I run one of these companies. Linnoedge is a software engineering company in Ho Chi Minh City, and if you are shortlisting Vietnamese vendors right now, we are a company you might end up comparing. So read this the way you would read anything written by an interested party. I am not going to rank anyone, and my own company sits in the table below with the same columns as everyone else, including the cells I cannot fill.
Here is what buyers keep describing to me. They open a stack of vendor sites and every one says high quality, low cost, English-speaking team, agile process. Nothing in that list separates one company from another. So the shortlist quietly turns into a price comparison, and the decision starts to feel arbitrary.
This article does two things. It shows you what these companies publish about themselves, taken from their own About pages rather than from directory sites. And it gives you the questions I would ask if I were the one hiring, including the two situations where the right answer is to not hire an offshore vendor at all.
What the published facts actually tell you
Not much, is the short answer. Every “Top 10” list ranks Vietnamese vendors on founding year, headcount, hourly rate and certifications. I pulled those numbers from each company’s own About page on 2026-08-07, and they turn out to be either wildly far apart or simply absent. Neither state helps you choose.
| Company | Founded (as published) | Size (as published) | Headquarters | Standards and certifications listed on that page |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| TMA Solutions | “Established in 1997” | “4,000 Engineers” (stated as a current figure) | Ho Chi Minh City | Listed under “International Standards”: RUP, ISO 9001:2015, TL 9000, CMMi Level 3, Agile, CMMi Level 5, ISO/IEC 27001:2022 |
| Saigon Technology | 2012, “established with only 3 software engineers” | “Successfully grow the company to 400 staff” (company timeline, 2021-2023 entry) | Ho Chi Minh City | Badges in the page header and footer: ISO 9001, ISO 27001, Microsoft Gold Partner, DMCA |
| SHIFT ASIA | “May 2016” | “Reached 200 employees” (company timeline, 2022 entry; the timeline continues past it) | Ho Chi Minh City | ISTQB Platinum Partner, ISO/IEC 27001 |
| Golden Owl | 2013 in Singapore; first Ho Chi Minh City office 2015 | “Team Expanding to 250 Members” (undated headline; the counters beside it render as zero) | Singapore, development in Ho Chi Minh City | Badges in the page footer: DMCA, NCSC |
| Linnoedge (us) | Not published on our site | “25 Engineers & specialists” (stated as a current figure) | Ho Chi Minh City | None listed |
Look at what that leaves you with. Two of the five list ISO 27001 and one of those also lists CMMi Level 5, so certification does not separate them either. Only two publish a size figure you could call current. Two of the others are milestones sitting in a company timeline, one from 2022 and one from the 2021-2023 period, and the fifth is an undated headline about expanding to 250 members, printed above three counters that render as zero. We publish a headcount but no founding year, which I only noticed while building this table, and I have left the cell honest rather than filling it in from memory.
None of these numbers are wrong. They just answer a question you are not really asking. What you want to know is whether this work will still be moving after the engineer who understood it best has moved on. Headcount does not tell you that. Our own average engagement runs about 24 months, and nothing in the size of the team predicted which ones got there.
Answer one question before you compare anyone
The question is this: can the person holding the budget say, in their own words, why this work is going overseas? Not the deck version. Their version. When a CTO or a project lead can answer that in a sentence, offshore projects tend to work. When the only available answer is “it costs less”, I would look upstream of vendor selection before going any further.
I am not being romantic about mission statements here. It is a practical test. Price is a real reason to look abroad, and I would never tell a buyer to ignore it. But price alone does not survive contact with a project, because it gives nobody on your side a reason to push when the first difficult week arrives.
Which leads to two exits worth taking before you compare vendors at all.
Exit one: the scope is small and price is the whole point. If you need one well-defined thing built and the driver is cost, a single experienced freelancer in your own country is often cheaper than an offshore team, once you count the coordination. There is no team to spin up, no timezone gap, no onboarding month. The arithmetic behind that, including what an offshore engagement actually costs once everything is counted, is in our Vietnam software development cost guide.
Exit two: you are not planning to build a team. This is the bigger one. Offshore development is often sold as a way to buy capacity quickly, and that framing is what breaks it. Building a team takes time, and paying that time requires something on your side that is larger than a quote: an ambition, a product you actually intend to keep growing. Without it, the engagement gets judged before it has had time to work, and quietly wound down.
Where these projects actually fail
Almost always on the buying side, and almost never for the reasons that end up in the post-mortem. I want to be careful here, because I am the vendor and this could easily read as blaming the customer. So take it for what it is: a description of patterns I keep seeing from one side of the table only, written by someone who benefits if you hire an offshore vendor.
The first pattern is requirements that are not decided yet. That one is common and survivable. The second is heavier: the person who can decide the requirements does not come to the meeting. Every session then produces options instead of decisions, and the options pile up until someone declares the project slow.
The third is a project manager who never wanted this work to go offshore in the first place, and got assigned to it anyway. They will run the process correctly. They will also not fight for it, and early on, offshore work needs someone willing to fight for it.
The fourth is the one I rarely see written down by anyone on my side of the table. When the decision to go offshore was made reluctantly, on price, over someone’s objection, there is sometimes a person on the team who needs the project to go badly. Not sabotage, nothing that dramatic. Just a slow absence of help, and a readiness to attribute the outcome to the offshore vendor and bring the work back home. If you recognize this dynamic in your own organization, no vendor on any list will fix it, and the vendor choice is probably not the decision that matters most here. We wrote separately about how offshore projects fail and what avoids it.
