Upwork 

After a false start where they inexplicable blocked me from paying a supplier they fixed it in 2 days and all good after that. [1*-> 4* EDITED 20250708]

Terrible experience. Upwork is rigid, slow, and completely impractical for anyone trying to build real human collaboration. I was looking to hire a social media manager — not be forced into a blind purchase just to be able to talk to someone.
You can’t exchange any real contact info until after payment, which makes absolutely no sense. The chat system is outdated and incredibly slow. You’re locked into their broken interface with no flexibility.
The mobile experience is a nightmare: clunky, confusing, and painfully slow. I wasted hours trying to make something work, only to hit walls everywhere.
If you’re looking for genuine creative work or a real freelancer connection, avoid Upwork at all costs. Not worth your time, your energy, or your sanity.

If there was a zero star thease guys win the wooden spoon
I was contacted via a wix approved company to sort my websites algorithms I paid the quoted fee and the agent progressed through my website
Half way through I was asked to pay more money to complete the problems on my website
Of course I did not
I had my suspicions so reported this to the company
I then recieved a email from the company to say the agent has breached his contract
So.i raised a complaint
And got no where
Basically thease are fraud and scam artists please be careful

Despite providing my passport photo, my address and all my details, my account was locked from making payments with no explanation. Upon contacting customer service I was asked a few questions and told my account was unlocked and I could now hire a freelancer. However upon receiving this message my account was then suspended. It has been two days now and no one at upwork has replied to my messages. I still have no idea why my account is suspended and have had no reply for two days now. The customer service has been awful and unresponsive and I have a deadline that I'm not going to meet.

Contractors rarely deliver as promised, many of them just sub-contract the job out to another. The site is not trustworthy. Then you are threatened with by them if you file a dispute, I had them threaten to destroy my website and business.

Big scam! And nobody to help you when you further when you have a problem. Please save yourself the frustration and find another place to get freelancers!

Complete scammers!!!!! they make you pay for even moving the mouse, and then they take down your account and make you verify 3 times without explanations. They kept all money from all Connects and I lost multiple job opportunities. This should be illegal and they should be in jail.

I was contacted by thei HR via text regarding open positions at their company. Answered their initial questions- age & SSN. No resonse to my request as to what exactly the positions were. Didn't receive a response. Hours later I received a text that someone from their company contacted me. Never happened. Advised them of this, but haven't received any response.

Did a job according to specification. Client refunded despite confirming quality in messages. There is no way of talking to someone working at upwork and the AI solutions they replaced their staff with don't have the power to assist. Overall terrible security. The platform is to bad to not have customer or worker support. For a service you have to pay to land jobs, there is no security that you get your payment. If you're considering Upwork for freelance, you're likely better off paying for google ads, or asking locally. this platform is hardly functional.

Upwork blocked my account multiple times because I previously had another account, which was deleted even before I made my new account. After unblocking my account, they removed all my recent proposals, which I spent time and extra credits on. I requested a refund, but they said they cannot. They should have at least put back my proposals.

As a freelancer, you need to pay ton of money just apply for projects. Long time ago it was very good platform, today is the worst!!!!!

All they do is make you pay for proposals to Jobs that are probably fake. Impossible to join any assistance. A total waste of time and money.

I'm not even going to waste time writing a long damn review.

Just don't start. It's a rat race and I'm sure Upwork creates fake job applications so you waste money buying connects which you don't get for free. You have to spend more and more and get less and less.

But the cherry on the cake is the 15% set fee, from 10 to 15. So even if you earn money, it all goes to them.

These people at Imark are liars, manipulators but also Criminals that will abuse your site for their own financial gain. They never deliver on what is promised, lie to you to keep the contract going. No improvement at all.

2 months after ending our agreement a worker from Imark (yes this is a company, not a freelancer), logged into my wordpress account with the details i had given him previously and changed payment gateways to his personal accounts and robbed me of 1200$. Absolute disgrace how upwork allows these scamming indians on here, this is just 1 out of hundred on the site, this place has lost its credibility completely. Do not work with these people under any circumstance, I am filling a report to the Indian authorities against them

I strongly recommend not using upwork, since they wouldnt help me at all after contacting them about IMark not even providing the services paid for.

