FullStack.com vs Terminal: Why Terminal is the Best Alternative for Hiring Developers in 2024

Tech companies worldwide are scrambling to create the next big product, especially with emerging digital technologies like generative AI and augmented reality. But first, these companies must find qualified software engineers from the global talent pool and have traditionally relied on remote hiring platforms like FullStack.com for that.

FullStack.com is a custom software development and resourcing solutions platform founded in 2013. The company is known in the remote hiring industry, with notable clients like GoDaddy and Uber. However, there’s a better alternative to FullStack that’s all the rage for new and innovative startups in 2024: Terminal. And in this article, we’ll show you why this is so by comparing both platforms in depth. So, let’s dawdle no further and get down to business.

What Does FullStack Do?

FullStack offers its services under three banners: Fullstack, Fullstack Labs, and Fullstack Talent. Fullstack is the sub-platform for on-demand AI development and resourcing solutions. Fullstack Labs handles broader software development concerns, especially with legacy digital technologies. But FullStack Talent is the sub-platform for hiring remote workers.

The company’s head office is in San Francisco, California, from where it offers onshore and nearshore remote hiring services for US companies. The size of its in-house talent pool is unclear, although the platform purportedly has hundreds of core employees.

What Is Terminal?

Terminal is a nearshore and offshore remote hiring company with a modern approach to talent sourcing, hiring, and management. Thanks to its innovative standards and fingers on the pulse of the tech industry, the platform has emerged as a top favorite among tech startups in the Valley of Free Wi-Fi.

Terminal’s head office is on the US West Coast, in the San Francisco Bay area, but its talent network spans Latin America, Canada, and several European countries. Thousands of candidate developers from these regions apply to join the Terminal in-house pool monthly, and entrance requires passing some of the most rigorous talent pre-screening exercises of any contemporary hiring platform.

FullStack.com vs. Terminal

This comprehensive comparison of FullStack.com and Terminal will focus on the following important points of consideration:

• Talent sourcing
• Talent pre-screening
• Hiring flexibility
• Hiring process
• Hiring costs
• Developer roles and specialties
• Quality assurance

Note that this list is not exhaustive. But while many other factors worth considering exist, we must keep this comparison concise, so we have picked the core considerations that determine a superb remote hiring platform. That said, let us proceed.

Talent Sourcing

How a platform sources its candidates influences the quality and quantity of developer talent it can access and offer to you. Considering that, we shall assess and compare FullStack.com and Terminal regarding talent sourcing. The main factors under consideration are talent-sourcing strategies and geographic range; geographic range will be significant because it affects culture fit, cultural diversity, and talent range. 

FullStack.com

FullStack.com doesn’t offer any information about its talent strategy, thus making things a tad difficult for inquiring parties. But at least, the platform is a bit more transparent about its talent-sourcing scope. 

According to the FullStack Talent page, the platform recruits developers from the US and Latin America. Hiring from the US has its advantages, but given the high domestic talent shortage, sourcing in other regions rewards the effort better.  

Terminal

Terminal’s talent sourcing strategy is available on its website so that inquirers can learn about it more easily. The strategy primarily involves proactively forming business liaisons with top-rated universities across Latin America and Europe and with companies in Silicon Valley. Thanks to these strategic partnerships, a steady stream of both fresh talent from academia and veteran talent in between jobs flows into the pipeline, primarily via referral sourcing.

In addition to all that inflow, Terminal gets thousands of direct applications from candidates monthly. After all, thanks to its reputation in Latin America, most remote developers in the region want to work with the platform. 

Speaking of regions, Terminal casts a wider net than FullStack.com, recruiting not only from Latin America but also from Canada, Spain, Poland, Romania, and Hungary. 

However, aside from these specific regions, the company also offers global options via its Employer-of-Record services for clients wishing to hire elsewhere. This option allows you to leverage Terminal’s expertise in navigating the legal and logistical hassles of international remote hiring. 

Talent Pre-screening

Talent sourcing must immediately be followed by talent sorting or pre-screening. The process for pre-screening talent is pretty standard; after all, software development requires a pretty standardized skillset—with some variations depending on the specific niche. Notwithstanding, not all platforms are equally good at screening their candidate inflows and finding the top performers. 

FullStack.com

According to the FullStack.com website, the in-house talent pool is extensively pre-vetted. However, it’s unclear how this pre-vetting proceeds or how reliable the process is. 

