Upwork or Freelancer

If you are considering outsourcing some of your work, you may have heard there are several portals for outsourcing. They are like a marketplace. Skilled freelancers list their services and clients like you post their jobs and try to find a good match.

Two of the biggest freelancing websites also called portals or marketplaces are Upwork and Freelancer. Here is a brief overview of both:

1. Freelancer – Popular and getting bigger by the day. They bought out several smaller competitors and have become quite big. Large pool of freelancers. The interfaces are too graphic intensive and that makes it slower than it should be. It seems the designers are not that great at UI design and mistake big graphics to be user friendly. The encouraging part is that they seem to be headed in the right direction. Let’s hope they can incorporate a work room like the old Elance used to have, that is, the client hires a freelancing team and then the team assigns resources to the work room. That is a key feature favored by clients whose jobs require multiple resources. Instead of hiring 4 separate people, a consolidated work room will allow a client to hire one team and then let the team manage by assigning multiple resources and aggregating their hours. Chances of finding a good freelancer – High. Chances of finding a good team – High.
   Commission Charged: 10%
2. Upwork: This is the big behemoth resulting from the merger of Odesk and Elance. Elance had the better framework and UI. Unfortunately the merged company took the clunky interface of Odesk and has imposed it on the new company. It’s amazing how the bigger the company gets, the farther from reality it gets. There doesn’t seem to be an end in sight. The people in charge seem to be oblivious of what’s happening to the UI. Every day without fail they have system outages. Neither clients or freelancers can access the system, their messaging system does not work. Their dispute resolution team behaves like third world monkey courts. Instead of trying to simplify, they are trying to make it more complicated and add even more features. A ton of customers have abandoned Upwork in total frustration and freelancers are following suit. Good news for competition. Chances of finding a good freelancer – Medium.
   Commission Charged: 20%

Whichever portal you go with, proceed carefully and in small steps. Try to establish good communications with the freelancer or team first, be it through Skype or telephone or email. Once you get comfortable with each other, outsourcing can be a great way of stretching your dollar.

Good Luck!