A web agency designs and promotes websites and online shops (design, build on platforms such as WordPress or Shopify, SEO, campaigns); a software house builds custom software: management systems, portals with a login area, apps, integrations with ERP and CRM. If the website has to bring in enquiries or sales, you need a web agency, or a freelancer for a small project; if the website is part of a business process (orders, private price lists, data coming from your ERP), you need a software house, or a supplier with both teams.
Put like that, it sounds easy.
The problem is that the label on a supplier's website doesn't tell you what it can actually do.
On 28 October 2026 we read the 9 pages Google shows on the first page in Italy for "web agency o software house". All of them are written by companies selling one of the two services, and none gives a price. Six of the eight publishers are software houses, and most of them end by presenting themselves as the supplier that does both.
The mistakes we see most often, when a company comes to us holding two quotes, are three:
- comparing two quotes from two different trades as if they were the same product, looking only at the total;
- picking the words "software house" because they sound more solid, for a site that only needs to bring in quote requests;
- not asking who will handle SEO, tracking and changes after launch, the items that decide whether the site works or just sits there.
We know this first-hand. Scovaventi had an online shop that got visits but didn't sell: we rebuilt it on Shopify, connected to payments and logistics, with Google Analytics 4 running from day one, and in the first year it sold €77,000 with an average basket of €190. Not a line of custom software.
Bosatta, on the other hand, ran its shop on an outdated CMS that couldn't sell across countries with different languages and currencies. The problem was the platform, not the design: after rebuilding the checkout journey and splitting campaigns between consumers and resellers, €240,000 in sales in one year across four markets.
So what does that have to do with choosing between a web agency and a software house?
In both cases the right question wasn't "who do I call?" but "what does the website need to do?". The answer to that tells you who to call.
In this guide you'll find:
- the difference between a web agency, a software house and a freelancer in one table;
- what we found on 12 Google searches for "web agency" and "software house" in six cities;
- who to hire for each type of website, from a brochure site to a B2B portal;
- what they cost, according to the few sources that publish figures;
- the questions to ask before you sign, whatever label the supplier uses.
Let's start.
What's the difference between a web agency and a software house (and where freelancers fit)
The difference is in what they deliver. A web agency delivers a website people look at and use to contact you or buy; a software house delivers a tool people use to do their work, often behind a login.
A freelancer is one person: the scope is whatever that person is good at, not a label.
| Web agency | Software house | Freelancer | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it delivers | website, online shop, landing page | management system, portal, app, integration | website or component, depending on the specialism |
| What it builds on | WordPress, Shopify, WooCommerce | custom code, frameworks | usually a CMS or a site builder |
| Who is on the team | design, web development, SEO, ads, copy | analysts, developers, testers, project managers | one person, sometimes with partners |
| How success is measured | enquiries, sales, Google rankings | time saved, fewer errors, processes | depends on the project |
| After launch | SEO, campaigns, updates | corrective and evolutionary maintenance | support, if available |
| Typical risk | a good-looking site that can't handle an integration | a site that works but brings no enquiries | depending on a single person |
Visilay summary, October 2026.
We sit in the first column. We are a search marketing agency: we build websites on WordPress or Shopify and plan them around what people search for on Google, because the work that follows (SEO, Google Ads, tracking) is what we do every day. When a client asks for a deep integration with their ERP, we say so before the quote.
What Google shows: 12 searches, no supplier in both (and software houses that sell websites)
On 28 October 2026 we searched "software house" and "web agency" followed by the name of six cities (Milan, Rome, Turin, Bologna, Naples and Lugano), on mobile, in Italian, using DataForSEO. For each search we read the top 10 organic results and the local pack (the map box): 83 entries per type of search.
| City | Suppliers in both searches | "Software house" entries mentioning websites or e-commerce | "Web agency" entries mentioning software or apps | Directories in the top 10 (SH / WA) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Milan | 0 | 1 of 14 | 1 of 14 | 4 / 3 |
| Rome | 0 | 4 of 14 | 0 of 14 | 5 / 1 |
| Turin | 0 | 0 of 14 | 0 of 14 | 4 / 1 |
| Bologna | 0 | 2 of 14 | 1 of 14 | 5 / 6 |
| Naples | 0 | 3 of 14 | 1 of 14 | 4 / 2 |
| Lugano | 0 | 0 of 13 | 0 of 13 | 8 / 2 |
| Total | 0 | 10 of 83 | 3 of 83 | 30 / 15 |
Visilay check, 28 October 2026. Google on mobile, Italy (Lugano: Switzerland), top 10 organic results plus local pack. Counted on titles and descriptions.
Three things stand out.
