Software Outsourcing in Vietnam: 2026 Buyer's Guide

This guide is for CTOs, VPs of Engineering and founders in the US, UK, Australia and Singapore who are weighing software outsourcing in Vietnam. It covers why Vietnam lands on shortlists, where it falls short, what engineers there earn compared with the US, which engagement model suits which situation, the risks and how to contain them, and a checklist for vendor calls.

A disclosure first: we are a Vietnamese vendor. MOHA Software is based in Hanoi, with a Japanese entity in Yokohama. Read this with that in mind. We’ve tried to write the guide we would want if we were on the buying side, including the parts that don’t flatter the country.

Why Vietnam lands on outsourcing shortlists

The most cited outside assessment is Kearney’s 2023 Global Services Location Index. It ranks 78 countries on 52 metrics grouped under financial attractiveness, people skills and availability, business environment and digital resonance. Vietnam placed 7th, one of several Asian countries in the top ten.

When buyers tell us why they are looking at Vietnam, the reasons are consistent.

Cost comes first. Engineering salaries are a fraction of US, UK and Australian levels. We put numbers on that below, using public salary data.

Mainstream skills are well covered. Web (React, Angular, Vue), backend (Java, .NET, Node.js, PHP, Python), mobile (Flutter, React Native, Swift, Kotlin), QA and cloud work are all easy to staff in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. If you want local market data by role, TopDev’s Vietnam IT market reports and ITviec’s annual salary report are the two most used sources.

The government treats the sector as a priority. Vietnam’s national digital transformation program, Decision 749/QD-TTg, was signed in June 2020 and runs to 2025 with a vision to 2030. It aims to build Vietnamese digital technology companies that can compete abroad and targets a digital economy worth 20% of GDP.

Many vendors trained on demanding clients. Plenty of Vietnamese vendors grew up serving Japanese companies, which expect detailed specs, formal QA and frequent written reporting. We are one of them. That habit of documentation carries over well to Western clients who want visibility without micromanaging.

Where Vietnam falls short

A guide that only lists advantages isn’t much use to a buyer. These are the real trade-offs.

Spoken English is uneven. Written English among engineers is generally workable. Spoken fluency varies, especially below senior level. Interview for it, and make sure your main contacts (PM, tech lead) are strong speakers.
The US overlap is thin. Hanoi’s morning is the US East Coast’s evening, and the West Coast barely overlaps at all. It works, but only with deliberate written handoffs.
Rare roles take longer. Senior ML engineers, staff-level architects and specialists in uncommon stacks are in shorter supply than mid-level web and mobile developers.
Process integration takes effort. A vendor that arrives with its own process and never adapts to yours will cause friction, whatever country it’s in.
Knowledge can get stuck with the vendor. If only the vendor understands your system, switching becomes expensive. Plan against this on day one (see the risk table below).

What engineers earn in Vietnam vs the US

These are market salary figures, not vendor prices, and not MOHA’s prices. They show why the cost gap exists and how big it is before overheads.

ITviec’s IT Salary & Recruitment Market Report 2025-2026, based on a survey of 1,839 respondents in 2025, gives these monthly medians. We converted them at the World Bank’s 2024 average exchange rate of about 24,165 dong per US dollar.

Role (Vietnam, market data)	Median monthly salary (ITviec 2025-2026)	Approx. USD per month	Approx. USD per year (12 months)
Back-end developer	37.8 million VND	$1,560	$18,800
Front-end developer	34.8 million VND	$1,440	$17,300
Mobile developer	36.85 million VND	$1,530	$18,300
Tester	28.8 million VND	$1,190	$14,300
Tech lead	51.8 million VND	$2,140	$25,700
Project leader / PM	50.1 million VND	$2,070	$24,900

For the US, the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook puts the median annual wage for software developers at $135,980 and for QA analysts and testers at $104,300 (May 2025).

On these numbers, a Vietnamese back-end developer’s median salary is roughly 14% of a US software developer’s, and a Vietnamese tester’s is about 14% of a US tester’s. Call it one-seventh.

