Upwork Reviews

I hope people are reading these reviews by the newest first. I’ve used this app forever, and I am constantly amazed at how they just cannot seem to get their app to work for their clients. There has been a glitch in the chat feature ever since the update several years back that does not allow you to write text properly in conversations and moves the cursor around and makes it unusable. I have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars through this company and I cannot believe that they cannot get a simple fix like this right - as a business owner of 30 years, it says a lot about their operational management and priorities for their customers. Read all of the other reviews. Look for themes and read them carefully. I hope this app will take these serious and do something about it. I’m actually going on to write on other online forums to warn people to stay away from Upwork as there are other options like Fiverr out there (who has gotten the lion share of my contracting business because of this) who have gotten it right, and have cared about the client UI/UX from the beginning.

How many reviews like this do you need to read and how many customers do you need to lose before you actually do something about this, this app?

The worst ever- I paid $800 for work and when the person uploaded the work, I couldn’t even access it because this app keeps redirecting me to freelance app instead, no way around it. I tried literally everything and can’t even reach a support representative except the stupid chatbot, even their phone number keeps telling you to go the chatbot. Please tell me what was the point of paying $800 for work if I can’t access it and what’s the point of support if there’s no human to help you!!!! this app please help the heck out because I’m going to lose my mind.

And don’t tell me I’m doing something wrong because I’ve read several other people had this Robles, including freelancers who lost work because their account kept getting redirected to client and no one could help them fix it. This is utterly unacceptable.

I created an account and posted my first task. First proposals came in and nothing else was done on the account. Upon downloading Upwork and entering my account through Upwork ; the account gets suspended with no explanation and an email sent says no explanation will be given and reactivation is impossible.
No appeal. No due process. Arbitrary, unreliable, capricious, and unprofessional.
Don’t waste your time starting on this app as they will arbitrarily use their kill switch on you even if you act ethically and they will do so without explanation and without assuming accountability on their behalf. I am glad this happened right at the start and not when I started working with a freelancer, that would be worse.
I don’t trust this app; will use Fiverr and other competitors.

Keeping it simple, you want a great Logo for a good price head to Fivver. They will actually get you a great design, what I can tell from the this app design free lancer community based off a freelancer I worked with (Stephen John Tierney-this man had a 94% success rate like how) they are inconsistent, unresponsive, and just lacking the ability to create good renderings of desired design. Save yourself money and time and just take your work elsewhere. I’ll make it simple, this app is serving McDonald’s level meals and charging gourmet prices. Now this is in regard to DESIGN freelancers not the other areas of this app which I wouldn’t know. These aren’t real designers, just people that know how to work Photoshop trying to earn some extra income and they are more than happy to give you mediocre work in the process. Do yourself a favor, do your brand a favor and do not use this app.

I was able to engage with this app for one week.

The talent aren’t always honest, however, after spending an all nighter I was able to find a professional that matched my project.
This freelancer and I hit the ground running. Quickly establishing relationships with my partners, engaging in long term events, etc.

Then I was suspended without any notice or justification, locked out of my dashboard. I called customer service, who has no information for me at all other than promising an email will arrive in 24hrs with more details. The email arrived that only confirmed that yes my account is suspended.

I called again and replied to the email, 36hrs post suspension. I wanted to confirm that my freelancer would get paid for work done as well.

This was a work stoppage, destroyed developing relationships that were vital. At the very least a category or general area of what was violated would allow me to look back. I pride myself on integrity and was under the impression that I was proceeding correctly. I assume the appropriate guardrails and notices weren’t available for whatever in the world I’ve done wrong.

Just an absolute terrible and embarrassing experience. Thanks for nothing this app and will keep demanding a reason for this action.

This lady I hired and did nothing and she was a marketer and I am frustrated with this app now because I expected that if you hire from Upwork it will help but this is a trash app man!

this app is an absolute abomination of a platform. The user interface is archaic and frustrating, filled with bugs that never seem to get fixed. Job postings are often low-quality and offer laughably low pay, making it nearly impossible for serious professionals to earn a decent living.

The bidding system is utterly broken, reducing talented freelancers to groveling for scraps by constantly underbidding each other. Customer support is a joke—unresponsive, unhelpful, and utterly indifferent to the problems users face. They take a significant cut from freelancers' earnings, which is outrageous given the subpar service they provide.

