transparency, making any applicable budgetary plans before requesting a hire is impractical. The platform only mentions that it can reduce hiring costs by up to 30%; still, with no clear picture of the average costs, you must remember that the remaining 70% could be enough to wreck your budget. 
• While they come from almost every continent, VanHackers are apparently only hireable by companies in the EU and Canada. The VanHack alternatives we will discuss shortly do not have this shortfall. 
• There is usually insufficient time at VanHack’s hiring events to liaise with potential hires. 
• Finalizing a hiring arrangement can take quite some time. The average time is about 50 days, but it can take up to 2 months for high-level developers. 
• VanHack caters primarily to large companies and long projects. According to the platform, the average working tenure of VanHackers at various companies is 3½ years. While it’s still possible to hire them for short-term projects (say, up to 3 months), you have to go somewhere else if you need more adaptable arrangements. 
• VanHack offers no trial periods.

VanHack Alternatives to Hire Developers

Now we’ve seen what VanHack offers and what it doesn’t, what other platforms should you consider? This section will discuss the best alternatives and compare them to the VanHack. 

1. VanHack vs Terminal.io

Terminal is one of the most popular VanHack alternatives, especially for long-timeers in the hiring market, and it’s not hard to see why. It has all the best features with none of the shortfalls, and it has a more reliable track record of flawless talent-to-job matchings, even with the uniqueness of each hiring request taken into account. 

Terminal.io is an AI-powered platform like VanHack but is less reliant on AI. Unlike the latter, the former recognizes the importance of human touch, so it combines its AI with the expertise of its industry-experienced human experts. The result is a curated hiring experience that feels human-friendly and personal—a sharp contrast to VanHack’s comparatively impersonal offering. Terminal is also tech-exclusive, allowing it the time and resources to take on developer onboarding on request. But it doesn’t end there. Terminal goes beyond VanHack in these regards: 

• Terminal is much more transparent about its pricing than VanHack. It even supersedes many other VanHack alternatives that only mention developer pay rates but not their fees. Terminal lets you know upfront that its developers charge between $4000 and $12000 monthly. And although its hiring fees are variable  (they depend on the expertise of the developer you hire), it does disclose that said fees are no more than a few thousand dollars. 
• Since it relies on human experience and artificial intelligence, Terminal can better navigate the intricacies of the developer talent industry and find the right professionals to satisfy custom sourcing requests. It can also better protect you against fraudulent or unethical workers with its in-depth vetting and capacity to detect even the best-faked CVs. 
• VanHack is unsuited for hiring anything other than full-time developers for long-term projects. Conversely, Terminal is very well suited for hiring long-term, short-term, full-time, and even freelance developers. You can also make contract-to-full-time rearrangements.
• Although Terminal.io mainly focuses on recruiting and hiring mid to elite-level developers, it also has many entry-level developers for hire. 
• Terminal.io hires much faster than VanHack, typically taking no more than 45 days to get you your new hire, regardless of their expertise level. 
• Terminal is geographically quite the opposite of VanHack in terms of talent sourcing and hiring. While VanHackers are globally sourced but only available to companies in the EU and Canada, Terminal developers come from the fast-emerging talent markets of Latin America, the EU, and Canada and are available for companies worldwide.
• Terminal.io offers incentives that far outclass VanHack’s. In addition to providing timezone alignment-based cost and time savings of up to 60% (twice that of VanHack) over domestic US hiring, it also offers a free trial and risk-free trial period of up to 14 days. To top it off, in the vanishingly likely event that your new hire doesn’t quite fit the designated job, you can take advantage of Terminal’s three-month free replacement guarantee. 

Want to see Terminal’s developer talent instantly? View vetted engineers for free now

2. VanHack vs BairesDev

BairesDev is a Latin America-based tech solutions company that offers both nearshore and off-shore hiring services. Its talent pool is 4000 strong and includes professionals of all types within the tech sector. Like Terminal.io, BairesDev sources its developer talent from the Latin American talent pool, providing its services to companies in the greater continent and beyond. It is tech-focused like VanHack but brings even more to the table, specializing in all of remote hiring, team assembling and augmentation, and software development services. 

