Best sites for hiring freelancers?

I have been using Elance as a client for many years but now it has been shutdown (cannot post any new jobs there), after it's been acquired by Odesk(Upwork). I tried using Upwork and absolutely hate the features of this site, everything sucks: user interface, workflow, search for contractors, evaluating skills/reputation... I know about freelancer.com and guru.com but didn't try these.

My question here is for people who actually use contractors, not for those who have hypothetical knowledge of the subject (e.g. from bogus internet reviews): Could you please share your experience working with different websites connecting freelancers and clients, any cons, pros, specifics? (I am typically hiring for writing, virtual assistant, and web programming services).

 

I think Fiverr works great, but I also had bad experiences in the past.
Especially designers there seem to be in for the quick buck.

 

You can try freelance.com to hire freelancers for your work.

 

Upwork.com, PeoplePerHour.com and Elance.com definitely the best freelancers sites..

 

Elance is no longer an option (that's why I posted this), Upwork is absolutely terrible (at least compared to Elance), I didn't try PeoplePerHour.com yet, initial impression is not great: looks like the site doesn't validate (by PayPal account) where freelancers are located and as a result you get tons of people from India, Philippines, and Pakistan pretending to be from Canada, US, and UK. The rates also seem to be much higher for the same services e.g. virtual assistant rates (e.g. for the ones from Philippines) start at $10/hour, which is more than double of what they asked on Elance.

I already replied re upwork, 99design seems to be design focused only, and envato seems to be very small site with very few freelancers registered (based on results of my search).

The site requires clients to pay $100 monthly subscription to see the results of search (for contractors). It's very stupid business model...

Tried it many times for small projects ($5-$20 range). Considering that contractors pay very high fee ($1 goes to Fiverr and $4 to contractor) plus clients pay 10% per job, as a client you end up paying close to 30% on the top of what goes to the contractor. It is ok for small jobs (e.g. process images, create logos, etc.) but not applicable to $100+ jobs.

 

I don't have either one of those (hypothetical knowledge / first-hand experience), but it looks like you're running out of options. What about https://www.outsourcely.com/ ? Can be a total waste of time though.

 

I worked as a freelancer, not a contractor on Freelancer.com and I was pleased with it. Sure, it has stupid rules (like, I have to pay the fee for the project when the contractor awards it to me, and not after I get paid) but as I see it, it`s the only viable option to Elance

 

Thanks for your suggestion. There are few problems with Outsourcely:
- small site, fewer contractors available (compared with other sites)
- charges monthly subscription fee ($26-$99/m)
- doesn't offer any services (e.g. reviews/ratings, payment escrow, etc.), don't process payments (you arrange payments directly with contractors)

Yes, based on what I read and reviewed, Freelancer.com seems to be the only viable alternative to Upwork It's too bad, neither is even close to Elance

 

Too bad that the old Elance is gone. I heard some rumors that they have been bought by Freelancer.com, but it seems that I was mistaken. Always liked the interface on Elance but because I got established on Freelancer first I didn`t want to invest my time to grow my profile on Elance.

 

Hi, I will suggest some 100% reliable and trustworthy freelancing site where you can hire freelancers.
1. upwork.com
2. freelancer.com
3. guru.com
4. getacoder.com
5. peopleperhour.com
6. 99design.com

 

We do Outsourcing for full time agents, usually works out better than hiring a freelancers, depending on what you're trying to accomplish of course. Clarkoutsourcing dot com if you're interested!

 

You can go for up work or freelancer.

 

I do hiring on upwork (for data mining, research etc). I don't work on freelancing sites (was doing well on Elance, but the new Upwork is not to my liking. Not being able to hide past earnings and prices makes it almost impossible to ask for more decent rates, even if I do have more than a decade of freelancing experience. Oh well, it's better to chase some high-paying clients and not that impossible to do either.

 

The UI DOES suck, but it's the best out there.

I hire, and do side work using Upwork/Odesk, and I like it so far. (been using it to hire contractors for a year)

 

I heard Odesk is quite good.

