UpworkReviews 2,128

I used upwork for 3 months and meanwhile, I met 3 clients.
And I got 5 star reviews always and could keep 100% job success.

One day, I was just requested to provide my id card and bank statement without any reason.
Actually, id card and bank statement is the personal info which we cannot like share.
But I uploaded it and after receiving it, upwork closed my account!

THEY DIDN'T TELL THE REASON!
HORRIBLE, TERRIBLE EXPERIENCD!
DON'T USE UPWORK! SCAMMERRRRRR!

I bid on several jobs and got none. Then I built my own website and hired someone to promote it. They said they would give my site backlinks. I later found out paying for backlinks was discouraged by Google. Was the five star rated freelancer so stupid that he did not know? So even five star freelancers are not helpful enough to give ANY positive return on investment. I am sure all clients would agree, upwork promotes fraudulent behavior in freelancers, for example it helps a freelancer to do a "course" or buy a review (which upwork does not do enough to prevent) or listen to some "expert" freelancer who is so incapable that his business relies on upwork to succeed. On top of that, you lose 20% of what you pay as upwork's commission fee, so if you pay $1000, you are actually paying the freelancer $800. This is a waste of money as I found out the hard way, and many freelancers indulge in black hat practices that will lower your site's rankings. Even upwork tests have been asking the same questions for years. There are many sites which give the questions and answers of upwork tests and freelancers use these to pass tests. People who are defending upwork obviously benefit a lot from all this, like Danny Margulies who has a private forum dedicated to succeeding on upwork, and people who regularly write mere words for $125 an hour. Stay away, and stay safe.

I was very active on Elance before the merger and name-change. Elance was GREAT in every way. As soon as it became Upwork, it took MONTHS of issues only to migrate my profile, and after that, I was told I had to provide new bank information. I did so, and a day later, found three fraudulent withdrawals. I complained to the FBI (interstate commerce) with no help, and aside from my bank being nice about crediting me for the fraud, I still had to close all my bank accounts because of that. DO NOT TRUST THIS SITE!

Upwork is being run by a group of $#*!ty people who are just greedy for money. I don't say it is a scam, it is 100% legit and also I have earned a decent amount from upwork. But the upwork management sucks. Recently my account got suspended for no reason. When I asked them to provide me a reason then they simply refused and they also charge 20% from each service you provide and also a withdrawal fee and also a very low conversation rate. Moreover if unfortunately if you get in a dispute which is not a big issue because it can happen as there are plenty of frauds. In that case upwork again find new ways to launder money from freelancers. I can say if you are working fine on upwork then you are very lucky and a suggestion don't login your account from any other device or from app because app suck. Even though your project get spoiled but don't try to login on any other device if your care about your account.

Be very careful who you hire on Upwork because if things go wrong, Upwork's powers of mediation are none existent, even if you present an infallible case!

Having raised such a case for mediation - due to freelancer unable to complete the job as agreed, as well as overcharging despite agreeing a fixed fee! - they simply didn't want to know.

It is my opinion that Upwork's allegiance is firmly with their freelancers who, lets face it, pay them a big commission (20%!) for each job they get.

So if they were to award in favour of the Client, it would dent their own profits! (where's the sense in that!?!)

Upwork mediation - Inept, toothless and bordering on unethical. Hence the review.

Avoid - July 2017. Having been scammed before when working directly with freelancers, but having good experiences with fiverr, I needed a place to get some development done. I was delighted to find responsive developers and an escrow system and had my first job completed within 24 hours and happily released funds. And then, I couldn't get the freelancer to do any more jobs. Apparently, they couldn't get the money from Upwork either. I queried this with Upwork and was told they had permanently suspended the developer with the weasily response ". We are unable to provide details as to why we have done this". Great! So the great experience I have with the freelancer, upwork decide to bin for a reason that only upwork knows, and force to me to find another way to work with the developer. It literally doesn't get worse than this. If upwork cared for their customers (like me) they would at least have the decency not to hide their reasons. So upwork have my escrow money sitting in their account earning interest. My freelancer hasn't been paid. Bad result.

I just experienced the biggest nightmare of my life, working with an Upwork vendor. He's a 3D animator by the name of Sergey Petrukevich. He repeatedly tried to blackmail me for more money throughout the job. I kept Upwork in the loop during the project and afterward, asked them to sandbox him for good so he could not attempt to extort anyone else. They PUNISHED ME! Upwork obviously approves of their vendors holding clients to ransom for more money. It now all makes sense. The more a vendor robs a client of additional monies, the more Upwork gets paid. If you value your wallet and your sanity, avoid Upwork like the plague. For me, this was like fending off a rapist, reporting him to the police and then being thrown in prison for assaulting the person who tried to rape me. Yes, it was just about this bad.

As long as one finds the professional(s) she was looking for, the system works. It's sloppy (as of the UI), but works: money put in escrow, the freelancer does the job, gets paid when finished and both parties are happy.

The issues come when any, literally any problem raises, especially for when the freelancer fails to deliver:

As of Upwork handling your money: It runs back from escrow to your bank account. There are no other options for this. Can't be held in escrow, no "client account" in the system or anything. Means, if the job must get done, so should be posted again, it should also be financed again while one waits for the escrow money to arrive back to the bank account...
Adding to this, if the freelancer doesn't approve this action (e.g. She was gone for good, so won't be around to do so, or simply doesn't care), it takes a good 12-14 business days (in my experience) to get the money back.

