Revelo places full-time engineers from Latin America and runs the contractor administration for you. You describe the role, its recruiters return a curated shortlist in about 72 hours, and once someone starts, one monthly invoice covers pay, benefits, taxes, and compliance across 18 countries. If you're new to hiring internationally, this helps you find LATAM hires quickly and without setting up an entity or payroll.
But under Revelo's Agent of Record (AOR) structure, the engineer is an independent contractor. That means the person stays self-employed, and if they work full-time for one U.S. company for years, that classification can be challenged by local labor authorities.
Revelo covers that risk with indemnification if a classification is ever contested, capped at whatever limit your client agreement sets, but back taxes, benefits, and penalties above the cap land on you.
The engagement shape is fixed, too. Revelo placements are full-time, so an hourly, part-time, or freelance brief has nowhere to go. And once someone starts, the support behind them is administrative, with quarterly check-ins rather than a person who owns the relationship. If something goes wrong after their 14-day guarantee, you have to resolve it yourself or backfill the position.
This article will help you decide whether Revelo’s model works best for your team, or if an alternative that employs hires directly, allows for more flexible engagement types, or builds the team (or project) for you is the better fit.
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Platform |
Best for |
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1. Strider |
Curated LATAM hiring with support that continues after the hire |
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2. Near |
Staffing several functions beyond engineering with one LATAM partner |
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3. Howdy |
Supporting hires with in-country offices and coaching |
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4. TECLA |
Hiring engineers on flexible pricing and engagement terms |
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5. CloudDevs |
Bringing on short-term developers without employing them |
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6. BairesDev |
Handing a vendor the delivery as well as the hiring |
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7. Toptal |
Getting a senior specialist onto a project within days |
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8. Arc.dev |
Adding candidates to the pipeline you already run |
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9. Turing |
Drawing several hires from one pre-vetted bench |
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10. Deel |
Handling employment across many countries from one platform |
Eligibility is checked at network entry and covers Latin American residency, at least three years of professional experience, and a complete profile. Proprietary AI screening narrows the network against your requirements, and recruiters then screen the remaining profiles on your stack with questions written for the role, while professional English teachers grade recorded spoken responses at CEFR level.
Two live conversations follow. A Strider recruiter interviews the candidate on motivation, culture fit, compensation expectations, and soft skills, and gives feedback in that call, which means they arrive at your interview briefed on the role. A subject-matter expert then walks through a real project the candidate shipped, probing depth in real time to catch AI-generated answers, and providing a technical write-up for each candidate for you to use in your own interviews.
With this process, four or five candidates reach you within two days of the intake call, and 94% of searches end in a hire.
While Revelo engages the engineer as an independent contractor, Strider employs them. As the EOR rather than an AOR, Strider holds the employment contract, which means payroll, taxes, benefits, equipment, and compliance sit on its side, along with the compliance exposure that would otherwise be yours. That way, the work left to you is integrating the hire into your team rather than lining up a second employment vendor behind them. Engagement shape differs too, since Revelo places full-time engineers only, and Strider's full-time hires work exclusively for your company.
Ongoing support is another significant difference, as Revelo only checks in quarterly while Strider assigns a named account manager who stays with your account for the length of the engagement, accessible via Slack or email. That person owns what has no obvious owner otherwise, like providing a bonus to an over-performer or coordinating an offsite in the employee’s region. Behind them, customer success ships hardware, runs onboarding, answers HR questions, and holds periodic performance reviews.
Fit screening and that support are why retention on Strider hires runs past 90%.
Strider fits best when you're hiring someone you plan to keep and would rather have them employed and supported by one partner than contracted through an agent. That puts a named person behind every hire, with engagement shapes and role coverage that Revelo doesn't offer.
See how Strider and Revelo compare head to head.
Strider costs nothing until you make a hire. You can share a role, review candidates, and run interviews before committing to anything, and you only owe something when a search ends in a placement.