 

Hey I just responded to another thread with almost the same topic, well I use Upwork and I found it fine. Although the payments are a little bit odd since it gives you half a day to decide and usually those are on midnight my time but the rest is alright for me.
It needs a little bit of getting used to I guess, I was looking for a team not just a freelancer to work with for multiple projects. The team I found right now is very good though.
I had bad experience with Fiver and do not suggest it at all.
Give Upwork another try with a refreshed view, I guess you can get used to it, it is the biggest now and number of freelancers and approved freelancers is good enough to give you choices.

 

Thanks to everyone who responded to this thread. Well, I have been using Upwork for over a month. Here is my Upwork review from the client's perspective. Aside from poorly design UI and workflow, they have some pretty serious problems, neither of these were at Elance:

1. Calculating job success score: When you are hiring freelancers you are obviously looking for job success scores, right? Well, bad news is that you cannot trust Upwork job success scores. They have ridiculously stupid algorithm that allows freelancers easily manipulate these, moreover, even this algorithm has been implemented with serious bugs. Take for example freelancer Nikkia Ganey (https://www.upwork.com/o/profiles/users/_~01c6a8a303d97848bf/). Her job success score posted on Elance is 100%. This freelancer didn't have any reviews lately and her latest review (as of May 2015) is quite negative with rating 2.25 out of 5. How's it possible? Well that's the question I asked Upwork support

2. Terrible, useless support. The job success score question (above) was just one example, and in response to this one I received 6 ignorant (likely scripted) messages pointing me to the post of Jeff Chen, Upwork's VP of Trust and Security (https://www.upwork.com/blog/2015/06/job-success-score-upwork/). I don't know if this algorithm is a creation of Mr. Chen or some other "genius", but I am yet to find more idiotic idea of calculating trust. And as mentioned above, even this idiotic idea was implemented with bugs... Many other support requests were answered in the same manner (in fact, I received only a single decent response from Upwork), so I just gave up on using their support.

3. Searching for freelancers. Elance and any other freelancing site (like almost any website or blog these days) allows free search queries, i.e. you can specify a query as "whatever words" and the system supposed to find all freelancers who have this "whatever words" in their profile. Quite a natural expectation, right? Well, not for Upwork. These idiots implemented indexing predefined tags (I haven't seen this since early 90s), so when a client searchers for freelancers matching particular tokens, this search will result in empty set unless you hit one of predefined tags.

4. The last but not the least is the job receipts. If you are a taxable business you would want to claim Elance expenses in your taxes, right? Well, after the job was completed, Elance was emailing me proper receipts that could be used for tax purposes (don't know about IRS but it was good enough for Canada's CRA). Upwork doesn't email you tax receipts but, after asking support (and this was the only only time when I got reasonable answer from support), I discovered a hidden way to access the job receipts. The problem with these is that they are absolutely useless. Their receipts just cannot be used for tax purposes, so I cannot claim any jobs done via Upwork in my taxes.

As you can clearly guess from this message, I absolutely hate Upwork after dealing with them for even a short time. I was using Elance for over 3 years and subcontracted a lot of work there. The fact that such an inferior company as Upwork was able to buy Elance and shut it down brings the analogy of Chrysler buying Mercedes in 1998. Well, at least Chrysler didn't shut down Mercedes forcing Mercedes buyers to switch to Chrysler cars. Upwork did.

 

most of the sites that comes to mind has been posted, but if u looking for a full time VA, i would say onlinejobs.ph is my #1 option because i can get a VA for like $200 - $800 full time ( depend on experience ). I used to be a big fan of odesk but quality wise has been always an issue.

 

Frankly speaking I don't understant why you hate Upwork so much. I'm working there for a year so far and find it absolutely great. I'm sure it's the best platform at the moment because it has the biggest amount of job offers and so many talented freelancers. The only minus is rather high comission of the platform (10%).
Maybe you could consider it one more time and learn all features more detailed.

 

I think I explained it quite clearly and provided enough details... Their UI is total crap, their software design is of unacceptable quality, their support is terrible and, overall, it is not even close to Elance