Upwork

This site:
-claims that it's there to help freelancers and clients hook up with each other, and offers escrow protection to make sure payments are fair.

However:
- if a client gives you a bad review, it doesn't matter who's in the right or the wrong; your account will be damaged, and your business will look bad, for months. Again, all it takes is one upset client. Do you really want to pay 20% of all you earn in order to work on a website that has rated you terribly in the public eye? I mean, who hasn't gotten one or two grumpy, impossible-to-work-with clients at one time or another?

- scammers galore use this site, and Upwork does little to nothing to filter them out from the real clients. Moreover, if you accidently get scammed, it's you that Upwork threatens to sue, not the scammer. You could get ruined by this site.

- their site is CONSTANTLY being "fixed". The technical difficulties they experience as a matter of course are huge and never-ending. My computer is sometimes unusable due to messages from Upwork that won't disappear from the screen and cover one third of the screen, no matter how often I shut down and restart my computer.

- payments are grossly, unfairly, low. You're competing with people who can, and do, work for $5 a day. That's not Upwork's fault, but it is what happens when a site is global, and unfortunately, finding fair work on Upwork is just about impossible from a freelancer's point of view.

- Clients have you over a fire, and Upwork won't protect you from it. Say a client wants you to write 5 articles for them, but only wants to pay you for 1. The client simply "changes his mind" about the template and the topic each time you submit the article, saying that what you wrote wasn't good enough, but that he'll give you another chance if you actually write about this totally different topic instead. What do you do? To refuse means to get a 1 star rating and a bad review that you can do nothing about, but which will harm your business for the next 6 months. You HAVE to comply with this dishonest client, working for 5 days for him for the price of 1 day. Otherwise down goes your Upwork rating and your future potential business vanishes!

- Unfortunately, I found the other freelancers are sometimes dishonest too. This means that clients can be extremely jumpy, ready to give you 1 star ratings that actually the freelancer who worked before you deserves. That means that your advertising, online image, and profile can get damaged because of another freelancer's dishonesty.

I wish that I had never worked on Upwork. The longer I worked on it, the lower and lower it went down in my opinion.

Great to work online, easy to get quality contract job. Thanks