18 responses so far ↓

• 1 Edward J. Stembler // Nov 14, 2008 at 4:37 pm

  Nice comparison! But you’re missing the “Homework projects” category which is so ubiquitous on RAC.

• 2 Michael Driscoll // Nov 14, 2008 at 9:24 pm

  We’ve had mixed success trying all of these sites — none of which offer a smooth or particularly friendly experience. Both eLance and Guru, in particular, seem intent on charging nickels for nearly every action on the site: additional bids, profiles, on top of the hefty 5-10% they take from every payment.

  In their greed, these sites are relegated to serving as an introduction tool for buyers and sellers of services. Once a relationship is formed, buyers & sellers continue it outside of these sites.

• 3 somebody // Nov 14, 2008 at 9:56 pm

  how could you leave out getafreelancer.com????

• 4 Dan // Nov 14, 2008 at 10:06 pm

  >how could you leave out getafreelancer.com????<

  I'll do a followup as others point out their favorite sites.

• 5 Sameer Alibhai // Nov 24, 2008 at 12:05 pm

  I wanted to comment that using alexa rank in this context sometimes can be misleading. For example if you have a site catering to say “Ruby on Rails” programming, and you have one of the best following and a very high quality of readership, and someone might misunderstand the high alexa rank (i.e. not such a popular site) as meaning its a low quality site, which is not true.

• 6 Neil // Nov 24, 2008 at 1:26 pm

  Hiring people on these sites takes the same skills as hiring for a regular job. If you have no experience hiring in the real world don’t expect to pick up a rock star coder on your first attempt.

  Because the hiring is so easy, people who know nothing about a field will request almost impossible jobs. There are plenty of people wanting ‘facebook clones’ who will no doubt be disappointed.

  From my experience with these sites, oDesk is far superior.

• 7 Dan // Nov 24, 2008 at 3:50 pm

  Alexa rank is, of course, a very rough tool (as is Google Trends, which I also used in my evaluation to provide a bit of a reality check).

• 8 Freelancer // Nov 25, 2008 at 2:52 am

  I have tried all of these sites and my personal favorite is Rent a Coder because most of the buyers actually choose a bidder. I agree that many bidders from some particular country bid the lowest. There are many genius people in that country like any other, but I have found many who only do the ‘talking’ and below average quality in work (I always check resumes of people who made me loose a bid). The thing is many buyers does not care about the quality. Even the buyers from so called high economy countries choose cheapness over quality. That is how those low quality but cheap work gets high demand. There are tasteful buyers too but very rare. Do not try freelancing if you are not a good marketing person yourself. It’s truly like running your own company with all the pros and cons.

• 9 Abhishek // Dec 3, 2008 at 4:57 am

  oDesk does have a limit on bids i.e. 20 bids per week maximum. You start with 10 bids per week and you can increase that to 20 by giving tests or fetching projects.

  My favorite is oDesk as it has focus on hourly jobs. These jobs are win win situation for buyers and providers. Buyers get to see what providers are doing using the oDesk tools (which are brilliant) and Providers know for sure that they will be paid for the work they have done.

  We are working on Elance and GetAFreelance also but Elance is an costly affair and GetAFreelancer is for small projects.

• 10 Blake // Dec 5, 2008 at 1:20 am

  1st time user on odesk. Without escrow you have very little protection as the buyer. Working with a russian team that delayed delivering just long enough to ensure that the period to lodge a dispute had passed. When a developer gets a bad review they just get new listings and start a new associated company. Buyer beware.

• 11 Software Experts // Dec 10, 2008 at 9:03 am

  The issues expressed with the job boards are on point, I would add that they are all difficult to use, they cater to price and unsophisticated buyers, like ebay, buyers and sellers often distort, and it is buyer beware, well it’s seller beware also.

  I would jump to a site that offered a flat fee for bidding and optional fee for escrow. The bidding is important as it provides a bazaar for buyers and sellers. Yet in some cases we want third party and others not. The escrow services as a separate tool might be useful for non bid jobs.

