Compare Upwork VS Freelancer.com

Compare Upwork VS Freelancer.com

Today we are going to compare Upwork VS Freelancer to see which one of these platforms is the best to start working on there and earning money, on one of the reasons why I chose to do this article booster?

I often see reviews of these two platforms and a lot of the time they are negative, so there's one the particular article that I've recently seen that describes how a blogger friend had a very well-established app development firm in Europe and they decided to sign up to Upwork and try to get more work on clients they set up their profile and I applied to about a hundred jobs and they only got two responses and they ended up not landing the single client so the article concluded that Upwork and other freelance of platforms is a waste of time.

Now I did have a bit of a gripe about this article and that was that the article recommended the course on Udemy teaching you how to land clients in the real world? so, I did find this a little bit biased also when you think about it it makes sense that the person with a newly created account on that work with no reviews couldn't land many jobs you know you've got much less chance of landing a job on one of these platforms.
If you've got no experience to show these platforms are incredibly competitive and unless you're offering rock-bottom prices you know there's probably not much chance of landing many high budget clients in your first few months. I wouldn't take this person's experience as proof that the platforms don't work because the scenario is slightly flawed.

The platforms are making money and I say this because I've been working on my work on Freelancer for more than five years now. I was a member of a desk which they've got rebranded emerged with Elance which subsequently then rebranded again into Upwork. So I have been with them for quite some time now and the same goes for freelancers.com.

I remember they used to be called we work out and they also bought and they merged with getting a Freelancer and also a few other platforms to eventually become freelance calm so people with both these platforms for quite a long time now and on the whole, my experience has been positive especially, when I was going for university it reads it helped me in providing an additional income, what's more, is it was very flexible which is great for me because during term time when I was busy with University projects you know I didn't have that much time to work on the platforms.

But when the holiday time comes around you've got a bit more free time and you know I could actually work at her money so it was good I could switch between the two also you can work in the comfort of your own home which is great because you know in the daytime you could work on the Uni projects and you could just switch over and start bidding on jobs and potentially start doing some work to earn some money working from home does help especially if you compare it to the time and money that you spend commuting to a job.

so, I wouldn't let a few horror stories from other freelancers put you off from signing up and just trying it out and seeing how you girl there is the problem that you are competing in the global marketplace on these platforms and it's obvious when you have workers from countries aware working for a few dollars per hour is sustainable but in my experience, a lot of clients are happy to pay a premium price or someone who is reliable a good communicator and also provides obviously quality work, not all these platforms are created equal though and this is what I wanted to talk about in this article.

So let's compare Freelancer end Upwork so the first big difference between these two platforms there's several bids that you have per month to use and when applying to jobs and second is how easy is to find relevant jobs now I find Freelancer network to be on the opposite sides of the spectrum when it comes to these two factors so with a free Freelancer account you get 8 bits per month and they've got five different levels of membership from the free account and stay range from one pound a month all the way up to 33 pounds per month though with each membership level you get more perks and you also get more bids per month for the plus membership which is the mid-range membership level of 5 pounds per month you'll get 100 bids.

In my experience this is morally enough to actually land work so with Upwork you've only got to membership level once you put the basic which is the free account and you get 60 connects per month or you can upgrade to the Plus plan for $10 per month and that gives you 70 connects per month and you also get the ability to roll over any unused bids the rollover feature is actually quite good because for example while I was away for a few months and not working online I kept my membership open and therefore I could stockpile mine connects and now I've returned back to work I've got close to 200 connects which is really helpful in earning more money now.

One connect does not equal one beaten-up work typically it's a bit on a job it will cost you two connects per application so, in reality, you get to apply it to about 30 jobs per month I think Freelancer is definitely better value for money when it comes to membership plans and the number of bids that you get per month but there is one problem with that and it is the ease of finding jobs on each of these platforms so freelance you get more bids per month but the filtering system and the categorization features are terrible and this results in you just spend much more time and you waste many more bids applying to jobs that you probably won't lead to actually anything.

Freelancer Job Search Interface:

So, what I'm gonna do is I will tell you the interface is a Freelancer and Upwork and I will tell you why this is the case first we'll take a look at Freelancer this is the job search interface on Freelancer and we have a few options here to filter out the jobs we have a search box that you can enter keywords. So, if the instance you could type in logo design you have skills which are kind of like tags that associated with the project one of the biggest problems with Freelancer is that the skills are not accurately applied to job listings this right here is one of my biggest complaints with Freelancer so many jobs are tagged with graphic design.

So, you will see mobile app development user interface development you will see web design and everything I was tagged with graphic design which means that using these tags to actually find jobs is not very accurate and just results in you having to scroll through pages and pages of irrelevant jobs next you have the job types that self-explanatory I just usually on tick contest because that's not the type of work time looking for you can click on the more filters option and then you've got a few more things to choose from listing types these are not really used that much so it's not really worth using them and also they're not actually very well explained on this interface languages and location are self-explanatory so that's really about it there's not much to filter by.