The platform is saturated with unqualified freelancers, making it a herculean task to find legitimate, high-paying work. this app does nothing to ensure quality or fairness, leaving both freelancers and clients dissatisfied and frustrated.

In summary, this app is a complete and utter failure, failing to support its users in any meaningful way. It is a colossal waste of time, money, and effort. Avoid it at all costs if you value your sanity and professionalism.

Up(yours)work has a great idea and many good freelancers I have used over years but now have changed due to financial problems selling souls to VCs trying to make unrealistic hockey stick ROI starting to rip off. I had several projects going always positive feedback by freelancers because I pay and tip. A proven bad freelancer was late and admitted had not started. I wrote forget job but he promised to get done 24 hours and since I was in timeline crunch agreed. But then filed false hours for work I could not even use! I hired and paid someone else bonus for quick job. I proved Freelancer was bad but this app did not care and wants their fee. I refused to pay so they locked my account damaging other ongoing jobs to extort fees! this app is unethical Wework over charging freelancers 20% and abusing clients like me and others. Now using competitor with much better results.

I have been a client for several years. One day, for absolutely no reason, my password stopped working. When I tried to use my email to reset my password, the site would not allow me to even attempt it. Customer service to deal with this issue was abhorrent and a series of automated pre-drafted messages that made a little sense and did not actually respond to the content of any of my messages directly. Instead, these automated forms insist that I must provide every single document that would provide them the most sensitive personal private information you can think of. All because they decided to lock me out for no reason. There does not seem to be any recourse, or any way to eventually get a response from a human being. Use this service at your own risk. I know I will not be.

I have been trying to set up a account for 2 days and at every corner it is trying to get me to re sign in over and over. After finding a few people I would like to contact it now ask me to “show proof” of my existence after allowing me to creat my account. If you’re going to make people create a account then let them creat a account and not make them wait until they are ready to start making them verify their account and identify. Do it at the beginning of the process of signing up. Literally all I am trying to do is message people I am not trying to show my ID or anything else. Upwork is garbage and will not allow me access to the things I want too. The support is also useless, I’m trying to talk to a real person that can get something right and now wait extra days to get the things I want done. Fix your app and website.

Upwork is so beyond frustrating to use. When trying to type anything it does all kinds of weird things from making the cursor jump to a completely different place mid word, to changing your word completely, to just stopping it from typing all together. So it takes FOREVER to type even the simplest message. It’s so irritating.

Then if you have multiple images sent to you at a time (common for design work, so this surprises me something so core to the brand wouldn’t work) and you try to open them to review, no matter which images you click it will only open one or two of them. So even if I click image B or C, it opens image A every time.

Upwork is irritating and completely defeats the purpose of having an app. It’s supposed to make the communication part of their services easier, but it actually makes it harder. Skip Upwork .

You normally would assume they would protect clients. They won’t. They try to make freelancers look good so you will hire them so this app can charge a fee.

I had a horrible experience with one freelancer. I spent more than an hour, using up all 5,000 characters to explain what happened. I was objective and everything I said can be backed up by the chats. It didn’t matter. Turns out freelancers can remove bad reviews. LOL. Can you believe this app give them such an option? It doesn’t even require any audit. Freelancers can just do a few clicks and it’s done. He is still top rated with all positive reviews. My comment was marked “this review has been removed”. They do not even say by freelancer. It reads like I used cursing words so my comment was deleted.

Again, freelancers are like their products. They try everything to make them look good while in reality they want you to hire them to make more money. Fraudulent website it is.

I wish I could give 0 stars. The only thing worse than Upwork version is the desktop version. The website is in complete disarray (I thought it was just my laptop but tried it across multiple computers and alas) to the point where everything is overlapping, jumbled, and not clickable. Upwork is very confusing as well. It’s nearly impossible to figure out how to edit your profile, how to browse talent, and how to communicate with them. There is no customer service email and if you call… good luck ever getting connected to someone to speak with.
You have to put a billing method just to send a message to a potential hire (very odd) and then once you do, Upwork is so finicky, it STILL won’t allow you to send a message. I never go out of my way to leave reviews… that’s how frustrated Upwork has made me.

If you’re a music engineer/producer looking for work on this app or looking to hire one, I highly recommend SoundBetter instead.