The axis nobody publishes: can the work be handed over?
People change. Engineers leave, get promoted, go on parental leave, get pulled onto another account. Every list I have read compares vendors on size, rate and certification, and none of them ask what happens to your system on the day the person who understood it best stops working on it. That is the axis I would put first.
One of our company values reads: “When one person has to be the hero to save a project, the system isn’t strong enough yet.” It sounds like a poster until you try to build for it, at which point it turns into three concrete practices. Those practices are also three questions you can ask any vendor in a first call, ours included.
1. Are the documents updated against the source code?
Ask what happens to project documentation when a staff member leaves. The answer you want describes a routine: someone goes through the source code and brings the documents back in line with it. The answer that should worry you is a specification written at kickoff and never touched since. I ask about this first because it is what I hear most often.
2. On long projects, does more than one person understand it deeply?
Ask whether they rotate people deliberately. On our longer engagements we move people through on purpose so that more than one engineer holds the system deeply, which costs short-term speed and buys the ability to survive a departure. There is a real case for the opposite: on a short, specialized build, one strong engineer start to finish is usually faster and perfectly safe. It is the long engagements where a permanently fixed ace turns into a risk you are carrying.
3. Who writes what: does AI cover code behavior and humans cover business intent?
This is the split that has changed most in the last two years. Detailed behavior is already in the source code, so AI can extract it far faster than a person can write it up. What AI cannot supply is why the business does it that way, who the user is, and which edge case actually matters. That part stays human, and a vendor should be able to tell you which side is which. This is where the answer is moving fastest, so treat it as what I see in August 2026 rather than a settled practice.
Get an answer to all three and you have learned more about a vendor than any certification list will tell you. Our own answers are written down where you can hold us to them: a handover protocol built into the weekly workflow from day one, and documentation produced each sprint, both described on our system development service page.
When you should not hire us
There are four situations where I would rather you went elsewhere, and I would rather say so here than discover it together in month three. These are not humble-brags. Each one describes work we take on badly, and a buyer in that situation is better served by a different kind of vendor.
- Cost is the only criterion. Development here does run at a fraction of Tokyo or US rates, and that is real. But if the decision comes down entirely to the lowest quote, someone will always be cheaper than us, and the relationship will not hold when a hard trade-off appears.
- The scope is one small, fully specified project. Hire a freelancer. You will spend less and get it faster.
- The specification must be locked on day one. We work best with clients who treat the first milestone as a hypothesis and stay involved through the build. A fully fixed scope with no revision process usually means a surprise at delivery, for both sides.
- Offshore means lower priority in how you run the relationship. Our team is in Vietnam. If that translates into second-tier treatment, this will not work, and we would both rather find out now.
A shortlist process you can run this month
Keep it small and make it observable. The goal is not to gather more vendor claims, it is to see how a company behaves before you are committed to it. Three steps have consistently told me more than any amount of proposal reading, and none of them require a procurement process.
Ask the three handover questions in the first call. Not by email, where the marketing team can answer them. You are listening for whether the person describes a routine they actually run, or a principle they believe in. Those sound very different out loud.
Ask to see a document an engineer used last month. Redacted is fine. A real working document from a live project tells you more about a vendor’s discipline than a portfolio does, and the reaction to the request is informative on its own.
Start with one paid month, not a year. Pick something genuinely useful but small, then watch what happens to a problem raised in week one. Does it come back in week two with a decision attached, or does it come back as a status line? For a rough read on whether your organization is ready for this at all, we built a short offshore readiness assessment for exactly that.
None of this makes the choice risk-free. It does move the decision off a price list and onto something you can actually observe before you sign.
FAQ
How do I choose between Vietnamese software outsourcing companies when their websites all say the same thing?
Stop comparing the claims and compare the practices. Headcount, hourly rate and certifications are published by almost everyone and separate almost nobody. Ask instead how documentation is kept current against the source code, whether more than one engineer understands a long project deeply, and how the vendor splits the writing itself: AI describing how the code behaves, people describing why the business works that way. Those answers differ sharply between companies.
Is offshore software development in Vietnam always cheaper than hiring locally?
No. For one small, fully specified piece of work, a single experienced freelancer in your own country is often cheaper once you count coordination, onboarding and timezone overhead. Offshore economics come from building a team you keep using over time. If you do not intend to build that team, the cost advantage usually does not appear.
Can I talk through my shortlist with someone who is not trying to win the deal?
Yes. In a 15-minute call I will go through the vendors you are considering and the questions worth asking them, including the cases where our own company is the wrong choice. Plenty of these conversations end with you hiring someone else, and that is a perfectly good outcome.
Bring me your shortlist
Fifteen minutes, no proposal. Tell me which Vietnamese vendors you are considering and what the project is, and I will tell you what I would ask them, where the risk sits, and whether this work should go offshore at all. If we are the wrong fit, I will say so on the call.
Book a 15-minute call → Contact us
Shogo Harada原田 祥吾
CEO · Linnoedge Inc. · LinkedIn↗
Operating IT offshore development and overseas expansion support businesses across two bases: Tokyo and Vietnam. A leader who believes in “Systems over Spirit,” structuring cross-border businesses that often tend to be opaque. Committed to providing “reproducible quality” to organizations and clients rather than relying solely on individual skills.