We run a software company in Cairo, so treat this accordingly. It's the version we'd want to read if we were the ones choosing — including the parts that don't favour us.

Rates

Eastern Europe — Poland, Romania, Ukraine — sits highest of the three. India spans the widest range of any market on earth; the gap between the cheapest and the most capable Indian firms is larger than the gap between countries. Egypt sits between them: closer to India on cost, closer to Eastern Europe on working hours.

If cost is your only variable, India will usually win. That's a real answer and we're not going to dress it up.

Time zones

Cairo is UTC+2. That gives a full working-day overlap with Europe and the Gulf, and covers the US East Coast morning — roughly 8am to midday Eastern.

Eastern Europe is similar for Europe, slightly better for the UK, similar for the US. India is UTC+5:30 — excellent for Asia and Australia, workable for Europe, genuinely hard for the US West Coast. Plenty of teams make it work with overlap windows, but you're managing it rather than ignoring it.

Overlap matters more than most buyers expect, because the real cost of a project isn't the hourly rate. It's how many days you lose waiting for an answer.

Where each one is genuinely strong

  • India — unmatched scale. If you need forty engineers next quarter, India can do that and Egypt largely can't. Deep enterprise experience, and the top-tier firms are as good as anywhere.
  • Eastern Europe — strong engineering culture, excellent for complex technical products, close to EU regulatory norms. Costs more, and hiring is tight.
  • Egypt — a large young engineering workforce, English as the working language by default, native Arabic, and time zones that cover Europe, the Gulf and the US morning in a single day. Genuinely strong on MENA-specific work: Arabic interfaces, regional payment rails, ETA e-invoicing, Gulf compliance.

When Egypt is the wrong choice

Worth saying plainly.

  • If you need forty engineers immediately, go to India — the depth isn't here.
  • If your product is deeply tied to US or EU regulatory work, such as FDA-regulated medical devices or US financial compliance, hire where that expertise is concentrated. That's usually onshore.
  • If you need real-time overlap with San Francisco, none of these three is good. Latin America is the honest answer.
  • If your buying criterion is the lowest possible hourly rate, India will beat us and you should take it.

What actually predicts a good outcome

After enough projects, we don't think the country is the main variable. These four questions are.

Ask this before geography

Do the engineers you meet in the sales call build the thing, or do they hand it to a team you never meet?

Do you own the repository from day one, or on final payment?

Are architecture decisions written down anywhere other than one developer's head?

What does the contract say about IP — does it say hereby assigns, or only shall assign? The first moves ownership the moment you sign. The second is a promise to transfer later, which leaves you holding a claim rather than the property.

Those four predict outcomes better than geography does. They're also the ones most buyers never ask.

We're one of the Egyptian options — see what we do or how we approach custom software and ERP integration. If Egypt isn't right for what you're building, we'd rather tell you than take the project: get in touch and we'll say so.