Upwork

The platform is great, usual friendly and also ensures client and freelancers gets excellent customer service. The only issue is that number of connect required for job application is too high as you have to pay for the connect.

I started with Upwork a number of years ago and found success and regular work. It was actually a large piece of where I found work as a voice artist. But then they changed their fee structure and I no longer try to find new work through the site.

We must now pay for audition credits AND they then take a percentage of the contracted fee.

I felt this was a money grabbing attempt and it made me decide to leave the platform except to keep my past clients who still work through this site.
Otherwise I have left and will spend my time elsewhere.

It is a good platform and one that I had success using. The value was once good. But not it is not a value for me any longer.

If you are just starting out it can still be a great platform for you to use. If you have been in the business a while I say skip it.

Nice platform to find your required work. Just a little bit costly now for the freelancers. There should be some relief for the freelancers.

Getting orders on the website has never been easy. However, securing the first order on working on it efficiently guarantees a successful future with voluminous orders.

They are fine and you set your own fees. If they like you they will give you work sometimes. I get plenty of work and it is good supplemental income for a professor. The have some competition now but are still okay. Better than some scam sites like Writerbay.

I am just starting working at Upwork and do not have much experience, but I am enjoying it so far. Can recommend to try.

It's okay. There is a high volume of leads, but in my experience, most of those leads are not very good. I found few decent gigs to apply for, and declined most of the offers I received. Common reasons I had for either declining or not applying were: a) pay far below industry standard, b) client misunderstanding freelancer/vendor responsibilities (e.g. Conflating PR, marketing and sales), c) unethical requests (e.g. Writing product/service reviews for pay), d) requests that were so vague it would have been difficult to measure "success." I eventually worked with some very nice clients, but they had little to no experience working with freelancers, and I had to do a lot of hand-holding. Let's face it: Established companies and experienced freelancers typically find each other via word of mouth and do not need platforms like UpWork or its competitors. I'd say UpWork is okay for picking up an occasional gig, but the volume of subpar clients and the 20% cut (!) the platform takes from vendor payouts should discourage regular use unless you're just barely starting out.

Before anyone assumes I'm a disgruntled low-level contractor. I've owned my own businesses (2) and made more than 100K on this platform, am a top-rate Plus contractor with 100% success rate and rave reviews from clients. Upwork is a good platform, but it has many problems! It has a constant stream of growing pains that show up as downtime for elements of the software on a regular basis: multiple times per month (things just flat out don't work for hours until they fix it), customer service chat is never available when you run into a problem, you have to file a ticket and they take DAYS to get back to you, or you're in the middle of a complicated bid because the potential client has entered every single question the software suggested to them into the application (they have no idea what to ask you on their own) and the software dies - which is a pain whether you've cut and pasted from a word processor, or not. Then there is the throttling problem. If you bring too many issues to the attention of customer service, they throttle potential clients' ability to "see" your profile in their search feed. In other words, you stop showing up as often. It doesn't matter how much money you've made them if the software has constant problems and customer service is never available. Their biggest issue is Client training and policy enforcement: there is none, and I mean NONE. Your clients will pull the most ridiculous schemes imaginable in the middle of a project and you are on your own. There is some mediation, especially if the client conned upwork into approving their payment verification, which has happened to me. In Upwork's defense, they were able to recover the money for me, and cancel the account. However, the issues created by a lack of screening of potential clients allows clients to post advertisements on the platform as if they're jobs, allows clients to assign an hourly amount to a job and then in the description tell you it's a fixed bid or a per work/per page project. Stay away from those and report them. But if you report too many, you'll notice that you stop receiving invitations from clients and suddenly no one can find you when you have business contacts search for you on the platform, even if they're entering the right information and you are 5-star, top-rated-plus, 100% success rate. They've changed a lot about the platform in the last year or so. You now don't receive as many 'connects' - the tokens that allow you to bid on jobs, and the monthly membership cost has gone up from 11.99 to 14.99 plus tax. Clients don't have to pay anything except their hourly rate to you if you're hired and this exact thing prevents their Payment Verification from being done often until they hire you and then oops! They can't hire you because they don't have an adequate payment option or credit card, and you now have to go back to your booking calendar and figure out what you're doing and your finances and start the bidding process all over again! You only receive 70 Connects with that monthly membership. If you want more connects you have to buy them from Upwork and 100 Connects costs you $15.00, about the same as your membership, but you'll be bidding against more people working from home now than were a year or two ago and you'll find yourself using 20, 30, 40 Connects to be seen at the "top" of the application pile of 80 or 150 applicants. No thank you. Use another platform if you have the option, this one is starting to hit the wall.

It is great concept working well but the website is super slow and buggy. Messages are not loading sometimes not possible to close contract. It is just frozen. Fees are another topic. It cuts 20% fee... (top of it you need to pay tax etc half of the money you are earning is just gone) And it is asking to buy premium membership. And buy connects etc. They should really consider to drop fees if they want to attract or not lose good developers.

You shouldn't do this; it will probably result in failure. I have a friend who is a designer and he was hiring developers via UpWork. Even with consultation from friends of his who were real engineers, it was extremely difficult to find decent engineers who could do the things he needed, deliver reliably, and iterate according to ongoing testing/customer feedback.

I have very mixed experiences with upwork, no good ones for SEO, some
Lovely ones for a marketing adviser and photoshopping of images, but
Terrible for website design. Am in the middle of a dispute now, the
Designer was supposed to do design templates for 3 specific pages, and
The layouts, looked great. However his integrating was and still is a
Mess, affecting text and layout on all the pages, to the extent, that I
Am now having to spend hours undoing and re-doing all the work. And the
Upwork view..." it appears that no clear violation of our terms has
Been made"So sure, use them, but you are entirely alone if it goes wrong.

