Full disclosure: we're Ryz Labs, and we're on this list. So yes, we're biased. Here's what we'd actually tell a friend, including when you should hire someone else. Every fact about Globant comes from Globant's own sites and SEC filings, and every fact about the other firms comes from what they publish, with sources at the end.
Globant sells two things: hourly engineering projects (most of its business, per its 2025 annual report) and AI Pods billed per supervised token on its Glob.AI platform. So the question that decides your shortlist is simple: are you buying a program, metered output, or a named team? Answer that first, and the right competitor is usually obvious.
Globant is a big, listed firm: 27,411 Globers at the end of Q2 2026, $2,454.9 million in 2025 revenue, and 904 customers that each paid it more than $100,000 over the last twelve months. Buyers who start there usually have a real budget and a real system to build. They are not shopping for a freelancer.
What has changed is how Globant sells AI. On October 27, 2026 it added Glob.AI OS, an operating layer for enterprise AI, and it says enterprises "pay for outcomes or consumption, rather than hours or seats." That is a genuine choice for buyers, and it splits the market. Some firms sell metered output, some sell programs, and some sell people. Comparing them on one hourly number doesn't work.
The other thing buyers learn quickly: almost nobody publishes a price. Globant doesn't publish a rate card, and none of the competitors below do either, except us.
We put named senior engineers on your team, reporting to your leads. You meet them before the engagement starts. They work in your repos, CI, cloud and standups, with the tools you already use (AWS, Azure, GitHub, Postgres, Anthropic and OpenAI models). For AI work, a typical pod is about seven senior engineers, including a tech lead, an ML engineer and backend engineers, as one accountable team. There is no Ryz platform to adopt, you own all the code and IP, and a team can start in under two weeks once you say go.
The price is public: mid-level engineers $7,000 to $10,000 a month, senior $10,000 to $15,000, leads quoted per team. Five senior engineers run about $50,000 to $75,000 a month. Our pods built AI fraud detection for a global fleet company ($5.94M in confirmed fraud, 244K+ invoices scored), marketing compliance review for a leading alternative asset manager (8,000+ documents, days to hours), and a driver-support agent that covers about 218,000 calls a year in three languages. Only the top 1% of the tens of thousands of engineers we interview make it. See our case studies.
Where we're not the right fit: if procurement needs a consumption-priced SKU, we price per engineer instead. If you need engineers in Europe or Asia time zones or follow-the-sun coverage, a global network fits better. If you want a management-consulting engagement or a proprietary AI platform, look at the large consultancies below.
EPAM is a NYSE-listed, S&P 500 engineering services firm with about 62,850 people at the end of 2025 and $5.457 billion in 2025 revenue. Financial services is its largest vertical (24.1% of 2025 revenue). It sells the AI/Run suite and the open-source DIAL orchestration platform alongside managed delivery teams.
Where EPAM beats us: scale for multi-workstream programs across the full software lifecycle, and long relationships (64.4% of 2025 revenue came from clients of five or more years). The catch is structural: its delivery is weighted to India and Central and Eastern Europe, so New York overlap depends on which team you get. See EPAM vs Globant.
Accenture reported $74.2 billion in revenue for its fiscal year ended August 31, 2026, with about 814,000 people serving about 9,000 clients. In December 2025 it formed the Accenture Anthropic Business Group, with about 30,000 professionals to be trained on Claude, including forward-deployed engineers it calls "reinvention deployed engineers." It also sells its AI Refinery platform.
Where Accenture beats us: if the work spans strategy, operations and technology across a whole enterprise, few firms can staff it the same way. The catch is the shape: Accenture reports its business as consulting and managed services, so ask whether you will get a program team or engineers working on your team.
Thoughtworks is an engineering-led consultancy founded in Chicago in 1993 and taken private in 2024. It says it has 10,000+ people. In 2026 it launched AI/works, an agentic development platform for modernization and new builds, and Agent/works, a control plane and governed runtime for agents in production. It works on time-and-materials and fixed-price contracts.
Where Thoughtworks beats us: three decades of engineering-led consulting, with strategy, design, data and engineering under one roof, plus analyst recognition from Forrester and Gartner. The catch: its last public filing put 63.1% of its people in Asia-Pacific, so New York overlap depends on which office staffs the work.
Turing is a San Francisco AI company best known for supplying training data and evaluations to frontier AI labs. Its enterprise line, Turing Intelligence, is offered as Advise, Augment and Build, delivered by pods and forward-deployed AI engineers. It says it has a network of 4M+ engineers and experts and that clients keep their code and IP.
Where Turing beats us: model-level depth in fine-tuning, evaluation and post-training. The catch: delivery comes from a distributed global network, so time-zone overlap depends on who is staffed.
BairesDev is a nearshore software company that says it has 4,000+ engineers across 100+ technologies. It sells staff augmentation, "Dedicated Teams" with BairesDev technical PMs driving delivery, and full project outsourcing. AI and ML development, including agentic systems and custom LLM work, is one of its services, and it says teams can start in 2-4 weeks.
Where BairesDev beats us: one contract can cover staff augmentation, dedicated teams and full outsourcing across a very wide range of stacks. The catch: AI is one of 100+ technologies it covers, not a dedicated AI-to-production practice, per its own positioning. See BairesDev vs Globant.
If you want named senior engineers building one system in your stack: Ryz Labs. You meet the people first, they work on your team, and you know the monthly cost before the first call. Read Globant AI Pods vs Ryz AI pods if pods are what brought you here.
If you are running a broad multi-year program with one vendor: EPAM, or Globant itself.
If the work is an enterprise-wide transformation: Accenture.
If you want consulting-led modernization with governed agents: Thoughtworks.
If you need fine-tuning or evaluation depth: Turing.
If you want metered output from a catalog: stay with Globant's AI Pods.
For large programs, global engineering firms such as EPAM, Accenture and Thoughtworks. For AI build work, Turing and teams like Ryz Labs. For nearshore capacity, BairesDev. Which one is right depends on whether you are buying a program, metered output or a named team.
Of the firms on this page, only Ryz Labs: $7,000 to $15,000 per engineer per month. Globant's annual report says it bills most work at hourly rates that depend on the project, and its Glob.AI page publishes billing units, not Pod prices. See Globant pricing.
Globant describes its pods as AI agents and documented workflows supervised by Globant experts, billed per supervised token. A Ryz AI pod is a team of senior engineers you meet by name, who build with your team in your stack.
Yes, and many enterprises do. A common pattern is a large integrator on a broad program and a named senior team on one system that has to ship. Our Ryz Labs vs Globant page and Globant alternatives hub cover the trade-offs.
Decide whether you need advice or a build first. Our guide to AI consulting vs AI implementation walks through it, and the enterprise AI development companies list covers the wider field. Or talk to us.
We checked pricing and services for every provider here in October 2026. This changes often, so double-check before you sign anything.
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