"Strider has been a valuable partner, saving us time and money by quickly providing high-quality candidates. I recommend Strider to any software company looking for top talent." — Mikhail Opletayev, CTO at Petvisor
"Strider is not just some run-of-the-mill hiring platform, they are a true extension of our team. They've worked closely with us time and time again to develop the perfect job description, hiring process, onboarding process, and even HR best practices. If you're looking to hire in LATAM, there's only one choice: Strider." — Keivan Shahida, Co-founder and CEO at Response
Near recruits LATAM talent across eight departments, so the partner that finds your backend engineer can also find your bookkeeper. Software engineering, data, customer support, sales, marketing, finance and accounting, design, and operations all run through one recruiter and one process, which helps when hiring runs past the engineering roles Revelo's network is built around.
Near begins each search with recruiter-led screening, including initial interviews, English-fluency and communication assessments, skills checks, and international background checks. Its recruiters screen candidates against the role-specific skills, experience, English level, and working style agreed during intake, while you can add your own interview exercises or evaluation criteria. That flexibility suits a team with a clear definition of seniority and fit. The technical bar is yours to set, though, so a team without a defined internal assessment gets less out of this than one that already knows how it screens engineers.
Near assigns a dedicated recruiter to the search, and the pace of the search is that recruiter's pace. First vetted candidates arrive within three to five days, each with a video introduction so you can see and hear them before booking a live interview, and most clients hire within three weeks.
You get two paths for placing the hire. Direct hire puts the person on your own payroll, or through an EOR you already use, and you manage the employment relationship after placement, backed by a 180-day guarantee that Near calls double the industry standard. Managed staffing has Near hold contracts, payroll, benefits, and compliance and bill one monthly invoice, and there the guarantee runs for the duration of the engagement. Under either path, Near finds you someone new at no added cost if a placement doesn't work out.
Near can work for teams filling multiple customer support, sales, accounting, or operations seats in LATAM alongside its engineering hires. If you want engineering-specialist depth, or to browse candidates and run the pipeline yourself, it gives you less to work with.
Near's fee is gated behind a discovery call. Its pricing page simply shows salary benchmarks by role. You can interview candidates for free, and only pay when you hire.
G2: 4.8/5 — Based on 153 reviews
Where Revelo's involvement after the match is payroll and quarterly check-ins, Howdy's is a building and a coach.
Getting into that arrangement takes longer than a marketplace match. Recruiting is run by 31 full-time psychologists trained as recruiters, who interview more than 100,000 people a year and pass fewer than 5% of them. First candidates arrive within 24 hours, but the full cycle runs four to six weeks, and every placement is full-time with no end date. That means it isn't the right call when you need someone starting next week.
The payoff is retention. Over 98% of Howdy professionals stay with their partner company through the first two years, across 12,500+ placements. The office is a large part of that, which means the model is strongest when the hire lives in one of the hub cities. Someone working remotely from elsewhere in the region still gets the coach and the employment layer, but not the building.
Howdy makes sense for a team building a lasting LATAM outpost in one of its cities and willing to wait a month or more for the right person. A project with an end date, a part-time seat, or a role that has to start this month is outside what it places.
Howdy quotes pricing per engagement, and does not publish a rate card. Billing only starts on your hire's first day, with no upfront or recruiting fees, and no minimum commitment.
Two tracks do most of the work. Direct-hire recruiting runs on contingency, so you pay a one-time fee when the candidate starts, the engineer becomes your employee outright, and TECLA steps out. Managed staff augmentation keeps TECLA as the employer, with one hourly rate covering vetting, compliance, benefits management, equipment, and ongoing support, on rolling monthly terms. A team that isn't sure a role is permanent can start on the hourly track and convert once it is.
Screening runs in stages before you see anyone, with a technical assessment covering coding challenges and system design, a recruiter interview on English fluency and culture fit, and verified references. You interview pre-screened candidates within five to seven days, and someone can start within two to three weeks.
Every TECLA hire carries a 90-day guarantee across all three tracks, so if the fit is wrong on skills or communication, they source someone new at no extra cost. What you don't get is a database to search yourself, since every engagement starts with an intake call and a recruiter-built shortlist.
TECLA suits a team that wants to decide the engagement shape after meeting the person rather than before. If you'd rather search a large pool on your own, the intake-call model puts a recruiter between you and the candidates.