No supplier appears in the top 10 of both searches, in any city. The 5 domains found in both are directories (Sortlist three times, PagineGialle, local.ch). For Google these are two separate markets.
Software houses sell websites more often than web agencies sell software: 10 entries out of 83 against 3, and 2 of those 3 are directory listings. A software house in Naples says it builds "software, e-commerce, web site, app mobile e web app"; in Rome a local pack entry is called "2open Software House e Web Agency".
Half the results for "software house" are directories, job ads or social profiles (30 of 60), against 15 of 60 for "web agency". If you look for a software house, you find more lists than suppliers.
So the label is useless?
It tells you where the supplier starts from. A software house that also builds websites has developers in-house, but rarely someone who handles rankings and campaigns. Asking "who actually does it?" is worth more than any label.
Who to hire for each type of website (the table missing from most quotes)
The choice comes down to three questions: who will use the site (anonymous visitors or logged-in users), where the data comes from (pages you write or a management system) and how you measure success (enquiries and sales, or time saved).
| Project | Who uses it | Data | Who to hire |
|---|---|---|---|
| Landing page or brochure site | visitors | written by hand | freelancer or web agency |
| Company website that must bring enquiries | visitors | written by hand, CRM for leads | web agency |
| Shopify or WooCommerce shop | customers | uploaded catalogue or feed | web agency |
| Shop connected to stock and ERP | customers and the orders team | from the ERP | web agency and software house together |
| Reseller area with private price lists | B2B customers with a login | from the ERP | software house |
| Product configurator or quote builder | customers | rules and prices from the ERP | software house |
| App or internal management system | employees | company database | software house |
Visilay analysis of the projects we receive, October 2026.
The row that causes most confusion is the fourth. Scovaventi sells online with Shopify, which handles payments and shipping itself: a web agency was enough. A manufacturer that has to show each reseller its own price list and live stock from the ERP needs someone to write the integration. The public website and the private area can have different suppliers, as long as someone coordinates the two.
If you sell to businesses and ask for quote requests, your site is almost always in the second row. We cover it in the guide to the B2B website. If your company is a software house and wants to be found on Google, there's our guide to SEO for IT companies and software developers.
And freelancers? When they make sense (and the risk nobody puts in writing)
A freelancer makes sense when the project is small and well defined: a landing page, a brochure site, a redesign on a theme already chosen. It costs less because there's no agency overhead, and you talk directly to the person doing the work.
The risk isn't skill. It's continuity. If the freelancer falls ill, changes job or stops replying, the site is left with nobody who knows where things are. Of the 9 first-page pages in Italy, only 2 say so explicitly: SAEP ICT calls it a "single point of failure", Garda Informatica talks about code nobody wants to maintain. Both are software houses, so neither is a neutral observer.
The fix is the same for all three: domain, hosting and logins registered to your company. If the domain is registered to whoever built the site, changing supplier becomes a negotiation.
What they cost: freelancer, web agency and software house (the figures you can find)
Public figures only exist for freelancers and web agencies. None of the 9 first-page pages gives a price, and we found no published price range for a software house in any of the sources we read: the cost is estimated on the specification, as a fixed price or on time and materials.
For websites, two Italian sources put freelancers and agencies in the same table:
| Type of site | Freelancer (OnWeb24) | Agency (OnWeb24) | Senior freelancer (Argento) | Web agency (Argento) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brochure site | €800-2,500 | €2,000-5,000 | €1,200-3,500 | €5,000-15,000 |
| Company website | €2,000-5,000 | €3,500-8,000 | €1,800-5,000 | €8,000-25,000 |
| Small online shop | €2,500-6,000 | €5,000-15,000 | €2,800-8,000 | €10,000-30,000 and up |
Sources: OnWeb24, updated 17 August 2026, based on Lorenzo Albano's price list; Giuseppe Argento, updated 1 October 2026. Italian market, read on 28 October 2026.
Look at the agency column. For the same brochure site, one source says €2,000-5,000, the other €5,000-15,000. And neither is neutral: OnWeb24 sells websites on subscription, Argento is a freelancer.
So which figure is right?
The one that matches what the site needs to do, plus what it costs to keep it alive: renewals and hidden items are in our guide to how much a website costs.
The biggest cost, though, is never in the quote. It's the site that goes live without measuring anything. On Valore Solare the ads account counted 15,267 "conversions" in one month from 5,467 clicks: they were technical site events, not quote requests. Nobody had noticed, because whoever built the site didn't run the campaigns and whoever ran the campaigns didn't touch the site.
Two quotes, two different trades: let's read them together before you sign.
You've just seen what happens when whoever builds the site doesn't run the campaigns: months of wrong data. When we plan a website we list SEO, tracking and consent line by line in the quote, and we tell you upfront if part of the project needs a software house.