App lost my job posting I spent a lot of time typing twice. Would not acknowledge the security word I literally just created and made me create a new one. Tried to delete the old partial draft of the job so that I could try a third time to create a new job posting, only to receive another error screen saying it could not delete the post. Wasted over an hour trying to just set up the account and place one job posting. No way to contact anyone for assistance. All this was after our successfully accepted my credit card number of course. I’ll change my rating of someone will contact me to assist in setting my amount up and posting my job posting properly.

I work with a single freelancer that switched platform from fiver to this app. Oh my god, this platform is so confusing and frustrating to work with. There are so many layers of forms and fields to fill out and proposals to send and to accept etc etc. you have to leave reviews for every single job and feedback for the site and it’s just tedious. I can never just see what’s being worked on and when it is complete to just close it and pay already. Also the amount of confirmation emails from posting the job and the freelancer accepting it is just swamping my inbox. So, if I have to spend more time filling out paperwork than it takes to do the job myself, then it’s just not worth it for me working with my guy.

While it feels like a winner at start, after actual routine use it becomes surprising how clunky Upwork is, given it comes from a company that has the biggest pool of sourced app development talent at its fingertips. Has senior this app management even tested this? Long loading times of screens, Messages ‘Lite’ not only still slow but doesn’t refresh when you’ve already seen new messages and keeps red notifications, no obvious way to copy a profile link of a freelancer to share it with someone, and other obfuscations. It feels like this app I.T. didn’t want to open any systems up for engineering the back-end of it for performance, and UX/UI was rushed through as an MVP mock-up instead of being SLC (Simple, Lovable, Complete). When the result is a bolted-on maimed shadow of the website, instead of an experience truly ported for mobile, one wonders why not just use the website from a browser.

UPDATE: An update to Upwork hit while I was writing this review. It fixed the messaging issue mentioned below so I’ve added a star.

ORIGINAL REVIEW:
Don’t want to pile on, but this is awful! Messaging doesn’t work. Every word you type is a fight. Once you’ve hired on the desktop you can’t message applicants but you can through Upwork ? Worse, they can message you so there are unrelated conversations coming in after the fact. — Guys! You should seriously consider pulling this from Upwork Store. It’s SO BAD and ironically says all the wrong things about you. Best of luck either way.

I have been with this app since they were still called Elance. When I found out about Upwork . I was initially excited. The first version left much to be desired. Then this one came out, and it worked out pretty well...

But now, I don’t know what’s going on! Every time I try to view my job post or messages, it either takes forever or doesn’t load at all. I have restarted my device, closed Upwork multiple times, and refreshed to no avail. I find that it decides when it’s going to load or not and I’m always surprised when it does. Sometimes I can’t even send messages. This is all on my iPad.

Don’t get me started on using it on mobile. Even slower....complete garbage at times. I end up having to go to the website. This is is killing my productivity on the go.

I really want Upwork to be great consistently. Please this app...correct this issue. As a client and freelancer from the platform that literally pays money to the platform, set aside capital to fix this issue. There is really no excuse.

Great service and the product has been really good for me. I’d really like to see an app that works better with an iPad. I’m always on the move with my iPad Pro 12.9 with Magic Keyboard. So frustrating that I have to use the web product which doesn’t have a productive way to chat (like pressing enter doesn’t give a new line...it submits the chat message!).

So maybe sprucing up the web app OR providing a better UX for iPad. I certainly like the native apps on my iPad to leverage push notifications and the Apple ecosystem.

My experience on your side has been unbelievable! Unbelievably good that is. Faith is one of the best people I’ve worked with in a very very long time. You would have to have the patience of Job in order to deal with me. And she has that and then some. I believe that she is an incredible asset to your company as well as the people she’s allowed to serve. My lunch today I believe was a good success mainly because faith helped to bring it to life I’m so grateful I am so so grateful! Thank you so much faith and God bless you and all your endeavors you deserve it you’re the best! And thank you at work for screening and hiring incredible people.

I wouldn’t be writing this review but I had to. this app has always been my number one platform to find talent for my business! The software works good and it’s easy to understand. When I’m navigating around this app it’s not hard to figure out what to do. The software is user-friendly. As long as I take my time looking for freelancers I never have a problem finding good talent. Good talent also applies for my jobs when I post them.