Both of us sell a full-time seat. Only one covers your whole working day.

At a glance

Oceans and Contractanaut sell the same shape of thing: one dedicated person, employed by the provider, on a flat monthly fee. The differences show up in what hours you get, how long you are tied in, how fast you meet anyone, and what is written down about replacement.

Where Oceans is the better choice

Start with the thing Oceans does that almost nobody in this market does. They put real operators on the public site, with names, photographs and job titles, before you have spoken to a salesperson. Across the twenty-seven companies we looked at on 17 September 2026, three showed any talent publicly at all. Most ask you to book a call and take the vetting on faith. Oceans shows you human beings. We think that is the right instinct and we have built our own version of it.

They also publish an 86% first-match rate, and publishing that number takes some nerve. It is an honest figure with an honest implication: roughly one placement in seven needs a second attempt. Most of this category quotes acceptance rates instead, which sound impressive and mean nothing without a denominator. We do not publish an acceptance rate for exactly that reason, and we would rather compete with a company that publishes a number that can be held against it.

The Sri Lanka argument is a real one, not marketing decoration. It is a less heavily recruited talent pool than the Philippines, English-medium university education is common, and a provider that concentrates there can plausibly get better people than one fishing in the same Manila pool as three hundred competitors. If the work is analytical and asynchronous, that argument holds up well.

And the proof is strong. More than 600 companies, top accounts that have hired ten or more placements, and named client pages you can read rather than anonymous logos in a grey row. Expansion inside an account is the hardest kind of proof to fake, because nobody buys a tenth seat from a vendor that is not working.

The core difference

What a full-time day means

Oceans is unusually straight about this, and it is on their own home page: a full-time day is described as 4 to 5 hours of real-time overlap in your timezone plus 3 to 4 hours of independent work (read on their site on 17 September 2026). Sri Lanka runs roughly nine and a half to ten and a half hours ahead of US Eastern, so that is simple arithmetic rather than a criticism. Somebody has to be awake at an unreasonable hour, and they have made a considered choice about how much of that to ask.

For a lot of work that is fine. A finance analyst closing the books, a marketer building campaigns, a legal coordinator working a queue: none of them need to be reachable at 2pm your time. For other work it is the whole job. Someone answering the phone at 9am Eastern, handling a calendar that changes at 4pm, or covering live chat through your afternoon has to be there when you are.

We recruit to the hours the seat needs. Philippines for assistants, Latin America and Eastern Europe for sales and operations, Kosovo for finance and accounting, South Africa for sales. The geography is chosen after the hours, not before, and the person works your working day. That is not a better idea in the abstract. It is a better fit for a US small business that wants the seat covered while the office is open.

Three months against thirty days

Their site describes a three-month trial as the period needed to get full value from the placement, then a move to a rolling contract that renews automatically. Call it what it is: a three-month commitment with an auto-renewing tail. At from $3,000 a month, that is around $9,000 decided on the strength of a discovery call.

We bill month to month, in advance, with 30 days' written notice to end it, and you pay nothing until the person actually starts. If a placement is wrong in week two, the exposure is one month, not three.

What you get for the money

Oceans publishes a floor. Full-time support starts at $3,000 a month for 40 hours a week (read on their site on 17 September 2026), and the upper end of the range is not published anywhere we could find. That is not unusual in this category, but it does mean you cannot work out whether you can afford them without a call.

Our bands are on the page. Executive and virtual assistants from $2,400 a month. Operations and admin from $2,500. SDR, BDR and CSR from $2,500. Finance and accounting from $2,800. All full-time, all dedicated, all working your hours, all on our pricing section with no form in front of them. We say from, because seniority and scope move the number, and any provider telling you a single flat figure covers a junior bookkeeper and a senior financial analyst is not being straight with you.

So the comparison on a like-for-like seat is from $2,400 to $2,800 against from $3,000. On a finance seat the gap narrows to about $200 a month, which is small enough to ignore. On an assistant it is around $600 a month, or $7,200 a year, which is not. We are not the cheap option in this market and we do not claim to be. Several offshore providers will quote you half our rate and some of them are perfectly good at what they do.

