If you’ve ever needed to scale your marketing team fast, without hiring full-time, there’s a good chance Upwork popped up in your search. It’s one of the largest freelance marketplaces out there, used by companies of all sizes to find and manage remote talent across marketing, design, writing, and more.
Upwork lets you post a job, get proposals from freelancers building their freelance careers, and handle everything from contracts to payments in one place. It’s flexible, fast, and gives you access to global talent at every price point.
That said, it’s not perfect. Not every freelancer delivers top-tier work. Upwork fees can add up quickly. And managing multiple contractors across time zones—especially without the right systems—can get messy fast.
In this Upwork review, I’ll walk you through what Upwork gets right, where it falls short, and how it stacks up for marketing leaders like you. By the end, you’ll know whether it’s the right place to find your next great hire—or not.
What is Upwork?
Upwork is a freelance marketplace that connects companies with independent professionals across the globe, a unique business model that has attracted millions of users. Companies of all sizes (startups, agencies, and enterprise teams alike) use this platform to find and hire talent for anything from quick tasks to long-term projects, without the overhead of full-time hires.
Whether you need someone to run your next email campaign or rebuild your website from scratch, chances are you’ll find someone on Upwork who can do it.
Here are multiple types of freelance experts you can hire on Upwork:
- Marketers (digital marketers, brand marketers, performance marketers, email marketers, SEO/SEM specialists, social media managers)
- Designers and creatives (graphic designers, brand designers, UI/UX designers, video editors, animators, illustrators)
- Writers and content experts (copywriters, content strategists, technical writers, editors, ghostwriters)
- Developers and IT professionals (web developers, mobile app developers, software engineers, DevOps, QA testers)
- Data and analytics specialists (data analysts, data scientists, business intelligence experts, dashboard/reporting pros)
- Sales and customer support (sales development reps, account managers, virtual assistants, customer service agents)
- Business and operations consultants (project managers, financial analysts, HR consultants, operations strategists)
Companies use Upwork because it’s fast, flexible, and doesn’t lock them into long-term contracts. You can scale up or down as needed, test talent before committing, and tap into skill sets you don’t have in-house.
Whether you’re trying to fill a gap in your email marketing, test a new social media channel, or scale your operations without adding headcount, Upwork gives you options.
How Upwork works
Upwork is a non-vetted bidding marketplace, which basically means anyone can create an Upwork account, claim they’re an expert in a field, and start applying for freelance jobs—no certifications, no skill tests, no background checks required.
The only “filter” Upwork uses when someone applies to join the platform is supply and demand. If there are already too many freelancers in a specific category (like general graphic design), they might temporarily pause approvals in that area. But they’re not reviewing portfolios for quality, testing technical skills, or verifying work experience. That part’s entirely on you, the client.
Because of this open-door model, Upwork has a vast range of talent. Some freelancers are absolute pros with enterprise-level skills. Others are… well, not. You’ll find everyone from beginners trying to land their first gig to seasoned specialists charging hundreds of dollars per hour. It’s a true free market, and you have to navigate it wisely.
For example, let’s say you want to hire a freelance developer to create a mobile app. You’ll start by posting a job on Upwork, writing a clear project description, your requirements, and maybe your budget range. Once it’s live, it becomes visible to all relevant freelancers on the platform.
Freelancers who are interested can then submit proposals to you. Each proposal usually includes a brief cover letter, their relevant experience, some portfolio links, and most importantly, their bid.
A bid is either:
- An hourly rate they’re willing to work for, or
- A fixed price for completing the full project.
Because freelancers are competing for jobs, bids can vary wildly. You might get one freelancer quoting $20/hour and another quoting $120/hour for what seems like the exact same work. This happens a lot because there’s no standard pricing—Upwork doesn’t set rates. It’s completely up to freelancers to price their services, and up to you to decide what feels fair for the skill level and scope of the project.
Since there are far more freelancers than clients on Upwork, you’ll likely get flooded with proposals—sometimes dozens in just a few hours. That sounds great in theory, but in practice, sorting through them can be overwhelming. And because there’s no built-in vetting, you have to do the heavy lifting to assess whether someone is actually good by digging through reviews, checking for strong portfolios, and sometimes even running trial projects.
All in all, Upwork gives you the flexibility to hire for any remote job on your own terms, but that freedom also means more responsibility on your end to filter, evaluate, and manage the hiring process.
Key Upwork Features
Here are the core features that make Upwork work for companies hiring remote talent.
1. Global talent
Upwork gives you access to a massive pool of freelance professionals—over 18 million freelancers across 180+ countries, according to DemandSage.
You’ll find experts in virtually every field imaginable, from marketing to legal, finance, design, and tech. Whether you’re looking for a niche copywriter, a reliable virtual assistant, or a senior developer, chances are there’s someone (actually, thousands of people) on Upwork ready to pitch themselves.
Some companies even build entire departments using Upwork talent. This makes it a go-to platform for organizations that want everything in one place, without juggling multiple hiring sources.
