An in-house team delivers long-term retention of knowledge. The developers absorb your domain in a way no external team will match, and this context sits with you. The cost comes in the form of slow hiring and fixed overhead: hiring well takes months, onboarding takes several more weeks, and the salary continues regardless of workload.
Handing a project to a vendor is the arrangement where someone else is accountable for shipping: they staff the project, they manage the plan, and they carry the risk of missing the date. This fits well when the scope is reasonably clear and you have an available product owner. It works badly when the requirements change weekly, since a vendor cannot fill that gap for you.
Hiring individual contractors is the middle option: you rent capacity but keep responsibility for delivery yourself. It is fast — the right specialist can start in weeks rather than months — and the commitment ends when the work does. The catch is that your own leads must have the capacity to direct the work. Without that, should you outsource or hire in house are paying hourly for uncoordinated work.
Most of the time, companies blend them. One durable pattern puts the critical decisions and the core system inside the edtech development company, while an external team takes on the parts that are bounded and specifiable. The line is simple enough: keep the parts that are hard to re-learn, and contract out what is well understood.
Three simple questions usually settle it. Start here: is this industry specific software development a core competitive asset, or a cost centre? Second: for how long will you need this capacity — one project or a permanent roadmap? Third: who answers the phone at two software development company in germany the morning when it breaks? Answer those honestly and the model is normally clear.