TECLA doesn't publish a fixed rate card. Its pricing page works as an estimator instead, where you pick the region, the engagement model, and the role type, and it returns an average drawn from current and past engagements.
The number for your own role gets scoped on a call, and there are no retainers or search deposits on standard engagements.
Clutch: 4.9/5 — Based on 21 reviews
CloudDevs sources from hubs in Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, and Colombia, with developers working inside roughly two hours of U.S. time zones. Its pre-vetted pool holds over 10,000 developers with at least five years of professional experience each, drawn from a wider network of 500,000+.
These candidates clear a communication and attitude check, a technical skills assessment conducted by a senior talent expert, and a plagiarism-checked problem-solving challenge before they're matched.
What you don't get is an employer. CloudDevs invoices and pays the developer for you and offers payroll, local labor-law compliance, HR support, and an optional healthcare plan as services, but the contract is between you and the developer, who is a contractor and not an employee of anyone. That flexibility runs both ways, though, since a week-to-week contract binds the developer no longer than it binds you.
CloudDevs works for a team sizing its commitment as the work becomes clearer, or running a bounded project on an hourly budget. If you're building a permanent team and want a legal employer behind the hire, the buy-out is the route there, and until you take it the classification question stays with you.
CloudDevs publishes its rates, bills on rolling weekly contracts, and charges only for the hours you use, with no deposit to start and no fees until you hire.
G2: 4.9/5 — Based on 163 reviews
You set priorities and direction and keep visibility through your own tools, whether that's Jira, Asana, Slack, or GitHub, while the project manager runs the day-to-day as your single point of contact. When priorities shift, you scale a team up or down or stand up a second one alongside it. At the top of the range, end-to-end outsourcing has BairesDev run discovery, sign an SLA, and own delivery outright through sprint reviews and demos.
The engineer on your sprint board never becomes your employee, though. Pay, retention, and career path sit on BairesDev's side under all three models, so someone who turns out to be exactly right for your team stays on someone else's payroll. There's no free trial and no published guarantee window either, and every engagement opens with a discovery call and a few days to finalize scope before the team is assembled.
BairesDev suits a mid-market or enterprise team that wants a build team and the coordination that runs it. It isn't the route for a lean team that would rather pick and directly manage one engineer at a time.
BairesDev doesn't publish a rate card. The figure for your engagement arrives after a discovery call, priced by scope, team size, seniority, and which services are in the contract.
Clutch: 4.9/5 — Based on 63 reviews
The speed rests on screening that's already done. Toptal publishes its funnel stage by stage, from a language and personality review that 26.4% of applicants pass, through an in-depth skill review, live screening with domain experts, and a test project of one to three weeks, down to the 3% who stay in the network. Every person you meet has cleared all five.
The trial takes most of the risk out of moving that fast. Each engagement opens with up to two weeks during which you pay only if you're satisfied, and you can try up to three people for a position before deciding. Engagements run hourly, part-time, or full-time, and in every case the specialist is an independent contractor, so classification and compliance stay on your side.
The pool is global rather than Latin American, which means overlap with your workday is whatever you specify in the brief rather than a given. That's the trade against Revelo, with reach and speed for a specialist in place of the region's built-in hours.
Toptal makes sense for a project with a defined finish line that needs a senior specialist now, and for a team that treats hours of overlap as a preference rather than a requirement. For those who want someone to handle work with an open end date, or who need EOR service without adding an extra vendor, it is less of a fit.
Toptal keeps talent rates off its site and quotes them per engagement, whether you're hiring hourly, part-time, or on a full-time contract.
A conversion fee also applies if you bring a contractor onto your own payroll, which can be negotiated.
G2: 4.7/5 — Based on 270 reviews
On the full-time track, a dedicated recruiter sources against your brief, candidates land in your applicant tracking system, and your team screens them the way it screens everyone else. When the hire works out, the person goes onto your payroll for a one-time fee with no platform relationship afterward, where a Revelo engineer stays contracted through Revelo for as long as they work with you.
