Top 20 Freelancing Websites
Are you a freelancer looking for the best freelancing websites? Freelancing can be a little challenging for beginners to market their services. For that matter, even professionals find it tedious. Here’s where freelancing websites play a major role.
Though, not all freelancing websites offer the same work types, reach, and payment terms. These come at varying degrees and if you’re not careful at the beginning of your career, you may end up wasting a lot of your effort, time, and money on platforms with questionable standing.
Thus, to help you choose the best, we’re here with Top 20 Freelancing Websites showcasing key features such as payment terms, job types, and communication channels.
Freelancer.com
Freelancer.com was built to establish a connecting link between buyers and sellers in a single location. This platform is popular among freelancers worldwide, allowing them to market their services. It’s an excellent platform for both beginners and professionals, supporting creatives and technicals as well.
On Freelancer.com, you can bid on a variety of projects such as web development, software development, content writing, data entry, proofreading, accounting, marketing, engineering, etc. Their pricing plans are quite flexible as well, coming with monthly and annual subscription packages.
You can easily track your work progress as the platform maintains work transparency, letting your buyers know how much time you’ve spent in completing your tasks. In addition to that, there’s a live chat feature available to connect with your clients. Moreover, the platform guarantees safe and secure payments for freelancers.
Upwork
Upwork is a cloud-deployed global freelance platform where freelancers can market their services and offer highly competitive rates as well. The platform gets you the best deals, ensuring that you’re on the right track working for legitimate employers. If you’re a beginner, you can begin with Upwork as it takes care of its users not falling into potential fraud.
You can sign up for the free service before committing. The best feature of this platform is that it comes with a ‘Work Diary’, which is useful for clients. Thus, giving them a bigger picture of what they owe you. It tracks your billable time based on the number of hours you’ve spent working.
The in-app messaging tool of Upwork comes in very handy to carry out communications and coordination between employers and freelancers. You can share text, videos, and files using this tool.
Moreover, Upwork follows a secure payment system with freelancers getting paid as soon as their job is complete. This is because, the buyers are allowed to pre-fund their accounts by the system and thus initiate faster, easy, and sure payments.
Fiverr
If you want to get started with your freelance work, Fiverr is the one for you. You can market different types of services including those of programmers, graphic artists, and writers. These are just a few to mention from the lot. You don’t require extensive technical skills to market your services on this platform.
Moreover, it charges a minimal fee, making it a lot easier for freelancers to begin with their search for freelance jobs. It has a secure and private communication channel through which you can exchange files and communicate with your clients. The platform values your privacy and thus protects personal information. None of your details are shared with any third party, thus assuring you that it is all kept confidential.
Envato Studio
This platform helps to collaborate with developers, designers, and creatives with experts, working on jobs. Using these solutions you can market your services such as app development, website design, and animation. This is a great platform, particularly for designers and developers.
What you need is just the right skill set. The rest will be taken care of by Evado Studio’s system. It will help you connect with the right clients and aid your hunt for freelance jobs. All you’ve to do is just upload your portfolios into the system. In addition to this, you get real-time feedback from your employers, thus enhancing your freelancer productivity.
Toptal
Toptal is always looking for top talent including finance experts, designers, or software developers. If you’re one of them, having a great command over the English language, then this is the platform you’re searching for.
This platform is particularly for highly-skilled freelancers who would be willing to work in critical projects. Moreover, you can try your hands on part-time, full-time, or even on hourly rate jobs. The platform gives you a trial period of a maximum of two weeks, thus giving you an ample amount of time to learn about your job. This will give you a clear idea about whether you’ll be able to sustain in such working environments or not.
PeoplePerHour
PeoplePerHour allows professionals to work on projects which are best suited to their qualifications. The platform is equipped with a variety of tools and features such as in-app messaging, proposal viewing, invoicing, and account management. PeoplePerHour is great for people searching for freelance jobs within their region as it takes regional recruitment into account.
Their pricing plans are quite suitable to individual freelancers ranging from monthly payments, one-time to quote-based payments. In addition to that, the platform ensures that you’re paid on time as buyers are required to make down payments before you even start working on their projects.
Nexxt
Nexxt is another cloud-based freelance platform, actively seeking to connect highly skilled professionals to businesses looking for hiring great talent. The platform displays advertisements and position descriptions from a variety of business clients, ranging from small to large enterprises. Thus, the system offers you a lot to choose from.
Since this platform focuses on skilled professionals, it’s imperative to give away your professional details. You can then go ahead by searching for jobs that fit into your niche. Also, Nexxt facilitates improved communication between clients and professionals. This allows both parties to work harmoniously, keeping a track of project progress, and giving valuable feedback.
Guru.com
If you want to apply for a region-specific job, then applying at Guru.com is the way to go. It links skilled individuals to companies while offering a variety of job categories. The platform comes with a powerful dashboard streamlining all your project management tasks and facilitating smooth communication with employers.
This robust dashboard is the most important feature of Guru.com, handling key tasks, updates, communication, document sharing, and payment deals. The platform assures you timely secure and easy payments, along with building long term relationships with employers. Guru.com keeps a tab on efficient employees, allowing them to work with the same employers in the future.
