A lot of people ask me what the difference between Elance and Odesk is. After all, the two sites are the largest online freelance marketplaces you’ll find. There are a few others that are worth looking into, like Vworker, but once you get beyond that, the number of listings on the sites drops quite dramatically. As a freelancer, lots of listings are your friend -even if most of them don’t pan out. You don’t want to have to sign up for a bunch of different sites in order to get just a few extra clients.
With this in mind, I’ve decided to do a series on all of the different freelance websites, what’s good about them and what’s not so good about them. All of this is based on my experience working on each site, as well as a bit of research I’ve done on the side. Each site has its own strengths and weaknesses, largely based on the separate visions of their CEOs and management teams. Here’s what I’ve discovered.
What Odesk is trying to be.
In case you haven’t noticed, Odesk is the largest online freelance marketplace. To even say that they are a place for mere “freelancers” alone is a bit of a misnomer because I think they want to break free of that mold. I would say they’re trying to reinvent work as we know it. In the past, we called that freelancing. Perhaps we’ll continue to call it that in the future, but I don’t think the team at Odesk wants it to be limited to that.
Odesk grew to its size because it was the first of the online freelance marketplaces to successfully implement a pay for time worked feature. For many years, that was their unique selling point. Their motto was “an hour worked is an hour paid,” and it contrasted greatly with the fixed price projects you’d see on sites like RentACoder.com (now Vworker) and Elance.
Over the years, both Elance and Vworker built their work-for-time features in order to compete with Odesk. The idea was ripe for the times, but Odesk made sure to take full advantage of it while it was their primary selling point.
The key advantage of a work-for-time scheme is the ability to do virtually what most managers do in the office. They can hire a virtual team to handle whatever tasks they delegate, and they can do it in a secure way. If a manager wants to wean an employee onto the team, he or she can limit the amount of hours that person is allowed to work. Once the employee has demonstrated competency, the manager can increase that person’s hours.
Odesk’s goal is to make it easy to create virtual teams. For the most part, that goal hasn’t changed over the years, and it reflects quite strongly in the types of jobs you’re likely to find on Odesk. In my experience, nearly all of my Odesk jobs have been hourly. I join a team and get paid the hourly rate that I request. I have done a few fixed price jobs on Odesk, but they are few and far between.
The one thing I like about Odesk is that they seem to have built a better referral engine. That is to the say, the clients who are referred to me through Odesk tend to be pretty decent. I sometimes get a few bad eggs, but that’s usually better than searching through a bunch of project listings trying to find what I’m looking for.
By the way, there’s one thing you can do to stop the bad referrals from coming through. Just make your payment terms and minimum project size very clear at the top of your Odesk profile. Mine are in all-caps, and I give a strongly worded rationale for what I charge. If you do the same, you’ll get clients who understand what you expect from them.
The one thing I don’t like about Odesk is searching through the listings. It’s hard to separate the good ones from the bad ones, and once you’ve entered a bid, it takes you right back to page one. I’ve found myself going through numerous pages over and over again just to pick up where I left off. The listing section could use a site redesign for added simplicity.
What Elance is trying to be.
Elance started off as the premier place for online freelancers. They offer an hourly option as well, but it’s not as emphasized as it is on Odesk. The Elance site design evokes a more upper crust sort of feeling. This was more of a selling point in the early days of Elance, but it now appears as though the site wants to grow to be the size of Odesk.
One thing I really used to love about Elance was their enforced minimum project size for a fixed price project. They used to set it at $50, and it served to weed out a lot of bad listings. I also like that, as a freelance writer, Elance acknowledged that there’s a time cost to going after the smaller fish, and we deserve to be compensated for it (o.k. maybe that’s me putting words in their mouths, but it was nice).
Sadly, that $50 minimum is gone. I think it’s largely because Elance wants to expand, and they know they simply need more listings in order to do so. Some people are willing to go after those super small projects too, especially when it’s their first fish. It’s a double edged sword because Elance and Odesk end up annoying the crap out the more experienced freelancers who have a hard time finding what they want in an increasingly crowded sea of projects.
Hopefully, a better referral system will help both Elance and Odesk. I’ve gotten a few good referrals through Elance, but because there are less projects on the site overall, I tend not to get as many. I still find it valuable to go through listings on Elance when I’m running low on work. Elance’s site design is better for this process than Odesk’s site design.
Recently, Elance appears to be making more news on the technological front. They’ve appeared on several news channels to talk about the state of online freelancing (at one point mentioning my friend Ben Gran). Fabio Rosati, their CEO, talked about connecting Elance workers to telepresence robots to do jobs that might only require someone’s presence for a few hours. A person in Illinois could logon to Elance and hop into a robot (just like Avatar) to be the office receptionist. Pretty cool when you think about it.
Elance vs Odesk. Which should you choose?
It ultimately depends on how you prefer to work. If you prefer to clock in and work on an hourly basis, Odesk is the better choice. If you prefer to work more like a freelancer and take some risks on fixed price projects, you’ll find some good ones on Elance. I should also mention that Elance uses escrow, and Odesk currently does not. Escrow protects you from the clients who take a while to pay. They have to fund the project before Elance will allow it to begin.
Over the long run, you should have profiles on all of the freelance sites. Don’t just pick one. I spend more time looking through listings on Elance, but I get a lot of referrals through Odesk. To do well, you need to be everywhere.
I’d like to end by saying your online freelancing career doesn’t stop at Elance and Odesk. There are lot of other opportunities out there, and one of the best ways to get them is to start building your own website (just like this one). When you create content that targets the right keywords for your industry niche, clients will come to you on your terms. This is much better than getting clients through Elance and Odesk because you don’t have to pay any commission. The sale is 100% yours.