After 2 years in Upwork and all the hustle, I earned more than 15k working in 8 jobs, My recent client was not happy that I quite and end the contract. I quite because it was end of my contract day so I didn't want to send new contract or accept his new one because of unfair amount of work/pay and general behavior toward me in his team so he went and gave me 3 star review with words like "untrustworthy, worst, not committed etc".

I politely asked him to revise the review and I even offered refund or free hour, he did removed those strong words but the review stayed the same. I can prove that I worked for that client more than agreed time and quality that he expected but that's not the problem. I had 400 Connects and spend it wisely over the past two month to get my next client and guess what no one is even viewing my proposal because of 65% JSS.

Upwork is refusing to delete any reviews which means if anyone spread the false information you are in trouble. I am not charging any more Connects in the platform, I gave 20% of my income to Upwork for not backing me up when its needed.
This is not fair if you are freelancer, I spend god knows how much time on the platform to be better, write better proposal and add valuable certificate like AWS/Terraform/LPIC to my account. So I decided to delete my account and move on.

As a new business client, I am profoundly disappointed with my experience on Upwork and cannot currently recommend the platform. My attempt to find qualified freelancers for my company was severely hampered by a series of issues and an inadequate support process.
Initially, two job posts I created – one of which was a paid premium post – were removed without any prior warning or plausible explanation. What was particularly frustrating is that a highly promising candidate had already been identified for one of the posts, and an offer had been extended. Due to the job post's removal, the system incorrectly marked this offer as "withdrawn by client," leading to a significant loss of trust with the candidate, who ultimately decided to discontinue a potential collaboration.
For several days, Upwork support was unable to provide a clear and understandable reason for the removal of my job posts. The explanations given were vague, contradictory (it was first stated one post was removed due to being in German, which did not explain the removal of a parallel, correctly English-language post), and ultimately unsatisfactory. An ID verification, requested only after the posts were removed and which I completed immediately, did not resolve the situation or lead to the reinstatement of the posts.
This lack of transparency, the absence of proactive communication, and the inability to resolve issues promptly and comprehensibly make Upwork an unpredictable risk for serious business clients who rely on a dependable recruitment platform. The consequences for my company have been wasted time, lost money (for the premium posting, for which I expect a refund), and the loss of a potentially valuable freelancer.
The underlying system flaws or moderation processes that lead to such seemingly arbitrary actions urgently need to be overhauled. Until then, I can only advise against using this service.

Dumbest website I have possibly seen on the internet. I cam back after 2 years when I tried already finding a freelancer there and quickly noticed again why 2 years ago I already immediately quit there. You cannot do anything on there. Everything is over convoluted and overcomplicated. Just finding and messaging someone can take days. If you want an extra full time job with no pay use upwork. That is literally how time consuming it is to create a simple profile or find any freelancer or connect with some one. Upwork should be out of business already. Also you need to do 100 times your KYC just to find a Freenlancer, as its super buggy and doesn't work and yes they have no support team. They want your phone, passport, work, certificates your whole life basically only so you can go look for Freelancers!?? And then once you signed up for 5 hours then you cannot message anyone anyway. Support team? No Only a bot that is not even AI. It's very bad, people should sue them for the amount of time stealing they actually do. Upwork is a negative to the global economy overall.

Upwork could be a great platform. We spent more than 200.000 Dollars so far with them.

But since about 1 year they started to get paranoid and have very bad algorithms to prevent getting in touch with chat or similar.

The problem: Its far away from working properly: Its blocking every 2nd message only when I want to give the freelancer the task to connect our facebook with a tool. "facebook" is triggering the alert that I want to get in contact directly and overpass upwork.

Its a mess!

Customer support is awful. Do NOT waste your time freelancing here.