Upwork Job Search Interface:

Now I will tell you the Upwork job search interface and this is pretty much one of the biggest reasons as to why I think Upwork is superior to Freelancer you can see that we've got more options to choose from first of all you've got job type you can do hourly and fixed price which is the same as Freelancer you've got several proposals which are quite handy because you can filter out jobs that have been applied to say like 20 to 50 times as maybe there's probably a less chance if you get a job that's already got a ton of applications.

You can filter by experience level which is really handy because you can remove all of the budget jobs which are pretty much the lowest paying jobs and Upwork and you can show just the jobs where people are looking for experts and therefore willing to pay more and also if you think about this on the flip if you're just starting out it's great to filter out all of the expert and intermediate jobs because really you've probably only got a chance of landing an entry-level job if you have got low reviews on your profile and you're just starting out next is the budget which is the same as Freelancer.

After that, you have client history now this is something that I really really like you can filter out all of the clients that are posting jobs who have no hiring history this is important because on Freelancer I see a lot of job posts from accounts that have never hired before by filtering out those that have actually hired on the platform as much higher chance that obviously, they're going to hire for the job that you are bidding I love a really handy filter in the options is to filter by verified payment. This just shows you that they're probably a little bit more serious about hiring if they've gone through the effort of verifying their means of payment you can also filter by the categories and these are much more accurate jobs are more accurately tagged and you will find many more relevant jobs if you obviously choose like a specific category here also a nice feature with Upwork is that you can save these filters as a preset so each time you go to your dashboard you can just click on it and it will show you all the job listings that match those specific filtering options.

Next, take a look at the actual quality of the jobs being posted in my experience I find the postings on that work to be much better Freelancer has been plagued with spam postings for several years now and also has very low quality inaccurate and fake job postings, with Upwork I find the process of posting a job to be a little bit better designed and you can ask questions about the project in an easy way which does help to add a little bit of clarity to the job applying to jobs and Upwork again is easier of the two definitely I find the Freelancer process of applying to jobs is a little bit slower and that you're forced to add milestones and taking projects yourself you can skip this tagging phase but it is just an extra click that you need to make which does slow things down another feature with Freelancer is their newly introduced bit Quality Score this essentially penalizes you from posting generic job applications over and over again.

Well, this is fine in theory the big problem is that many of the job postings are incredibly vague and as such the only thing that you can really type when bidding on such the job is a generic vague response so most of the time I find myself you know asking a simple question like, Do you have any examples of the type of logo? that you want and then I just add a brief introduction to myself you're also penalized for not adding accurate milestones to the project and again because the product descriptions are vague a lot of the time it's really hard to even come up with any sort of milestones so you find yourself just wasting time entering like three or four milestones to I can look like you've understood the job and you don't so you don't get flagged by this beauty quality score system.

Fees Difference:

The only thing that I can see that is better with Freelancer compared to Upwork is the fees. So, Upwork takes a huge 20% of the money you earn whereas Freelancer only takes 10% so this is quite a big difference another thing I do not like about Freelancer is that you cannot withdraw money directly to a local bank if you're in a certain country it just so happens that UK is one of those countries where Freelancer is the only options you have our Paypal, Skrill or the Freelancer debit card which I have no idea what that is we've Upwork you can withdraw directly to US banks for free and you can also withdraw a direct to your local bank for a $0.99 fee that's great for me because obviously I only have to pay 99 cents and it means that I get to avoid using PayPal but they do also accept Paypal and Payoneer as ways of withdrawing your money.

As you can see Freelancer and Upwork are quite different platforms and both have their positives and negatives, in my opinion, I don't think there is any harming signed up for both of these platforms and applying to jobs if you're new to freelancing I think you'll probably definitely have to use both as you are new your acceptance right for jobs will be low and you might find that you use up all of your beads before the month ends.

If this happens just head over to another platform sign up and usual bits on there don't get disheartened by this it's just a hustle that many freelancers go through when using these type of platforms myself included there are some mumps on Upwork wild blow through -60 connects in a few days applying to jobs and I'll maybe land one or two clients once you get the ball rolling things do get easier though and once I ground away for a few solid months and Upwork I was awarded the top-rated status and since getting this status, I have seen why I propose of acceptance increase to the point now where I get pretty much all of my work from Upwork and only really bother signing into Freelancer.

If I'm unable to find any work on Upwork or have used up all of my connects for the month but as I said you know since I got this top-rated status there has not been a month where that has happened yet. I always make sure I keep my portfolio updated on both sites as you never know when you will need to start using another platform again so that's a good tip for you there if I was to do it all over again I think I'd probably just sign up to Upwork pretty just grind away at projects of very low prices to make sure I always got a five-star review every project and just wait until I got that top-rated status.

It doesn't take as long as what you think and then from there I would probably start slowly increasing my rates to a point where I was comfortable with the amount I was earning so that's about it I think I've covered everything that I want to say if you've got any different views in these platforms please do share your experience in the comments below I hope newcomers to freelancing found this helpful and if any of you have any questions feel free to ask.