  BTW there are a lot of bidding tools on my site OSMXP.com for downloading. I often coach or represent developers on the boards, and although I don’t like the predatory pricing of some they are a necessary evil. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a stratification Ie a subsite for say homework, a subsite for first time buyers, or a classification of developers by size and skill. It is the equivalent of medieval bazaar and it will mature into a shopping mall but not soon enough for me.

• 12 Rick // Mar 17, 2009 at 12:43 pm

  Does anyone have a rundown on which sites support rss? It seems to me that getting an rss feed is critical as it is a means to allow for analysis of projects. One can add programmatic (or at least better searching/sorting) extensions to weed out the garbage.
  There is so much garbage, this seems like a must.

• 13 mart // Jun 19, 2009 at 5:00 pm

  I am a programmer and I have used RAC to find specialists to help me through tricky technical issues and help me create models for languages or environments that I am not familiar with.

  I have found a mix of characters including students who will do anything for experience and more senior experienced programmers with rare specialties who like the freedom of picking their projects.

  It is definately buyer beware situation. For large projects, start with a prototype or model. This is important to guage quality of your partner and help iron out issues and misunderstandings early and raise level of confidence.

• 14 Larry // Aug 20, 2009 at 7:15 am

  Have used now oDesk for a while: as a buyer you need to be able to see the actual skills beyound the profile. First one was waste of money, but basically own fault. Found excellent developer for another, and the pay/results ratio is excellent. Also get excellent UI raport from an student – pay/ratio also excellent. Now trying to get help for other duties, the key is to let them start with just very few hours and get some initial results – if that is not what you are looking for, find another one.

• 15 Nicky // Aug 22, 2009 at 3:46 am

  I really don’t like Odesk as a buyer. It can work OK for a while, but if you try to do larger projects you can get your fingers burnt like Blake above. Why? Because on other sites you pay by milestones / deliverables. On Odesk you pay weekly. So if freelancer delays or you are away, your freelancer gets automatically paid. Odesk are adjudicator of disputes. And it is in their interest to maximise hours billed. And I found their assistance when there were disputes rather poor. I don’t like the screen monitoring because it’s creepy and in any case so easy to get around. Rather get a developer to focus on the work. But if you don’t use the screen system Odesk seem to assume you’ve given the developer a free pass. That said I agree with the comments that it is down to you to select the correct quality coder. But particularly on Odesk you cannot give the Freelancer any leeway for delays at all or you will get burnt.

• 16 oDesk User // Dec 28, 2009 at 4:32 am

  Been a freelancer at oDesk and by far its the most dynamic and most effective tool for start-up freelancer (on the admin scale).

  The downfall with oDesk is the rates are getting cheaper like a $1 should be your rate or lower or you will never get noticed.

  I started as dollar for Advanced Home Energy, http://www.advancedhomeenergy.com, and escalated to $3 in a span of 6 months.

  Going back to the downfall, providers (job seekers) are neck-and-neck with their bidding. If the project is purely admin in nature(e.g. research, database) it is a MORTAL SIN to bid $1 higher regardless your profile is GOD-like already.

• 17 Kristi Patrice Carter // Feb 10, 2010 at 7:26 pm

  Informative article – I personally have been an Elance provider for over 10 years and I truly believe that Elance is the best online marketplace for qualified talent on the ‘net today. During my time at Elance, I have successfully completed over 800 projects and still consider it my favorite online way to market my writing and marketing services. Why? Because it works and it works well. Although I have tired some of the other sites, I keep going back to Elance and likely always will because they simply can’t be beat in terms of affordability and marketability.

• 18 tommy // Feb 27, 2010 at 8:20 pm

  What if we consider a different paradigm to the freelancing site by allowing the projects to be open source?

  I started http://nextsprocket.com which tackles this problem. Submit your project as an open source problem, let an open source developer solve it and everyone will benefit from the task.

Leave a Comment