Three cautions before you put that ratio in a spreadsheet:

A vendor’s fee is not a salary. It also covers employer costs, office, equipment, management, recruiting, bench time and margin. Expect the gap between an offshore fee and a local hire to be much narrower than one-seventh.
Medians hide seniority. ITviec’s back-end median runs from 12.4 million VND for engineers with under a year of experience to 54.9 million VND for those with more than eight. Ask any vendor for the seniority behind each seat.
Currencies move. Recheck the conversion at the current rate before these figures go into a board deck.

Time-zone overlap by market

Vietnam uses GMT+7 all year, with no daylight saving. The overlap depends on where you sit.

Your location	Offset from Hanoi	Shared working hours
Singapore	1 hour ahead	Nearly the whole day
Sydney / Melbourne	3 hours ahead (4 in Australian summer)	Most of the day
London	7 hours behind (6 in British Summer Time)	Hanoi afternoon, London morning
US East Coast	11 hours behind (12 in winter)	Hanoi early morning, US evening
US West Coast	14 hours behind (15 in winter)	Very little; plan for async

Engagement models compared

Most Vietnamese vendors sell the same three models under different names. Choose based on who owns the backlog and how long you need the capacity.

	Fixed-price project	Dedicated team / ODC	Staff augmentation
Who owns scope	Vendor, against a signed spec	You own the backlog; vendor owns the team	You
Day-to-day management	Vendor PM	Your product owner sets priorities; vendor handles people and delivery	Your managers
Best for	MVPs and well-defined builds	Products needing capacity for a year or more	Filling a specific skill gap
Billing	Fixed quote per milestone	Monthly fee per role	Monthly or hourly per person
Flexibility	Low; changes need change requests	High; reprioritize every sprint	High
Main risk	Spec gaps turn into disputes	Drift if nobody owns priorities	You carry the whole management load
Your time needed	Low to medium	Medium: a product owner, weekly	High

Some vendors also offer build-operate-transfer (BOT). The vendor sets up a team and later transfers it to your own legal entity in Vietnam. It suits companies that plan to open an office eventually but want someone else to handle the first phase.

Our view: if you know exactly what you want and it won’t change much, buy a fixed-price project. If you have an ongoing product and someone who can own the backlog, an offshore development center in Vietnam usually gives better value over a year. If you need one or two specialists inside your existing team, use staff augmentation. We go deeper on that choice in staff augmentation vs full outsourcing.

A realistic timeline

The phases below apply to most engagements. How long each takes depends on your approvals, the roles you need and how much of your system is documented.

First calls. Ask for relevant case studies with team size and duration.
Proposal. Look at team shape and seniority, not only the total, and at who will lead the work day to day.
Discovery and scope. Work through requirements, priorities and the first release together before the contract is final.
Contracts. MSA, NDA, statement of work, IP assignment, and data processing terms if personal data is involved. Legal review on your side is often the slowest step.
Team assembly. Fast if the vendor has the right people free; slower if they need to hire. Ask which case applies to each seat.
Onboarding and first sprints. The first month is slower while the team learns your code and domain. Judge on months two and three.

How to get the first months right

Most trouble in an outsourced team starts in the first few sprints and stays hidden until month three. A few habits make it visible early.

Start with a real feature that has an unclear edge. Something small enough to ship in a sprint or two, but with at least one question the spec doesn’t answer. You see early how the team handles ambiguity.

Have the team work in your environment. Your repository, your CI, your code review. Setup friction shows up in week one instead of month three.

Review the first pull requests yourself. Look at test coverage, commit hygiene and how comments are handled. Code quality is visible within days.

Read the written updates. Clear daily or weekly notes from the start are a good sign that reporting will hold up under pressure.

Hold a short retro after the first sprints. Ask what the team found confusing about your codebase and process. A good team will tell you something useful about your own setup.