DesignCrowd
If you’re a freelance designer, DesignCrowd is a better place for you. You can submit your designs and make them known to prospective buyers. It is primarily a custom design marketplace helping organizations in translating their ideas into reality. The platform hosts more than 600,000 freelance designers charging a meager $79 for a buyer to post a design contest.
Job searches get quick results as deadlines range from 3 to 10 days. Your design process will constantly be monitored as buyers will be providing you with the design brief. You’ll also be given timely feedback by buyers.
DesignCrowd supports a variety of payment methods, ensuring that you’re paid on time. It also takes payments in different currencies into account. So, no worries to work on international projects
DesignContest
This designer marketplace helps businesses, organizations, and artists to create design contests, helping them to gather designs to reflect their brands. Worldwide designers can submit their work to notable clients. It is highly recommended for freelance designers where they can sell their services to buyers looking for design work.
DesignContest is well known for having over 160,000 designers with an impeccable reputation as you need to go through a process of screening to meet their service standards. Not just that, if clients find your work satisfactory, then you also get an opportunity to work with them in the future.
crowdSPRING
crowdSPRING is targeted at creatives, who are actively seeking for great projects. The platform connects freelancing professionals with entrepreneurs, giving them a way into the world of online professionals. crowdSPRING is used today by more than 50,000 businesses looking for skilled designers and it hosts more than 200,000 creatives.
You can engage yourself in outreach programs by submitting your designs in charitable events held by the service. This is a great effort put forth by the service and you can offer a little from your side and display your skills to help the needy.
WriterAccess
If you’re a writer, proofreader, content strategist, translator, or editor, then go ahead with WriterAccess. It allows you to post your work portfolios for prospective clients to see. The platform comes with content creation features helping both freelancers and companies to come up with some amazing content. If this content is appealing enough, then it can be directly published to external platforms like Hootsuite, WordPress, HubSpot, etc.
These content creation tools include keyword optimization, analytics, easy order forms, research and Getty images, allowing freelancers to create beautiful and compelling content. You get star ratings based on your past work experiences, industry certifications and customer reviews. Thus, the higher the ratings, the more are your chances of getting hired.
TaskRabbit
TaskRabbit is a hub of different job categories allowing both professionals and companies to run errands more efficiently. Job categories range from yard work, housekeeping to grocery delivery and even furniture assembly. To make your work easy, this platform also notifies you when your task is due.
You can receive easy and secure payments upon completion of your tasks. It’s very easy to market your skills here. All you need to do is just sign up for the service and provide it with your professional info.
Catalant
Catalant helps professionals reach the right business to market their services. The system is enhanced by technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence to do so. Thus, it effectively takes care of content similarity and collaborative filtering, taking you to the right niche.
Catalant provides a project workspace for freelancers and businesses to communicate and collaborate. It hosts different project types such as social media advisory, business plans, research, etc.
Hirable.com
Job hunting is made easy on Hirable.com as you can use this service for free with a few mouse clicks. Its search engine is so powerful that even by typing out a single keyword, you’ll be able to conduct a successful search in your job search process.
Hireable.com notifies its users of newly posted job offers. If the job description matches your skillset, it gets you offers from different companies. Thus, providing you with the right opportunities.
99Designs
If you’re a design professional wanting to give out services globally, then this is the place you should come to. 99Designs has four distinct locations worldwide as of now. The platform comes with comprehensive resource centers providing valuable tips and advice for not just the professionals but also for the buyers.
There are tutorials and toolkits for creatives to improve their design skills too. Moreover, 99Designs also helps designers by providing discounts and assistance in key skills such as website design, education and design.
Designhill
Designhill is an online community giving space for graphic designers and companies to work together. If your key skills include website and app development, social media, clothing and apparel and brand identity, then you should definitely opt for Designhill.
You’ll be exposed to design contests, readymade logo store, small design tasks, etc. Their services come in different packages, that is, Fast Track, Standard, Executive and Platinum. All of these have their perks depending on the price.
Bark
Bark is aiming at reforming the workspace for local sellers and buyers. It will automatically find you an ideal buyer by just letting them know the potential services that you would offer. Thus, making the whole job-hunting process quite easy for freelancers.
Bark has an in-built tool named Bark messenger, that manages all your conversations and communications with your clients. In addition to that, Bark hosts a wide array of freelance jobs from writing, transcription and translation to web design, pet and personal services.
Skyword
Skyword is mainly a content marketing solutions provider for businesses. However, it does cater to freelancers who are willing to work in creatives. One of the most important features of this platform is that you can create your campaign from scratch. Also, freelancers can help businesses by optimizing their content through keywords and viewing performance reports provided by Skyword, etc.
Gigster
Gigster establishes a link between freelance app developers and companies. You get to join experienced professionals working in tech companies. Some of their freelance professionals are startup founders while others come from schools like Stanford and MIT. Thus, you’ll get top talents performing for your projects.
Conclusion
For those who wish to step foot into freelance work, these Top 20 freelancing websites would just serve the purpose. They are the best in the lot allowing you to offer your services to the right businesses and get paid on time. However, before diving into these, I’d recommend you to go for free trials, wherever available. See if the dashboard suits you, whether the messaging tool is fine with you or not, check for their job categories, and then make your decision.