The number that should decide this is what you are replacing. A US operations coordinator at the national median salary of $69,500 runs about $93,800 a year once employer taxes, health insurance, a 401(k) contribution, recruiting and a laptop are in, with every line sourced and dated on our cost calculator. Run it with your own salary figures before you spend an hour comparing two offshore vendors to each other.

One more thing on money that has nothing to do with price. Oceans includes AI tool training on the platforms the client's business runs on, with quarterly upskilling, which is a genuinely good inclusion. Ours goes a step further into the seat itself: an AI layer sits alongside the person, captures how the work is actually done into a living playbook for that seat, and coaches them weekly on it. If we ever have to replace the person, the replacement inherits the playbook instead of starting from a blank page. It is knowledge capture and coaching, not monitoring, and the distinction matters to us.

Speed, and who you actually meet

Oceans publishes about two weeks from discovery call to the operator's first day, running through a six-stage vetting process (read on their site on 17 September 2026). Two weeks for a screened, trained, matched person is a reasonable timeline and they deserve credit for putting a number on it at all. Plenty of their competitors publish nothing.

Ours is 48 hours from the brief to three availability-confirmed candidates, and on recent placements four to seven days from the brief to the first day of work. We define time-to-fill as brief to first day and we say so on the page, because a good number of speed claims in this category quietly mean brief to shortlist.

The bigger difference is what happens in those two weeks. Oceans matches you. We shortlist for you. You get three named people, availability checked that week, and you run the interviews and make the call. When the seat is the difference between invoices going out on time and not, most owners would rather spend forty minutes on three calls than hand the judgement to a matching process they cannot see.

On showing talent publicly, Oceans is ahead of nearly everyone, and on the basic idea we are level with them: both home pages show named people with photos, and ours is a selection rather than our whole bench. Their profiles are real people, which is more than the rest of the field offers, but they carry no dates and no availability, so there is no way to tell whether the person on screen could start in March. The difference on ours is the date. Each of the featured people on our front page shows when their availability was last confirmed, we re-confirm it every week, and a card that goes stale drops off. You do not need a call or an email address to look.

How your risk is covered

Oceans offers free rematching if a placement is not working. There is no named guarantee, no cure window, no stated limit on how many times and no refund policy published on their site when we checked (17 September 2026). In fairness, that is the norm rather than the exception. Most managed providers in this category promise a rematch and leave the terms unwritten.

What makes their position more honest than most is the 86% first-match rate sitting right next to it. They are telling you in advance that this will occasionally be needed, which is more than a rematch promise with no numbers attached tells you. The thing you cannot find out from the site is what rematching costs you in time, how long you have to ask, or what happens if the second match also misses.

Our answer is written down and you can read it before you sign anything. Free replacement, as many times as it takes, with four conditions published on our guarantee section: it is for the same role and scope, you gave the person defined work and written feedback, the request comes at least 10 working days into the placement, and after three replacements either side can walk away on the standard 30 days' written notice.

The conditions are the useful part. They say what we need from you, which is the half most replacement promises leave out, and they mean the promise is something you can point at rather than something you have to negotiate while you are already annoyed.

Then there is the shape of the commitment behind the guarantee. A three-month trial with auto-renewal after it means that if month one goes badly, you are still buying months two and three while the rematch runs. On month to month with 30 days' notice, a bad first month costs you a bad first month.

On security, because it comes up in the same conversation: we sign an NDA before anyone gets access, your logins stay in your name, and offboarding happens the same day you ask for it.

Which one should you pick?

Questions people ask when comparing

Sources and how this page was written

We read Oceans's public pages ourselves on 17 September 2026 and quote what they publish, not what a third party says about them. We describe their claims rather than reproduce their copy. If something here is out of date, tell us and we'll correct it. Our own numbers come from our pricing section and our published guarantee.

1. 01Oceans home page, talent profiles, geography, hours, first-match rate and client proof, oceanstalent.com, read 17 September 2026
2. 02Oceans pricing, vetting stages and timeline, oceanstalent.com/landing-v1, read 17 September 2026
3. 03Oceans blog on executive assistant cost, where the $3,000 floor is repeated, oceanstalent.com/blog/executive-assistant-cost, read 17 September 2026
4. 04Contractanaut prices and replacement conditions, contractanaut.com/#pricing and contractanaut.com/#guarantee, published 17 September 2026