As of Upwork handling you, as the "valued" customer: If one asks for help, gets the standardized, copy-pasted answer. If one asks for a solution, gets the same thing, as well as an excuse (mostly "our system works like that"...). If one complains stating this is not good. Gets a negative remark on her account...

I understand those who rate this site 3+ stars. I felt the same way for my 1st, minor project as I found the right candidate and the job was done.

BUT as soon as things go serious, investment goes high and actual professionals should be found for the large scale job, the system starts stuttering, the safety net is gone and one has to realize this site is useless, its processes are killing and very, very silly, as well as the support is impotent.

I definitely do not recommend using this site ever, for any business. Find someone better. It won't be difficult, go to any other provider...

I am a high profile freelancer, worked for some very reputable clients and with years of a successful freelancer career.
I've invested a lot of time and efforts to make my Upwork profile stand out and I did it. I carefully selected what work to show on my Portfolio, I've taken a lot of skill tests on the system in order to prove my expertise.
And it worked for some time. But guess what happened to me this year - they asked me for ID and other documents to prove my identity, this process was hard enough because they rejected my ID image and wanted me to take another shot at it especially for them and then resubmit it. I did it and finally after days spent I was able to verify my profile.
Now (a month later) they just permanently terminated my account without any real reason given. I received a blanket "explanation", that after a quick Google search I found out it was nothing more than a blanket message, sent to many Upwork freelancers, who also ended up with their accounts terminated.
I've tried to at least ask for the real reason, but they failed to provide one. They don't care for freelancers, they are only moved by their own interest on the back of the freelancer community. I believe anyone, who wants to start a freelancer career on Upwork deserves to know the truth how freelancers are treated.
- you will spend a lot and a lot of time and efforts to build your profile,
- you'll be charged 20% (!) for the services, that you provide,
- and you may end up with a permanently terminated account at any time, with no explanation whatsoever and no possibility to appeal it.

All in all I think Upwork is a very wrong place to make a freelancer career online, really toxic for your career development. They will feed on you and your skills, but will dump you out whenever they want. You have no rights there. Like back in the days of slavery.
Don't get burned just like I did.

I entered all my personal and financial info into upwork and then got rejected. I sent this:

You should have told me upfront that total rejection was a possibility. I could have been working on getting real work. There was just no indication of this. I would never have gone forward. I like businesses that are upfront and honest about what they are doing to collect your personal information. My motto is honesty and integrity and that is inconsistent with who you are and what you offer.

Then I got to thinking about it and said: You dont even have {my skill] listed as a skill yet you have enough of those folks? Lets see, you dont list the skill but you already have too much. I am so sorry I gave you my information. I want all of my personal info deleted from your system.

Then they sent mail that they didn't have any need for ANY of my skills. So first they have too much of what I have but now they don't need those skills period because no clients are calling for them. They can't even do simple logic or math.

Then I said: Your clients suffer because you limit the possibilities of who they can get. I have unique skills and approaches. You give your clients the first people who signed up with similar skills. They should know this. They should know they might not be getting the best because you have rejected everyone who might be better.

Then I said: Why did I have to provide a bank account before being accepted? Are you going to try and steal my money?

Now I'm waiting for them to take out the verification deposits. I will flag those as scam charges with the bank.

I also wondered if my picture helped them disqualify me since I do look older than 60 and maybe I really am.

The business lacks substance, integrity, honesty and consistency and I would stay away as a client or worker. Contact me directly if you need a great consultant!

Contradictory to what they claim, Upwork does not offer any protection to writers against dishonest clients. I had a client who was paying me $10 for small content writing projects. The problem here was that for each project, I had to purchase some material which went up to $3 in some cases.

As a service provider, I believed I was within my rights to ask her how much profits I will make because of this -

Total paid - $10
(-)Cost of purchase - $2 to $3
(-)Upwork fee of 20% - $2 of $10
How much I actually make/project - $6 or lesser for more expensive material

And these were projects that took a consistent work of at least 6 hours at a stretch, plus all the actual publishing and other things.

Upwork promptly sends me an email saying I asked to be paid outside of the website when in fact the CONTRACT was STARTED ON THE SITE and work was submitted through it!

The client said that they pay direct, which being an experienced writer, I assumed to mean that she had some understanding with Upwork for lesser paying projects. Now I don't know what happened of her but she may probably just start another profile or so. However, one of my sources of income is lost because such a big website cannot protects its writers from whom it takes a 20% commission EACH TIME when they have voiced a genuine concern and HAVE A WORKING CONTRACT. Plus, there's barely any well-paying projects there and most clients are not payment verified. Disgusted and thoroughly disappointed and would discourage anyone who asks from making a profile there.

I forgot my password and I cannot even log in for weeks because their web site is so poorly set up that it does not allow for password restore. It keeps cycling back to asking you for password. Even after I reported this via email I have not heard back from anyone.
Secondly, the categories are so poorly designed that it's almost impossible to find the 'right' category because they are so inflexible and they pigeon-hole you into 'IT' or 'non-IT'. For those who are adept in several fields, they almost get shut out of the right opportunities.

My gosh, just bring the odesk back. After the new upwork, it is way worse than the old one!

Good luck finding gigs. Don't waste your time here.