Hello, I have been a voice artist for over 6 years. I have been on Upwork for over a year now and like it in some ways, but have issues in other ways. Generally speaking it is a legitimate place for people to collaborate and hire contractors, etc.
I enjoy:
1- Some of their tools such as being able to skype/message/phone, etc.
2- I love that once the job starts there are a lot of ways to communicate and get things done.
3- I enjoy being able to see how many people have applied for a job so I know if it is a waste of time to also apply.
4- I love that we have control over the price we want, etc when we submit to a job.
5- That you can report a job if it seems illegal, illegitimate, etc.
6- There have been some great people I have worked with on Upwork, and enjoy a lot of the professionals that I have worked with on the site.
7- I love that companies can send invitations to interview to me so I don't have to pay money to audition for a job a company wants me to interview for. Fabulous policy.
Things I don't like:
1- This is a place where companies come to get slave labor. Some of the jobs listed literally are paying much less than minimum wage, sometimes even as low as $2-$3 an hour. They don't say it that way. They just ask for a huge amount of work for $30, and people applying don't realize that the job would take almost 10 hours to do.
2- When I report these jobs Upwork does nothing about it.
3- Upwork sends out emails with these horrible jobs included, thus supporting and encouraging slave labor.
4- So Upwork is not looking out and making sure legitimate jobs with decent pay are on the site. I feel like they are not protecting and caring for the voice artists, and that new voice artists will be taken advantage of on this site. I feel like they are more interested in making money and will recommend any job they get paid to recommend.
5- The amount of legitimate work for voice artists could be improved.
6. Sometimes people who want to set up a job though Upwork find it hard at first and ask me to set up the job. But I am not able to set up an initial job for someone. I can only make offers to those who I have already had a job with. I wish there was some way for people to approve getting offers from others so that the hiring process could go more smoothly.
7. There is no way for me as a person accepting or rejecting an offer to provide adjustments. This should be a negotiation process. Maybe I need a little more time than they put on the proposal, etc. But they have to redo the proposal on their end and that can be hard for some to figure out. So the proposal process should be more flexible.
8. Upwork should provide some guidance for those who are new at posting a job for a voice artist. Many of the job descriptions are so vague that I don't apply because it costs money to apply. If some sort of form or list of suggested details to post was provided it could improve the amount of successful jobs on Upwork.

On the whole I feel that Upwork has potential as a site for voice artists but that Upwork needs to do a better job at protecting those on the site from scammers and those insisting on slave labor. When I see these types of jobs it turns me off from the site and makes me constantly reconsider if this is a site for professionals or not.

I tried to register on Upwork twice. Both times the account was suspended despite the fact that I did nothing at all! I will look for another platform.

Great - Love the ability to connect to clients seeking remote services
Not So Good - Lots of spam listings and the rating system is VERY skewed against the freelancer.
If you are willing to work hard at UpWorks system- then it can be a great tool. Worth the time, but frustrating and needs serious improvement.

My working experience at UpWork started in February. I was working as an SMM-specialist and was involved in 3 projects. Frankly speaking, I didn't like any of my employees because when I started working there was one description of the project I had to accomplish and once I was selected there were some sufficient changes in it.

I've been in Upwork for almost two years now, you need to know what clients are the best fit for you, some clients stop responding and Upwork lowers your score (and preventing you from getting more jobs) but if you build relationships with clients and choose the ones that are a good fit then it will run smoothly. Ive been frustrated for some time because of this and no response from Upwork. There are very bad clients that just use you, say didnt like your work (beacuse they don't want to pay) and your only option is to give a refund because if not they would leave you a bad review. Upwork should really work on the review system, it SUCKS.

I've been working on upwork for a long time (since it was an Odesk).
I was excited when they moved to a new domain upwork.com. I hoped that it will improve some small issues that Odesk had. But unfortunately, when I started using the new site, it became the worst experience working with a freelance platforms.
Guys trying everyday to improve the site usage but I'm not sure when they will get success.
Anyway, there are a lot of good specialist on the site.

Upwork is Really Good Platform for Freelancers and Agencies but they have lots of conditions if you violate them by mistake they can terminate our account without giving any second chance. That's the main issue I found in their privacy policy and lots of people discussing this topic on the Upwork community.

I have previously worked at upwork as freelancer. It was good experience. But as I am a telecom engineer, I need more projects related to telecom. That's why I have at fieldengineer.com where I have many projects related to telecom industry.The perfect workforce solution for telecom companies. A platform specifically designed to hire a telecom engineer to work remotely

I have very mixed experiences with upwork, no good ones for SEO, some lovely ones for a marketing adviser and photoshopping of images, but terrible for website design. Am in the middle of a dispute now, the designer was supposed to do design templates for 3 specific pages, and the layouts, looked great. However his integrating was and still is a mess, affecting text and layout on all the pages, to the extent, that I am now having to spend hours undoing and re-doing all the work. And the upwork view..." it appears that no clear violation of our terms has been made"

So sure, use them, but you are entirely alone if it goes wrong.

They haven't a clue about business structures outside the US and make you jump through so many hoops for a paltry rate that it really isn't worth the effort. They don't understand that a Limited Company is a legal entity or that all freelancers aren't sole traders.

Nice website but it is bit expensive for individuals. But good for companies.

Not superb though, not user friendly either. I am satisfied because I found cheap labour but not quite satisfied with their performance. At first they were excellent but then started to let me down more and more. I ended up doing the job myself which is complete opposite of why i joined in the first place. Never mind, I am sure someone better will come along.