Selling Points

Unlike VanHack, BairesDev offers a more globally available hiring service. BairesDev provides nearshore developer hiring for companies in Canada and offshore hiring for companies in and beyond Europe. 

The platform offers significant cost and time reductions thanks to the timezone alignment in Canada and the US. It also has a much shorter average hiring time at just 37.2 days, compared to VanHack’s 50. Finally, it offers many more hiring arrangements than VanHack, including full-time, part-time, and freelance.

Shortfalls

In a few ways, BairesDev may prove a less favorable option than VanHack or some of the other platforms we discuss in this article. To begin with, it does not offer a trial period as Terminal does, nor does it help integrate new developers. There are also no known cost-saving benefits, and speaking of costs, BairesDev is not upfront about those. 

3. VanHack vs CloudDevs

CloudDevs is another Latin America-focused tech talent hiring company that provides global hiring services. It is similar to Terminal in this regard. Its 8000-strong developer talent pool makes it among Latin America’s largest remote hiring platforms and comprises elite and rigorously vetted developers. 

Selling Points

Like VanHack, CloudDevs specializes in hiring tech talent and affords you all the benefits that that brings. It is also provably budget-friendly, unlike VanHack, which only purports to be budget-friendly but offers no pricing information to indicate it. CloudDevs charges a transparent rate of $40 – $70 per hour for Latin American CloudDevelopers and $40 – $55 per hour for global ones. 

In addition, CloudDev’s hiring arrangements are more flexible than VanHack’s. The former offers freelance developers on both part-time and full-time bases, and you can modify the contract to full hiring. Regarding hiring speed, CloudDevs is much faster and can finalize hiring arrangements within 24 hours. 

Shortfalls

CloudDevs’s “global” talent pool only comes from Europe, making it more limited in recruitment scope than VanHack. It also doesn’t measure up to VanHack alternatives like Terminal.io, which offers talent onboarding, free trial periods, and the benefit of AI amplifying human skill in talent sourcing. Finally, it only provides elite developers.

4. VanHack vs Naprok

Naprok is an AI-powered remote tech team hiring platform headquartered in Cherkasy, Ukraine. It is one of the best VanHack alternatives in terms of fraud protection, second only to Terminal.io, and it has a known track record of reliably hiring developer talent for popular tech companies like Google and Facebook. 

Selling Points

Naprok recruits and hires only tech developers, thus offering the benefits of specialization, such as more niche tech developer hiring. It is also very transparent about its pricing. According to the platform page, the weekly hiring rate for Naprok developers is just $1,500. It even offers two hiring account types, only one of which charges an extra fee ($17 monthly). 

Unlike VanHack, Naprok is a global recruiter and can offer both nearshore and offshore hiring worldwide. Despite its wider reach, it’s also much faster at hiring, typically completing its hiring arrangements in 2 to 5 weeks. Finally, if you hire a developer from Naprok, you enjoy their services on a free trial for up to 14 days. 

Shortfalls

Naprok’s most apparent failure point is that it can only hire developer teams, not individuals. It also only offers full-time arrangements, which makes it far less suited for flexible and adaptable arrangements than VanHack alternatives like Terminal.io. Also, while it’s demonstrably affordable, its weekly hiring rate adds up to a monthly expenditure less affordable than Terminal’s lower bound by $2000. And while Terminal offers developer onboarding, Naprok does not. 

5. VanHack vs ZipRecruiter

ZipRecruiter is among the most popular and accessible remote talent platforms on the web. The platform has two offices in the US: its headquarters in Santa Monica, California, and the Arizona branch office. It also has offices in London, UK, and Tel Aviv, Israel. The platform is more of a job posting space than a hiring platform. If you need a task done or have an open role in your project, you post it on the platform. ZipRecruiter then runs your posting through over 100 job sites, drawing in applications from developers with skillsets suited for the job. You can then screen their applications, assign the job, and track their progress, all using the tools provided by the platform. 