Risks and how to control them

Risk	What it looks like	How to control it
Quality drift	Bugs rise; code review gets skipped under deadline pressure	Your tech lead reviews pull requests weekly; a definition of done that includes tests; track escaped defects
Knowledge lock-in	Only the vendor understands the system	Code in your repositories from day one; architecture decision records; docs in the definition of done
IP ambiguity	Unclear ownership of code, designs or data	Explicit IP assignment in the MSA; confidentiality terms for every engineer
Security gaps	Shared credentials, unmanaged laptops, production data in dev	Accounts you issue and can revoke; SSO and least privilege; ask for the vendor’s device and access policy
Attrition	Key engineers leave mid-project	Written replacement and handover terms; no single points of failure on critical modules
Communication gaps	Surprises at sprint review; silent blockers	Weekly written report with risks; one fixed daily overlap slot; a named escalation contact above the PM
Scope disputes (fixed price)	Change requests pile up	Paid discovery before signing; agree the change process and its pricing up front
Hidden costs	Fees for recruiting, tools, overtime or management	Ask for a full cost breakdown per role, including exclusions

How to evaluate a vendor: a checklist

Use this in your first calls. These are the questions we expect to answer ourselves.

People and delivery

What is the seniority mix, and who is the tech lead?
What happens if an engineer leaves or underperforms? How fast is a replacement, and who pays for the handover?
Which stacks do they have people for today, and which would they need to hire for?

Evidence

Case studies with team size, duration, stack and outcomes, not just screenshots.
Projects in your industry or of a similar size.

Process

How do they report progress and risk? Ask for a sample weekly report.
Will they work in your tools (Git, Jira or Linear, Slack or Teams) and your ceremonies?
How is QA staffed: dedicated QA engineers, automated tests, regression before release?

Legal and security

Is IP assignment written into the MSA?
Do individual engineers sign confidentiality terms?
What are their device, access and data-handling policies?
Which law governs the contract, and where are disputes resolved?

Commercials

Rate per role, and exactly what it includes.
Minimum team size, minimum term, and notice to scale up or down.
Any fees for recruiting, onboarding or tools.

How to read a quote

Published “average hourly rates for Vietnam” mix juniors and seniors, freelancers and companies, and different years, so they rarely match a real quote. Read a quote on three things instead.

First, the monthly cost of the whole team, including QA, PM and tech-lead time, against the fully loaded cost of hiring the same team locally. Second, what each fee includes. A cheaper fee that excludes PM, QA or replacement cover can cost more over a year. Third, your own time. Every model needs someone on your side, and a dedicated team needs a product owner every week.

We don’t publish a rate card, because the cost of a team depends on the exact mix you need. Describe the team you need and we’ll talk it through with you.

How MOHA approaches outsourcing work

We run delivery from Hanoi and have a Japanese entity, MOHA Japan LLC, in Yokohama. Our published work covers clients in Japan, Singapore, Laos, Vietnam and elsewhere. Three examples show the range:

A 16-person team built an NLP chatbot for StarHub’s customer support in Singapore, with intent classification, entity extraction, conversation tagging and a management system for chat flows.
A six-person team built the COMY language learning LMS for a labor export company training workers for Japan and Taiwan. The case study reports up to a 40% reduction in reliance on physical instructors and classrooms.
A team of 10 built an online learning, testing and e-library platform for schools in Laos in six months, in a Lao-language interface with an SMS contact book for parents.

If you are weighing Vietnam against nearshore options, read nearshore vs offshore software development. For what to look for in individual engineers, see key qualities when hiring Vietnamese software engineers.

FAQ

Is Vietnam good for software outsourcing?

For mainstream web, mobile, backend, QA and cloud work, yes. Salaries sit at roughly one-seventh of US medians on public data, the engineering pool is deep in the common stacks, and Kearney ranked the country 7th of 78 in 2023. It is a weaker fit if you need all-day live collaboration with a US West Coast team or rare specialists at short notice.

Which engagement model should I start with?

With a clear, fixed scope, start with a fixed-price project. With an ongoing product and someone to own the backlog, start with a small dedicated team and grow it.

How do I protect my IP when outsourcing to Vietnam?

Put an explicit IP assignment clause in the MSA, make sure every engineer is bound by confidentiality terms, keep code in repositories you own, and issue access through accounts you control and can revoke.

How does Vietnam compare with India or the Philippines?

India has a larger talent pool and more very large vendors. The Philippines has stronger spoken English and a long history in customer support outsourcing. Vietnam sits between them on scale and is often chosen for engineering-heavy work at a competitive cost.