What a good individual designer gives you is the same core deliverable without the surrounding structure. A logo in every format you need, a small palette, typefaces, and enough guidance to apply it consistently. For a business with one owner and a website, that is the entire requirement, and it is available at a fraction of an agency engagement.
The risk with an individual is availability rather than ability. One person can become unavailable, change direction, or simply stop responding, and if they hold your source files you have a problem. Mitigate it by agreeing deliverables in writing before starting, including every file format, and by taking delivery of the source files rather than only the exports. That single condition removes most of what goes wrong.
There is a third option worth naming honestly, which is doing it yourself with a template or a design tool. It produces something serviceable, and for a business testing whether it has a market at all, spending nothing on identity is a defensible choice. What you should not do is spend meaningfully on branding before you know who your customer is, because the brief depends on that answer and a brand built on a guess gets redone.
How to evaluate either matters more than which you choose. Ask what they will need to know before starting, because a designer who begins with questions about your customers and your competitors will produce something appropriate while one who begins with visual references will produce something fashionable. Ask to see work for businesses roughly your size in unrelated categories, which shows range rather than a specialism that happens to match.
And agree the ownership terms explicitly. You want the copyright assigned to you on payment, in writing, along with the editable source files. Absent that, the default position in the United States is that the person who created the work retains the rights, which means you can find yourself unable to modify a logo you paid for. That is the most common expensive surprise in this category and it is entirely preventable with one clause.