Book a strategy callWhat to ask before you sign (whatever label the supplier uses)
Ask every supplier these seven questions: the answers tell you more than the word on their website.
- Who are the domain, hosting and code registered to? The right answer: your company, with all logins.
- Which platform do you build on, and why? WordPress and Shopify have thousands of developers, a proprietary CMS has one (we measured what WordPress does for SEO on its own).
- Who handles SEO and content? If the answer is "you do", add it to the budget (see the guide to building an SEO-friendly website).
- Is tracking included? GA4, Google Ads conversions and Consent Mode should be line items in the quote.
- What does a change cost after launch? A language, a page, a new form.
- Does the site meet accessibility rules? In the EU the European Accessibility Act has applied to many businesses since 28 June 2025 (see our guide to web accessibility).
- If you're rebuilding an existing site, how do you handle redirects and URLs? A badly handled platform change wipes out rankings: see website migration SEO and SEO for a website redesign.
To put them in writing to several suppliers, use the template of the request for proposal (RFP).
Web agency or software house: who gets you found on ChatGPT and AI Overviews (the test)
We asked ChatGPT, with web search on, from Italy, on 28 October 2026: "for my company's new website, should I hire a web agency, a software house or a freelancer?" (in Italian). It recommended a web agency for a site that must bring in clients, a software house for integrations and private areas, then showed a price table.
That table was copied figure for figure from OnWeb24: €800-2,500 for a freelancer, €2,000-5,000 for an agency, for a brochure site. The 4 sources cited were all "how much does a website cost" pages published in 2026 by companies selling websites. None was among the 9 first-page Google results for "web agency o software house", and ChatGPT gave no figure at all for a software house.
The reason is simple. ChatGPT and Google's AI features lift passages that answer the question on their own: a table with figures, a date and a source beats an article that says "it depends". On Google an AI Overview appeared in 10 of the 12 city searches, and there too it described suppliers in detail, sometimes with prices.
For a business that wants to be cited, the lesson is the same: pages with price ranges, project types and cases with numbers. It doesn't guarantee a citation, but without those pages there's nothing to cite. We measured which sources ChatGPT and AI Overviews use in our test on 24 Italian searches, and how we work on it in our GEO service.
How we work (a web agency with its own theme and plugins)
The site you're reading runs on a WordPress theme we wrote and five plugins of our own: languages, contact forms, structured data, performance and cookie consent. We used to run Elementor and a commercial translation plugin.
So you're a software house?
No. We wrote that code because our own site is our SEO test bench, and every component removed makes a page faster. Connecting a website to an ERP, or to a private area with thousands of users, is a different trade: analysis, testing, years of evolutionary maintenance.
It works the other way round too. In March 2026 a software house that runs several classified-ads websites got in touch: it does development in-house, has one person on SEO, and wanted support on exactly that part.
When we build a site through our web development service, the quote always includes three things: site, domain and hosting registered to your company, one point of contact from brief to maintenance, and conversion tracking live from day one.
Frequently asked questions
It depends: some have developers who can, many outsource it. In the 12 Google searches we analysed in Italy on 28 October 2026, only 3 of 83 "web agency" entries mentioned software or apps, and 2 were directory listings. Ask who will write the code and who will maintain it.
Yes. In the same searches 10 of 83 "software house" entries mentioned websites or e-commerce. Check who will handle copy, SEO and tracking, though, because they are rarely a software house's core trade.
It depends: a freelancer costs less (€800-2,500 according to OnWeb24, €1,200-3,500 according to Giuseppe Argento, both Italian sources updated in 2026), an agency has more skills on the team and more continuity. Either way, domain, hosting and logins must be registered to your company.
It depends: none of the 9 first-page Google results in Italy for "web agency o software house" publishes a price. Software houses work on a fixed price or on time and materials, with an estimate based on the functional specification.
Your company, always, together with hosting and admin logins. If the domain is registered to the supplier, changing agency or software house becomes a negotiation.
Summary
Web agency: websites and shops that must bring in enquiries or sales.
Software house: management systems, portals with a login, apps and integrations.
Freelancer: small, well-defined projects, with domain and logins in your name.
On 12 Google searches in six cities, no supplier ranks as both a web agency and a software house.
Public figures only exist for freelancers and agencies, and for the same brochure site they range from €800 to €15,000.
One thing almost nobody considers: the supplier you pick today decides who can work on the site tomorrow. A widely used platform and logins in your company's name leave you free to change agency or bring in a software house for the private area. A site built on code only one person knows ties you to that person. Before asking "who does it best?", ask "who else will be able to work on it?".
