By BloggerKhan

My profession is Management and Marketing and it revolves around outsourcing, ecommerce and marketing on the internet. Wise men say identify what you are passionate about and then see if ...

Upwork or Freelancer or People Per Hour or Guru

Considering outsourcing? Thinking of finding a freelancer to do some of your web development work, or data entry or administrative work? Maybe you want someone to help you with Content Development or Content Promotion. Maybe you want some documents translated and looking for a freelancer translator. You are on the right track. You can save a bunch and get a lot of work done if you find a good freelancer or a team. Many people start looking for a freelancer using a freelancing portal but are not sure which one to start with. Here is a brief review:

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.
   An interesting Freelancer feature is called ‘Contests’. Works well for design jobs. You can post a contest, let’s say ‘Design me a logo and I will pay $100 for the best design’. Designers then present their logos and you pick the one you like. The winner gets the $100, the losers get nothing.
   Chances of finding a good freelancer – High. Chances of finding a good team – High.

2. People Per Hour

   – Small – more popular in UK but gets a decent clientèle from USA also. Simple interface. They don’t waste your time with clunky graphics. People Per Hour has a great feature called Hourlies. It is basically a pre-packaged offering for a fixed price.

   

   Hourlies by People Per Hour

   For example, take a look at the following Hourly. It is for one hour of WordPress help. You pay $25 and get one hour of support. If you like their work, you can continue with them for much longer time frames but if you don’t, your total risk is capped at $25.
   Chances of finding a good freelancer – Fair. Chances of finding a good team – Fair.

3. 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.
   As if all that was not enough, they raised their commission to 20%. A ton of clients have abandoned Upwork in total frustration and
   freelancers are following suit. Good news for competition.
   Chances of finding a good freelancer – Medium. Chances of finding a good team – Medium.

4. Guru:

   This is the smallest of the bunch. Not a bad portal. They don’t have the wherewithal to promote themselves so they don’t have a large number of clients but they have a good number of freelancers. Worth looking into.
   Chances of finding a good freelancer – Fair. Chances of finding a good team – Fair.

Whether you are leaning towards Freelancer or Upwork, People Per Hour or Guru, whichever portal you go with, proceed carefully and in small steps. Instead of going with the lowest price, try to find the best match, that is someone who has the skills but can also communicate well and understand your business objectives, not just the technical side only. The bulk of outsourcing projects that fail are because of poor
communications, not skills. 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!

When to hire vs when to outsource