Should I hire a Laravel freelancer or an agency?

Hire a freelancer for small, well defined, short term tasks where a single skilled person is enough: a focused feature, a bug fix sprint, a small site, or augmenting an existing team for a specific gap. Hire an agency for anything you will run your business on: products that need continuity, code review, QA, multiple skill sets, and accountability across months or years. The deciding factors are project size, how long you need the work, how much risk you can absorb if a single person disappears, and whether you have your own engineering management. Freelancers are cheaper per hour but carry single point of failure risk; agencies cost more per hour but provide a team, structure, and continuity.