2. Flexible hiring models
One of Upwork’s biggest advantages is the flexibility in how you hire. You’re not locked into a single way of working. Instead, you can:
- Bring someone on for a quick one-off task (like a blog post or landing page),
- Hire part-time for a specific project or sprint, or
- Even establish a long-term working relationship that mimics a full-time role.
This flexibility makes it easy to scale your team based on your workload and budget, whether that means adding three freelancers for a product launch or pausing contracts during a slow season.
Read: Fractional Hiring—Exploring the Latest Trend in Marketing Recruitment
3. Escrow and payment protection
Every payment on Upwork goes through Escrow, which acts as a buffer between you and the freelancer. Once you’ve agreed on terms and hit “hire,” you’ll be charged, but the funds aren’t released to the freelancer right away.
Instead, Upwork holds the money until:
- You approve the submitted work (for fixed-price projects), or
- The freelancer logs hours and submits a weekly timesheet (for hourly projects).
If the work isn’t delivered as promised or doesn’t meet your agreed-upon requirements, you can dispute the charge and request a refund. This makes working with new freelancers far less risky, especially if you don’t have a prior relationship with them.
4. Communication and collaboration tools
Upwork encourages potential clients and freelancers to collaborate directly on the platform. To make this easy, it offers a full suite of built-in tools and integrations:
- Messaging system – Communicate directly with freelancers, discuss project details, provide feedback, and answer questions.
- File sharing – Securely upload and share project documents and resources with your freelancer.
- Milestones – Break projects into stages with clear deliverables and deadlines, track progress, and only release payment when each step is completed.
- Work Diary – For hourly projects, freelancers log time and you can review screenshots and activity levels.
- Zoom integration – Schedule and launch live video calls directly inside Upwork.
- Loom integration – Share async screen recordings to give feedback or explain tasks visually.
- Note taking: Add private notes to messages for easy reference.
- Calendar integration: Link your Google or Microsoft calendar to show your availability and make meeting scheduling easier.
These tools keep everything centralized, which is helpful when managing multiple freelancers or ongoing projects.
Read: Your Guide To Setting Expectations And Goals With Your Freelancer Marketer
5. Job success score and talent filters
To help you narrow down ideal candidates, Upwork assigns each freelancer a Job Success Score (JSS), which is a percentage rating based on feedback from past Upwork clients, job completion rates, and long-term relationships. A high JSS (90% and above) is often a strong signal of reliability.
You can also use Talent Filters to narrow down your search based on:
- Hourly rate
- Location or time zone
- Language proficiency
- Project success history
- Upwork badges (like “Top Rated” or “Rising Talent”)
These filters are crucial if you want to quickly surface qualified candidates instead of sifting through a hundred generic proposals.
6. Lower Prices
Upwork’s open bidding system naturally drives prices down, especially in categories with lots of competition. Since freelancers set their own rates and send out proposals for jobs they’re interested in, many choose to compete by undercutting prices, especially when they’re trying to land their first few jobs or build up reviews.
This dynamic means you can often find skilled freelancers at surprisingly affordable rates, particularly if you're flexible with experience level or location. If you’re operating on a tight budget, this can be a major advantage.
That said, low prices sometimes come with trade-offs in quality or reliability, so it’s worth doing your due diligence before jumping at the cheapest offer. But if you're strategic, Upwork can be one of the most cost-effective ways to build out your team.
Upwork Challenges
While Upwork offers plenty of advantages, it’s not without its frustrations, and depending on your expectations, they can be deal-breakers. Here are some of the most common challenges companies run into when hiring through the platform:
1. High competition
Upwork is flooded with freelancers. According to DemandSage, there are 841,000 active Upwork clients, but freelancers still outnumber them more than 2 to 1. That means when you post a job, you’re likely to receive dozens—sometimes hundreds—of proposals. Sounds great in theory, but in reality, wading through them becomes overwhelming fast.
Freelancers also underbid each other just to stand out. Many come from regions with a much lower cost of living than the U.S. or the U.K., so they can afford to charge less and still make a good income. This puts talented freelancers in high-cost countries at a disadvantage—and unfortunately, it also creates a race to the bottom.
As a client, you’ll need to dig through a pile of low-effort, copy-paste proposals to find the few worth reading. And for freelancers? The competition is so intense that many highly skilled professionals have left the platform entirely, simply because it’s not worth underpricing their work to win bids.
2. Upwork scams
Scams do happen on Upwork—more often than you’d think. While the platform has basic identity verification in place, it doesn’t vet freelancers’ skills or backgrounds, which leaves the door wide open for bad actors.
For example, it’s not uncommon to see freelancers submit plagiarized work, disappear mid-project, or outsource your job to someone else entirely without telling you. There are countless Upwork reviews from clients who were ghosted, overcharged, or delivered subpar work with no accountability.
Yes, Upwork has a dispute process, but it’s often slow, frustrating, and doesn’t guarantee you’ll get your money back. This leaves many potential clients wondering: “Is Upwork really safe?”
3. Non-vetted freelancers
Anyone can say they’re a pro on Upwork. There’s no screening, no test, no required proof of expertise. If someone fills out a decent-looking profile, they can start bidding immediately.