Selling Points

ZipRecruiter’s most significant selling point is the degree of flexibility it offers. Due to its operating model, it can help you find developers for everything from long-term job roles to brief, days-long tasks. It can also find developers at every level, from entry to elite, just like Terminal. Given its pricing model, the platform can also be quite affordable. You pay per engagement for job or project postings, which costs about $62.19 an hour, depending on the developer’s expertise level and the job’s nature. Hiring arrangements can cost up to $115,217 annually. 

Shortfalls

While ZipRecruiter may offer a high degree of flexibility in hiring and job engagements, it does not handle the hiring, interviewing, and onboarding processes. The whole process of screening, interviewing, and hiring the developer is basically your business. In this regard, it is less favorable than the other VanHack alternatives, especially those that offer full-process hiring, such as Terminal.io. All that ZipRecruiter does is provide the tools to sort these things out yourself.

6. VanHack vs Turing

Turing is one of the most popular data science-driven VanHack alternatives. Its talent pool includes over a million highly and variously skilled developers from around the globe. Like Terminal, the platform specializes in various developer talent postings, focusing on niche developer jobs. 

Selling Points

In addition to specializing in hiring remote software developers, the platform makes good use of automation in its vetting, monitoring, hiring, payment, and insurance system. This reliance on automation affords it high speed—you can typically finalize hirings within 3 to 5 days of your initial request. 

Turing also offers significant hiring incentives, such as its 14-day trial period. 

Shortfalls

Turing shares a significant flaw with VanHack concerning its lack of pricing transparency. Additionally, it doesn’t offer any developer integration services. While it does feature a few freelance developers in its talent pool, it is almost exclusively a full-time developer hiring platform. 

7. VanHack vs Upwork

Upwork is a freelancing platform famous for its sheer size and how long it has been around. The platform was founded in 2013 through a merger between Elance Inc. and oDesk Corp, becoming Elance-oDesk. It assumed the name “Upwork” in 2015. Like ZipRecruiter, the platform has its headquarters in California, but that’s not the only similarity. 

Upwork operates a similar model to ZipRecruiter. You post the description of a task role in your company, the skills required, and how much you are willing to pay the freelancer who completes it. Once you decide on one or more applicants, you can send a contract with the task details, work time, and pay rate. 

Selling Points

Like ZipRecruiter, Upwork works well for projects requiring brief engagements with developers. It is a freelance-focused platform, after all. It can also be very affordable to use. With the pay rates between $30 to $120 hourly, depending on how many hours your project calls for, you may spend at most $1000 a week. 

Upwork is also similar to VanHack alternatives like Terminal and ZipRecruiter in offering a variety of work arrangements, from freelance to full-time and fractional developers. Upwork’s model also means hiring is as fast as you want it to be — every job gets several applicants in no time, and how fast you can hire one of them depends on how fast you can screen the applicants and assign the job. 

Shortfalls

Upwork is not a tech-focused platform; it doesn’t have an in-house vetting team or its own prevetted developers. Since it is more of a talent marketplace than a developer hiring platform, it is entirely up to you to deal with the stresses of screening developers and finding the best fit for your job. Alternatives like Terminal.io are preferable if you’d rather not take on all that stress. It’s also noteworthy that Upwork’s business model does not afford you such promotions as free trial periods. 

Best VanHack Alternatives for Remote Developer Hiring

The various platforms discussed in this article have their merits and demerits. Still, if one of them takes the cake, it’s Terminal.io. It offers the best of these platforms with none of the attending shortfalls. It is truly an all-rounder, combining unmatched flexibility and talent-sourcing reliability with top-grade vetting and affordability. If you’ve been looking for the right platform to hire developers for your project or job role, you need not look any further.