Quick note before we start: we're Ryz Labs, and our AI pod teams and senior engineers compete with both CI&T and EPAM. We'll argue our side, and we'll also tell you where each of them is the better pick. Both firms are listed in New York, so most facts below come straight from their annual filings.
The question to settle is whether you want delivery concentrated in one place or spread across many. CI&T is concentrated: at the end of 2025, 6,980 of its 7,993 employees were in Brazil, and its filing says nearshore teams do the engineering "in compatible time zones." EPAM is distributed: its largest delivery locations are India, Ukraine, Poland and Belarus, with about 2,950 people in Mexico. Choose CI&T if you want one dominant delivery base close to US hours. Choose EPAM if you need scale across regions and are comfortable managing overlap by location.
If you'd rather not depend on either vendor's geography, and want senior engineers on your own team and hours, we'd suggest Ryz Labs.
Here is every public price signal we found, checked October 2026. Most firms in this market don't publish a rate card, so we show the hourly band on their Clutch listing and convert it to a monthly figure for one full-time engineer.
Monthly figures are our math at 160 hours a month. Directory bands are entered by the firms themselves and are not quotes, so ask each vendor for a written monthly price for the same roles at the same seniority.
One base versus many. CI&T was founded in 1995 and is headquartered in Campinas, Brazil. Its US headcount was 175 at the end of 2025, and its 20-F says US staff focus on strategy and design while nearshore teams build. Its nearshore page names delivery centers in Brazil, Colombia and Mexico. EPAM, headquartered in Newtown, Pennsylvania, runs a much wider map, and Mexico ranks fifth among its largest locations. That means EPAM can staff almost any region, while your overlap with New York depends on where your team is drawn from.
An elevenfold revenue gap, with similar habits. EPAM's revenue is about eleven times CI&T's. Both lean on financial services as their biggest vertical, CI&T more heavily. Both depend on long relationships: 64.4% of EPAM's 2025 revenue came from clients of five years or more, while CI&T's largest client alone was 11.1% of its revenue.
Different AI wrappers. CI&T sells "AI Deployment" through CI&T FLOW and joined the Claude Partner Network in June 2026. EPAM sells AI/Run.Transform and puts DIAL, now with agentic workflows, in front of clients. Each will bring its own tooling, so ask what stays with you when the engagement ends.
When buyers compare these two, the conversation often turns to where the engineers sit and how many layers sit between them and the client's leads. Here's how we answer both.
Location stops being a variable. Every Ryz engineer works US business hours, so code review, standups and incident calls happen the same day. You don't negotiate which delivery center you get.
Multi-language AI in production. A Ryz AI pod team built a driver-support agent that now covers about 218,000 driver calls a year in three languages, cutting per-call cost by about 95% per the live case study. The pod worked in the client's own systems. See the driver-support case study.
Engineers report to you, not a delivery office. Ryz engineers work on your team, reporting to your leads, in your repos and CI. You meet the named engineers before they start and you own all code and IP.
A monthly figure, not an hourly band. Senior engineers (comparable to Amazon L6) run $10,000 to $15,000 a month; mid-level $7,000 to $10,000. Model a team in our AI development cost calculator.
Our one-on-one comparisons: Ryz Labs vs CI&T and Ryz Labs vs EPAM. For the wider market, see CI&T alternatives, EPAM alternatives, CI&T competitors and EPAM competitors.
43.4% in 2025, per its 20-F. Brazil is its other main market by country of sale.
EPAM, with about 2,950 there per its 10-K. CI&T names Mexico among its delivery centers, but Mexico doesn't appear in the 20-F headcount by country.
Both are vendor AI platforms, but CI&T describes FLOW as an "Enterprise AI Management System," while DIAL is an open-source orchestration platform for LLM apps.
Yes. Our engineers join your team and work in your repos, so they can sit next to another vendor's squad. Tell us the setup.
We checked these filings and pages in October 2026. Headcounts and offers move every quarter, so confirm the details directly.
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