2020 has brought many changes in different areas of life, including a drastic rejiggling in the way people and companies work. Namely, the trend of transitioning to online accelerating in the world due to work from home and forced even digitalization laggards to buck their trend and give in to digitization or automation of processes. As those in government services, trade, medicine, education, all kinds of services for the population, and even traditional brick and mortar retailers. In other words, it seems even the slowest of adopters of modern innovative technologies are conceding and finally budging. As a result, the need for qualified IT specialists has increased and will continue growing, at least for the foreseeable future.
Now, in the face of heightened demand, the question becomes: But “where to find these developers”? Can the local market offer you highly qualified specialists on good terms?
Companies are trying to find a balance between the costs of developing new projects/solutions and quality execution. As previous years’ experience shows, specialists from Eastern Europe, namely Ukraine, are cheaper yet not inferior in terms of the quality of custom software development they provide compared with the world’s leading IT companies. It is worth mentioning that companies such as Skype, Boeing, and Bosch were initially among the first to see the potential in Ukrainian developers and began to attract them to work on their projects.
Let’s take a closer look at what top-of-the-line software companies look like in Ukraine, their primary expertise, and what they most often use models of partnership and cooperation.
Software development companies in Ukraine
The custom software development company creates web and mobile applications. Despite the crisis in 2020, the Ukrainian IT industry avoided mass bankruptcies. It maintained the dynamics of growth as the industry and healthcare were among the most insulated from, immune, and resistant to the pandemic’s pressures on the economy. However, according to various estimates, its pace has decreased slightly within 20-30% of last year.
And yet, the number of software development companies in Ukraine is growing steadily. Just look at the data in the table below:
| Year | Number of software development companies in Ukraine |
| 2009 | 940 |
| 2011 | 1050 |
| 2020 | 1131 – 1650 |
Source Clutch
According to a report published by Escadra, there are currently over 1,600 software development service companies operating in Ukraine. Most of them work with clients worldwide, resulting in a substantial net exports surplus for the Ukrainian IT industry.
With the overall growth of the sector, the breadth and diversity of the spectrum of available companies offering different services increase too. There are many product companies, IT consulting companies, technical laboratories, R&D centers, and IT centers, along with outsourcing software development companies. With the increase in the number of local companies, specialization also increased, and the number of industry-specialized players also grew.
So we can say that the period of most significant uncertainty for the Ukrainian IT sector, manifested through decreased activity in signing contracts and deals and falling revenues, was in the spring and early summer of 2020. What saved the day was that many businesses quickly switched to having employees work from home and taking the demand to develop new and additional IT services and solutions to new highs. The wave of interest in solutions supporting remote work has allowed many Ukrainian IT companies to remain relatively insulated from the havoc and global economic and financial distress and duress wrought by the pandemic elsewhere in the world.
Where are most of the software development companies in Ukraine located?
According to Inventure, there are five main IT clusters in which most of the software development companies in Ukraine are located: Kyiv, Kharkiv, Lviv, Dnipro, and Odesa.
The above cities all have immense talent pools, but more than 40% of all software development companies in Ukraine are located in Kyiv. By the way, about 73% of all Ukrainian software developers are currently outsourcing.
What is the software development industry in Ukraine like in terms of company sizes?
As to the latest statistics from Clutch, some 1361 software development companies are registered in Ukraine: 52.4% of them are small companies with up to 50 employees, but there are few companies with more than 10,000 staff – EPAM is one of them.
GBKSOFT is one of the mid-sized companies in the top 50 Ukrainian medium-sized IT companies. In 2021, we plan to significantly expand our workforce and considerably expand the technology stack that we work with to be able to continue to improve how quickly we cope with our client’s tasks and how efficiently we deliver results, as well as to grow and diversify the nature of our clients.
The target market for software development companies in Ukraine
According to the report, the United States remains the primary target market for most software companies in Ukraine, accounting for about 80% of exported IT services. It is followed by the UK (64%), Germany (60%), etc.
What is the leading industry direction of software development companies in Ukraine?
The most popular areas of business among software development companies in Ukraine are e-commerce (31%), finance (37.5%), education (19.2%), telecom (10.7%), and healthcare (32.5%), with most companies offering services in more than one domain.
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Software development companies for mobile applications in Ukraine
In Ukraine, 960 mobile application development companies are registered on Clutch.
Most Ukrainian development companies tend to focus on iOS and Android development. In most cases, our clients prefer to develop for iOS first and then Android. But since the end of last year, we have seen a trend of the growing popularity of Flutter development because this framework allows you to get a product simultaneously for both operating systems quickly.
Among the clients who order the development of software for mobile devices are small and medium-sized businesses. Nevertheless, we have extensive experience in corporate-level projects: Ukrainian companies have handled projects of the scale of Microsoft, Tiker Toker, Oracle, Amazon, Cisco, and Intel.
Like our company, 60% of our colleagues who do mobile app development also offer wearable solutions. In addition to this, many Ukrainian mobile application development companies have experience in IoT, AR / VR.
As for non-mobile development, Python and JavaScript have provided real breakthroughs in programming languages. They grew by 89% and 66%, respectively. But Java’s popularity, as high as it was in the early 2010s, has come down significantly – in the last five years, it has been used 39% less. Mobile applications for Android continue to be written on it and are used in web development, but new languages are seeping demand and gradually replacing the former leader.
Top 10 custom software development companies in Ukraine
The tech world knows Ukraine as a country with a rapidly developing IT sector, highly skilled software engineers, and many reliable software development companies.
Which companies will lead the way and continue shaping the Ukrainian IT industry, providing the highest quality custom software development services in 2021?
We have selected the top 10 software development companies that have consistently supplied software solutions to recognizable clients and well-known brands and have proven themselves time and time again to be reliable outsourcing partners. The list is based on many sources, such as reputable aggregating data providers like Clutch, GoodFirms, and customer testimonials.
Prevailing business models among software development companies in Ukraine. How do they work?
Here are some of the most popular collaboration models used by software companies in Ukraine:
Project outsourcing
If you choose this model, your provider will take over all aspects of a software development project from start to finish. Outsourcing companies usually offer comprehensive services, including project management. It means that the customer does not need to have their technical expertise as their development partner will manage and oversee the entire process until project completion. Specifically, all aspects of the development process are performed by the vendor with minimal customer involvement.
However, in a typical project outsourcing company, developers will be working on multiple projects simultaneously, resulting in lower developer engagement and less commitment to the project.
Dedicated team
A dedicated team allows the customer to control the software development process better and fosters more active team participation and collaboration, mainly because software engineers can only focus on one project at a time.
Simultaneously, this model still does not allow the customer to choose their software developers for the project (usually, you can only select from a limited number of candidates provided by the vendor). Moreover, in this case, project management is usually also carried out by the service supplier.
Extended command
The extended team is an improved version of the dedicated development team model. In this case, the team is diligently tailored and gathered specifically for the client’s project requirements: you interview the developers and make your own hiring decisions. Moreover, you have complete control over the development process: from managing your offshore team as if it were your in-house team to scaling up and down at any point in your collaboration.
With direct communication and minimal involvement of third parties in the process, your developers are 100% committed to your project and achieve higher productivity. Besides, this approach is based on the so-called “Cost +” model, which includes salaries for software developers and a fixed monthly service fee.
To sum up
Back in 2012, GBKSOFT started as an outsourcing company. However, we soon realized that our customers wanted more control over the development process, so we decided to adopt the extended team model. Since then, we have helped over 700 companies around the world connect with talented Ukrainian developers and expand their own software development teams.
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