Still, we assume that the vetting follows the standard soft and hard programming skills criteria. We also assume that live coding tests and language proficiency are core requirements. Still, the vetting system is another aspect of FullStack.com that is shrouded in mystery.  

Terminal

Terminal’s talent pre-vetting system is rigorous and transparent. But aside from being rigorous, the system must also be robust because it must identify both standard developer skills and unique skill sets. 

Additionally, while Terminal strongly favors Elite developers, it recruits some talent at lower skill levels to give clients more options. With all pre-vetting metrics duly implemented, however, only the top 7% of the candidates get recruited into the talent pool. 

The pre-vetting process itself involves first assessing the developer’s English proficiency and cultural fit via phone interview. Some of the candidates’ basic information comes from their profiles and portfolios, including data like self-reported training, expertise, and experience.

Candidates who pass these preliminary assessments receive video interview bookings from the platform’s recruitment experts. These further interviews help determine each candidate’s professional traits and actual skill levels, typically through mock project scenarios and live coding sessions. 

Some successful candidates — typically those who meet custom sourcing requirements — get booked for an interview with a waiting client straightaway, while others join the marketplace and are eligible for interview right away.

Hiring Flexibility

Flexible hiring options are part of the difference between a platform that can meet the requirements of small and big tech businesses alike and one that is only favorable to businesses at specific growth stages. 

A platform that offers options regardless of your hiring needs is ultimately preferable because it allows a stable client-platform business relationship. Such a working relationship with a reliable hiring platform, in turn, spares you the cost of changing platforms at various stages of your business’s expansion. Given this context, let’s contrast FullStack.com and Terminal regarding flexibility.

FullStack.com

FullStack.com offers only one hiring type: team augmentation. This type involves having the platform supplement your existing project team, filling missing roles, and extending the team’s capabilities. This service is under the FullStack Talent banner and is available for month-to-month contracts. 

Should hiring be beyond your budget, you could still use FullStack Labs, the platform’s custom software development and resourcing solution. This service offers four specialized ‘labs’: custom software development, product design, AI, data and analytics, and DevOps.

Aside from these, however, FullStack.com offers no other options. The platform is flexible regarding hiring durations since the month-to-month contract structure allows for short-term projects of at least one month. Still, there is no allowance for hiring singular developers for shorter-term projects of less than a month. 

Terminal

Terminal specializes in creating project teams but also allows hiring individual software engineers. The available contract terms range from a couple of weeks to long-term and permanent hiring, which makes Terminal more flexible than FullStack.com in at least these regards. But that’s not all.

Terminal allows you to modify the terms of an ongoing contract and extend the duration if you are impressed with the developers you hired. This arrangement is called ‘contract-to-hire,’ and it allows you to upgrade a short-term contractor to a full-time or permanent staff member without the hassle of setting up a new contract – all at a fraction of the cost.

Hiring Process

It’s common wisdom to secure the needed staffing ahead of schedule to avoid delays. But unanticipated events can always leave you short-staffed, and long, over-complicated hiring procedures can get in the way when that happens. Thus, to avoid uncomfortable delays due to staffing and maintain momentum in 2024’s fast-moving tech world, you need a remote hiring platform whose process will have your project team adequately staffed and ready to go in no time.

FullStack.com

The hiring process on FullStack.com begins with placing a call to book a hire. The ‘client success manager’ on the other end will ascertain your project aims and hiring requirements. Subsequently, you’ll receive a curated shortlist of candidate profiles matching your specifications.

You also get access to the client portal, where you can explore the talent pool, review recordings of candidate coding challenges and video interviews from the pre-screening stage, and potentially book some interviews of your own. 

According to the FullStack.com website, the average hiring time on the platform is 48 hours, although it’s unclear if this applies to custom sourcing requests, which tend to take longer. But once you sign the hiring contract, FullStack.com will handle the subsequent talent onboarding and management. 

Terminal

To hire developers on Terminal, you first need to access the website and make a request. Based on the requirements you specify in this request, the platform’s algorithm scans the talent pool and shortlists the 5 or 7 best-fitting profiles. The shortlist can be longer, depending on how many roles you aim to fill, but the first shortlist is guaranteed to contain all you need and save you time. 

The hiring expert assigned to you will assist you in conducting interviews, reaching contract terms with your choice candidates, and onboarding them. Since the platform has thousands of developers ready to interview at all times, the hiring process may take less than a few days. This hiring time also applies to custom sourcing requests, except when none of the available software engineers meet the requirements.

