Upwork is a global freelancing platform where businesses, entrepreneurs, and freelancers connect and collaborate remotely. In 2015, Elance-oDesk merged and rebranded as Upwork.

Presently, Upwork has over twelve million freelancers and five million clients on its platform. An estimated 3 million jobs are posted yearly, which is worth about $1 billion, making it the world’s largest freelance marketplace.

Upwork allows businesses or individuals to interview, hire, and work with freelancers and agencies through the Upwork platform. The platform includes a real-time chat feature meant to reduce the time spent finding and hiring freelancers.

With the growth of the gig and talent economy where a lot of people are considering leaving full-time jobs to pursue or combine consulting, freelance, or online business ideas, many talented professionals start by signing up on Upwork to advertise their skills and gain some experience.

I’m a freelance worker, how can Upwork help me?

As a freelancer, trying to find good-paying jobs can be tasking, time-consuming, and fruitless. Upwork acts as a client referral engine by connecting people who are seriously looking to hire, often immediately, with people looking to work.

Being on Upwork opens you up to having access to an array of offers to choose from. They are not always great offers, but many solid gigs and roles may come your way if you build experience on the platform.

Pros

• Upwork provides work for everyone, irrespective of the skill and experience of an individual. A broad array of categories help freelancers to choose the job according to their skills and expertise.
• You can just type your keywords describing your expertise; this will bring up search results of varieties of work in that category.
• You can view sent applications and track the performance.
• Freelancers can easily send and receive messages to clients.
• The platform provides time-tracking tools.
• It also provides an escrow service to handle payments for both clients and freelancers.

Cons

• The 20% commission + 2.75% processing fee + VAT + FX rates is crippling for new freelancers. Although, this percentage reduces as you earn more money on the platform
• Your account and transactions may get blocked at any time, for no explainable reasons.
• There are so many fake profiles and projects on Upwork which makes freelancers weary.