Consultant vs. Vendor: What's the Difference?
Table of Contents
Main Difference
The main difference between Consultant and Vendor is that the Consultant is a professional who provides advice in his specific field of expertise and Vendor is a enterprise that contributes goods or services.
Consultant
A consultant (from Latin: consultare “to deliberate”) is a professional who provides expert advice in a particular area such as security (electronic or physical), management, education, accountancy, law, human resources, marketing (and public relations), finance, Heath Care, engineering, science or any of many other specialized fields.
A consultant is usually an expert or an experienced professional in a specific field and has a wide knowledge of the subject matter. The role of consultant outside the medical sphere (where the term is used specifically for a grade of doctor) can fall under one of two general categories:
Internal consultant: someone who operates within an organization but is available to be consulted on areas of their specialization by other departments or individuals (acting as clients); or
External consultant: someone who is employed externally to the client (either by a consulting firm or some other agency) whose expertise is provided on a temporary basis, usually for a fee. Consulting firms range in size from sole proprietorships consisting of a single consultant, small businesses consisting of a small number of consultants, to mid- to large consulting firms, which in some cases are multinational corporations. This type of consultant generally engages with multiple and changing clients, which are typically companies, non-profit organizations, or governments.By hiring a consultant, clients have access to deeper levels of expertise than would be financially feasible for them to retain in-house on a long-term basis. Moreover, clients can control their expenditures on consulting services by only purchasing as much services from the outside consultant as desired.
Consultants provide their advice to their clients in a variety of forms. Reports and presentations are often used. However, in some specialized fields, the consultant may develop customized software or other products for the client. Depending on the nature of the consulting services and the wishes of the client, the advice from the consultant may be made public, by placing the report or presentation online, or the advice may be kept confidential, and only given to the senior executives of the organization paying for the consulting services.
Vendor
In a supply chain, a vendor, or a seller, is an enterprise that contributes goods or services. Generally, a supply chain vendor manufactures inventory/stock items and sells them to the next link in the chain. Today, these terms refer to a supplier of any good or service.
Consultant (noun)
a person or party that is consulted
Consultant (noun)
a person whose occupation is to be consulted for their expertise, advice, or help in an area or specialty; a party whose business is to be similarly consulted
Vendor (noun)
A person or a company that vends or sells.
Vendor (noun)
A vending machine.
Vendor (verb)
To bundle third-party dependencies with the source code for one’s own program.
“I distributed my application with a vendored copy of Perl so that it wouldn’t use the system copies of Perl where it is installed.”
Vendor (verb)
As the software vendor, to bundle one’s own, possibly modified version of dependencies with a standard program.
“Strawberry Perl contains vendored copies of some CPAN modules, designed to allow them to run on Windows.”
Vendor (noun)
a person or company offering something for sale, especially a trader in the street
“an Italian ice-cream vendor”
Vendor (noun)
the seller in a sale, especially of property.
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