When a freelancer is enough
A freelance videographer is the right call for straightforward jobs: documenting an event, capturing a single interview, recording a presentation. If you mostly need someone to point a good camera at something and hand back clean footage, paying for a full production team is overkill.
When you need a company
A production company makes sense when the video has to accomplish something specific. Brand films, customer stories, and recruitment video need strategy, a crew that can run interviews and b-roll at the same time, a director, and a real edit. That is a team effort, not a one-person job.
The cost of under-hiring
The common mistake is hiring a solo videographer for a job that needed production, then discovering in the edit that the footage cannot carry the story. Now you are paying again to reshoot or rescue it. Hiring slightly up front is usually cheaper than redoing it.
A middle path
Some companies, ours included, can scale to fit. For simple coverage we staff lean. For brand work we run full production. The right question is not "freelancer or company," but what does this specific video need to do, and what does it take to get there.