Fractional CTO vs consultant: which do you need?

You need senior technical help, and two offers look similar: a fractional CTO and a consultant. They are different engagements, and picking the wrong one wastes months.

What a fractional CTO does

A fractional CTO is an ongoing relationship, typically one or two days a week. The CTO stays with the company: technology strategy and architecture decisions, engineering team leadership, hiring and mentoring, vendor evaluation and selection, due diligence support, and board and investor communications. The work does not end, because the company keeps growing and the technology decisions keep coming.

What a consultant does

A consultant answers a defined question, then hands over the answer. An architecture review runs two to four weeks. Technical due diligence runs one to two weeks. An implementation project runs three to six months. What you get is a report, a roadmap, or a built system, plus a team trained to run it.

How to choose

If the need is ongoing leadership, someone who stays with the team, makes the calls, and grows the engineering side, that is fractional. If the need is one question answered well, is this architecture sound, is this startup's technology real, build this one workflow, that is a project. A project can also clarify whether you need ongoing leadership. Start from the shape of the need, not the title.