Custom-sourcing directly from the talent market can take weeks; however, under normal hiring conditions, you can have your developers onboarded and delivering code in less than 45 days. 

Hiring Costs

Hiring remotely online should not be financially draining, so cost-efficiency is worth considering before choosing a hiring platform. The pricing structures of cost-efficient platforms tend to include fewer types of fees, and the fees they do include are budget-friendly. 

In this section, we will compare the pricing structures of FullStack.com and Terminal to see which will be milder on your hiring budget.

FullStack.com

FullStack.com’s pricing structure is unavailable on its website, which is odd since the platform has a page on software development prices in 2024. However, we did manage to find out from Clutch reviews that FullStack.com’s developers charge hourly rates from $25 to $49. These rates can add up to over $6000 monthly, depending on working times.

The FullStack Talent main page mentions that hiring on the platform affords you up to 50% cost savings. But with no information on hiring fees, onboarding costs, or any other charges that may apply, it’s hard to tell what that 50% amounts to. 

Terminal

Terminal’s highly cost-efficient pricing system is based on an all-round analysis of over 90 financial and legal considerations that impacted the platform founders’ choice of talent markets. For example, the Latin American talent market is geographically aligned with the US, so hiring in the region can afford you cost savings of 40%-60% over traditional or domestic hiring. 

The developer rates are also very affordable. Terminal’s software engineers set their monthly rates between $4,000 and $12,0000, depending on their expertise level. Since the platform specializes in hiring mid-to-senior level developers, it may not be as cheap as some other options. However, it remains the best place to hire elite talent at nearshore prices much more affordable than domestic hiring. 

A small onboarding fee, which ranges from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, depending on the contract, also applies. This onboarding fee covers everything from talent and payroll management to performance monitoring. 

Developer Roles and Specialties

A hiring platform should ideally offer an assortment of software engineering specialties and competencies. This way, you can easily find a competent professional to fill any vacant roles on your project team. That said, let’s look at the various roles and specialties available on FullStack.com and Terminal. 

FullStack.com

FullStack.com offers a considerable range of specialties. It claims to match over 600 technologies, including React, Node.js, JavaScript, Flutter, Kafka, PostgreSQL, Elixir, and Ruby on Rails. It also fills roles in specialties like DevOps, AI development, product design, project management, and business analysis. 

Aside from offering team augmentation around all these specialties, FullStack.com also does consultations.

Terminal

Terminal is well-rounded in terms of its specialties. Its developers are skilled in all kinds of technologies, from both popular and obscure programming languages, database management systems, enterprise resources, and content management systems to artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and blockchain technology. 

The specialties offered include cloud management, business management, quality assurance, full-stack development, data engineering, and mobile development.

Quality Assurance

Quality assurance must be available on any platform with which it is worth forming a lasting business relationship. With quality assurances in place, you can be sure that any possible issues with a platform’s service – such as wrong-fit hires – will not ultimately cost you. That is why we will now assess FullStack.com and Terminal for quality assurance offers and see which are more favorable. 

FullStack.com

In case of bad hires, which online reviews of FullStack.com indicate are pretty frequent, the platform has a 2-week trial period within which you can substitute your hires at no extra cost.

Terminal

Due to the high accuracy of Terminal’s talent matching, clients seldom need to change the developers they’ve hired. However, should such a need ever arise, the platform’s two free trial offers will spare clients the fees that usually attend hiring a replacement. 

The first offer lasts for three months and applies to long-term or full-time hires, allowing you to get free replacement and onboarding if necessary at any point within the period. The second offer lasts for two weeks and applies to short-term contracts. If you wish to end the hiring engagement anytime within this two-week period, you can do so cost-free. 

FullStack.com vs Terminal: Which Is the Best For Hiring Developers?

Terminal’s superior talent screening system processes thousands of developers from the many regions that the platform’s larger comprehensive talent network covers. The system also employs a more sophisticated sourcing strategy to assess higher-quality talent than FullStack.com. 

FullStack.com seems to hire quite fast, but that’s only under ideal circumstances; the need for multiple tries before getting the right fit on FullStack.com contrasts with the accurate matching on Terminal that gets you what you need in one try. The result is that hiring is, in practice, faster on Terminal than on FullStack.com. 

What’s more, Terminal is much more favorable to budgets, transparent with pricing, and diverse in specialties. And to close the deal, the platform has more attractive quality assurance offers than FullStack.com. So, the verdict is clear: Terminal is the best alternative to FullStack.com for a rewarding hiring experience in 2024.