Upwork headquartered in Mountain View, California offers their eponymous freelance management system (FMS).
$49.99
per month
Worksuite
Score 5.4 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Worksuite (formerly Shortlist) is designed to help companies find and manage their complete external workforce (freelancers, contractors, and vendors) by providing a single platform to source, onboard, manage, review/rate and pay them.
I would recommend Upwork to a colleague as a solution to workplace issues. Our company has utilized Upwork to vet out potential competitors as well as partners in a lengthy data analysis project, as well as given our engineering team extra hands when implementing new products, projects, and features. This has allowed our company to stay on track with projects without in-house manpower.
We haven't found another system that can do all that Shortlist can do (payments, tax paperwork, profile management, project management, on-boarding, etc...) but it doesn't mean we always love using Shortlist. Shortlist is cumbersome to work in and requires LOTS of redundant clicking. Something as simple as being able to right-click to open on any profile/page/account/link would save hours in a week where as now to get to two side-by-side items on some lists, you have to click back a page, re-load, and scroll down to select the next option. I appreciate that Shortlist manages all the tax paperwork and has created for us a on-boarding system that flows nicely and allows multiple team members to manage their piece of the process.
In my opinion the worst customer service. It is impossible to contact them via phone, and they are not transparent about their decisions.
I feel they don't have the freelance community's best interest in mind. Their focus is on the companies that pay. Freelancers are disposable.
They charge ridiculous fees to the freelancers that are the ones that need the money the most because they are the ones starting their businesses. It is like if your employer charges you for coming to work.
Shortlist only allows for minor customizations to their platform. It would be great if each company could create their own view/usage set for the system.
The help chat box needs some work for sure. It takes days for someone to respond if they ever respond and often there is nothing they can do to remedy the issue at hand.
Payments should be able to be made every day, not just on Fridays.
Support has been great. Rarely have I ever had an issue that has required support but when I have they have been great. I did have to interact with support to confirm my identity and the process was easy and quick and support was helpful to know what I needed to do to accomplish that task.
30-40% of the time there is no response when you contact the chat/help feature. 30-40% of the time if they do respond, it is to say they can't do anything about the issue. Maybe 20% of the time the chat is actually helpful, but that seems like a high estimate when I think about my experience asking for support.
Upwork is better suited for finding contractors that you can have ongoing relationships. Compared to Fiverr, it's a much easier process to find qualified designers rather than one-time contractors to design simple things for you. The interface is easier to use as well and the billing management makes it so much cleaner and easier to know how much we're spending and how contractors are logging work hours.
We've never found another platform that does exactly what Shortlist does in terms of payments, taxes, project management, and on-boarding. We use other sites to source our new vendors (like Indeed, craigslist, etc...) but ultimately we direct all those applicants to our onboarding in Shortlist. I wish some of the more "minor" platform issues we've had over the last year were fixed sooner (or fixed at all) but it does the job!
We have gotten close to 50% of all of our clients through the platform.
Upwork backs the work done through the platform, so no matter what the client or person you are working with does, you get paid for the work that you do. You aren't left hanging after doing hours of work for a client and then never getting paid for it.
Made it easy to communicate with clients from different parts of the world and set up partnerships and agreements in an easier fashion. I would highly recommend it to anyone with a unique skill set.
