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Upwork works well for what it's used for. Midlevel paying gigs
April 12, 2018

Upwork works well for what it's used for. Midlevel paying gigs

McKay Salisbury | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Upwork

I use Upwork to get short-term freelance gigs. I used to train companies on a specific project management software and it's a very specialized skill. I have a profile on sites like Upwork and companies contact me for help with their business. It's basically just a way to get leads and easy work for your spare time. I still have my full-time job, but I can make $50 just by jumping on a call with someone and telling them what I know. It's also a great way to connect with other businesses and grow your personal brand. There is some issues with stuff like their "job success score." It goes down if you mostly only do one time jobs.
  • High volume of leads with little effort on your part
  • Decent rates and a wide variety of work
  • You have a profile so you can brand yourself there and it is easy to get started.
  • Job Success score has nothing to do with "job success." It is a arbitrary number that punishes freelancers like me that aren't doing services where a company would use me again and again. Also, they punish you for leaving jobs open even though most clients want to leave the job open in case they have followup questions.
  • Not enough follow up to try to get clients to leave reviews. You are punished if they don't leave feedback.
  • The platform is price sensitive, this may be a smart move but it also turns a lot of top freelancers away.
  • It helped me gain some easy money and experience managing clients myself.
  • It's generated a lot of leads that have closed including clients that can work around my schedule.
Upwork and Fiverr definitely have the most traffic. Fiverr is good for package services while Upwork is better for customized/long-term services. You really want to use both. Freelancer.com and Guru.com don't have nearly the traffic. They rarely have any jobs in my niche and they are almost all non-US freelancers.
It is great if you are trying to get some easy freelance work. It's not great if you can't provide a complete service by yourself. It's also not great if you are a large brand looking for an agency partner to work with. Once you are more than a $10 million dollar business, you need to go to the next level and not use platforms like Upwork.