The freelance track is how you try before committing. A freelance hire starts within about 72 hours at the talent's own hourly rate, with a risk-free trial of up to two weeks during which you aren't billed if it doesn't work out, and contract-to-hire lets you convert that person to a full-time placement once the fit is proven. Full-time placements carry their own cover, with a new match at no charge if the hire leaves in the first three months.
What Arc leaves with you is employment. Payroll, benefits, and local compliance sit on your side, and for an international full-time hire, compliant employment runs through partner Employer of Record providers or your own entity rather than through Arc. The pool is global too, so overlap with your workday is whatever minimum you set on the listing, with UTC offsets shown on candidate profiles.
Teams consider Arc.dev when their hiring process already works and needs qualified people in it, or when they want to start someone hourly before offering a seat. A team that wants the search, the employment, and the paperwork handled by one partner would be assembling that from Arc plus an EOR.
Arc charges nothing until you hire, then bills by engagement type.
For contract-to-hire conversion, a negotiated fee applies.
G2: 4.8/5 — Based on 18 reviews
That's what makes parallel hiring workable. Since the scoring is done up front and independent of any one role, a Go engineer, two React developers, and a DevOps hire can run at the same time without your team screening four separate pipelines.
Where Revelo builds a shortlist per role, Turing's scoring is done before any role exists. The bench is global, drawn from the top 1% of more than 3 million applicants across 100+ skills, and every match carries at least four hours of daily overlap with your working day, with daily standups mandatory for every developer.
The hiring product runs on automation from vetting to matching, with no human involvement on Turing's side until you interview. Scores decide who reaches you rather than a recruiter's read, so an unusual background a person would have flagged can fall through. Developer hiring is also a secondary line for Turing now, whose main business is AI-lab data and enterprise AI. And Turing doesn't employ anyone. Engineers are independent contractors under its terms, which means payroll, compliance, and equipment are yours to arrange.
Turing pays off when a roadmap needs several engineers at once and your own team can't run a separate screening funnel for each. For a single hire you want handled end to end, with a person involved past the briefing call, the automation is the wrong shape.
Turing doesn't publish rates and quotes one bundled hourly rate per engineer after an intake call. There's no upfront cost to start a search, and nothing is owed if you stop inside the three-week trial. If you do continue, those trial weeks are billed.
G2: 4.3/5 — Based on 20 reviews
You choose the employment arrangement for each hire. Contractor management writes compliant contracts and handles classification, with a Contractor of Record option that moves the misclassification liability onto Deel's side for a one-month-payment deposit. A U.S. PEO covers co-employment across all 50 states, provided you already hold a U.S. entity. Whichever you pick, the payroll and compliance underneath adjust to match, on month-to-month terms.
Deel Talent is the sourcing half, and it's a toolset rather than a recruiting service. You post a job once, an AI-vetted marketplace suggests up to 20 candidates from 1.5 million professionals, and for specialized or new-market roles Deel matches you with partner recruiting agencies who source and vet on your behalf. The screening judgment sits with software or a partner firm rather than with Deel's own recruiters, and none of it is LATAM-specific. Compliance works the same way, which means Deel flags risks, changes, and gaps while the final decisions stay with you.
Deel is most useful when the hard part is employing people legally across several countries, whether you find them yourself or through its marketplace and partner agencies. If you want a recruiter-run shortlist and the employment handled by the same partner, it’s not modeled for your needs.
Deel publishes per-worker, per-month pricing on month-to-month terms. These are platform fees that sit on top of the worker's own pay, taxes, and mandatory benefits.
G2: 4.4/5 — Based on 6,087 reviews
Every option here, Revelo included, gets you to a capable engineer. Where they part ways is what that engineer is to you a year later.
On a contractor platform, they're a counterparty whose agreement both sides keep renewing. With a delivery vendor, they're the vendor's employee, and a good one can be reassigned. With certain EORs, they're your employee on paper, once you've found them yourself.
Strider is built for the version where they're simply on your team. You choose from a short list vetted against your role, a full-time hire works only for you, and Strider carries the employment, from the contract and payroll through the compliance exposure that comes with employing someone in another country. The account manager who set up the search is the same person you call in month eighteen.
That leaves your team with the part it wanted in the first place, which is the work.
Book a call to get your first shortlist, free until you hire.