That puts the burden of vetting entirely on you. You’ll have to read profiles carefully, review client feedback, check for red flags in proposal messages, conduct interviews, and maybe even run a paid trial task.
Of course, you can do all this. But the real question is: should you have to? Some freelance platforms handle this vetting upfront, so you only see pre-qualified talent. With Upwork, it’s all DIY.
4. Poor customer support
Upwork’s support team is one of the platform’s weakest links. When something goes wrong, you might find yourself stuck in endless back-and-forth emails with agents who don’t actually resolve your issue.
Many users report that support responses are slow and canned, and there’s little effort to understand or escalate serious problems.
Read: Toptal vs. Upwork—Which Platform Should You Use To Hire Expert Marketers?
Upwork Pricing
Upwork has three pricing tiers for potential clients looking to hire freelancers through the platform:
- Marketplace - You pay a 3% or 5% fee on all payments that you make to freelancers
- Business Plus - You pay an 8% or 10% service fee on all payments that you make to freelancers
- Enterprise - Contact the sales team for pricing estimates
Note: The discounted Marketplace fee of 3% and the discounted Business Plus fee of 8% are available for eligible clients in the U.S. who pay with a checking account.
Upwork Ratings and Reviews
Upwork currently has a 4.6/5 rating on G2. Here are some reviews from clients who’ve used the platform:
Positive review
Negative review
Neutral review
As these reviews show, while some companies are able to find the talent they need on Upwork, others aren’t. Many users also complain about the high service fees, which can add up fast for both clients and freelancers alike.
Read: 6 Reasons Not to Hire a Marketing Generalist in 2025
Upwork Alternative: Hire Talent with MarketerHire
If you’re looking to hire marketing experts, not general freelancers, MarketerHire is built for you. Unlike Upwork, which covers every kind of freelance work under the sun, MarketerHire focuses solely on one thing: helping companies (or agencies) find top-performing marketing talent for their marketing operations—fast.
There’s no need to post jobs, filter through hundreds of questionable proposals, or worry about getting scammed. We’ve done the hard part already. You just tell us what you need, and we’ll match you with a vetted expert who’s done it before, at companies like yours.
Here’s what sets MarketerHire apart:
1. Channel-specific talent
We don’t try to be everything for everyone. MarketerHire exclusively works with experienced marketing professionals—nothing else. That means every expert in our network specializes in driving growth, engagement, or revenue through proven marketing channels.
Here are some of the roles we cover:
- Content marketers, brand marketers, and email marketers
- SEO specialists, PPC experts, and social media experts
- Product marketers, Amazon experts, and agency account managers
- Programmatic experts, marketing analysts, and growth marketers
- Fractional CMOs
So if you're looking for a software developer or an attorney, you won't find them here. But if you're building or scaling a marketing team, you’re in the right place.
Read: 29 Different Types of Marketing, Explained
2. Thorough vetting process
One of the biggest pain points on Upwork is not knowing who you’re really hiring. Anyone can sign up and call themselves a marketer. At MarketerHire, we eliminate that guesswork by doing the legwork for you.
Every freelancer in our network is vetted through a multi-layered process that includes:
- Recruiting top performers with proven experience at successful companies
- In-depth skill evaluations to ensure their expertise matches their claimed specialty
- Live video interviews with marketing professionals to assess communication, strategy, and real-world problem-solving
- Test projects for added quality control, when needed
And we don’t lower the bar—we accept only 1% of applicants. That means whoever we send your way isn’t just “qualified”—they’re exceptional.
3. Fast matching
Posting a job on Upwork often means waiting days for proposals to come in, reading dozens of copy-paste pitches, and trying to figure out who actually knows what they’re doing. At MarketerHire, it’s the exact opposite.
Here’s how it works:
- You book a short consultation with our team.
- You tell us about your needs—your goals, budget, timeline, and marketing priorities.
- We use a combination of AI + human expertise to match you with the ideal expert in less than 48 hours.
You don’t have to scroll through profiles or guess who’s legit. And because we’ve already vetted everyone in our network, you can hit the ground running, confident that your hire has a track record of driving real results.
4. No-risk free trial + free rematch, if needed
We’re confident in our matches, and most of our clients are too. In fact, 82% of companies we work with hire the first marketer we send their way.
Still, we know that chemistry matters. That’s why every match comes with a two-week, no-risk trial. Use that time to assess the fit, get a feel for their working style, and make sure the collaboration feels right.
If for any reason the initial match isn’t right—whether it’s a skills mismatch, a shift in project scope, or something else—we’ll rematch you for free.
You’re never stuck with a bad fit. And you don’t pay for guesswork—only for results.
Read: 10 Best Upwork Alternatives & Competitors to Hire Freelancers in 2025
Case study: Molton Brown
At MarketerHire, we’ve helped over 5,000 companies find and hire marketing talent. One of them is Molton Brown.
When Camille Vinel joined Molton Brown as Brand Manager for France and the Benelux, the team had just launched their first DTC eCommerce site in France. To drive growth, they partnered with a full-service agency for paid search and social, but quickly ran into issues. Communication was lacking, results were unclear, and with limited in-house digital expertise, Camille’s team struggled to evaluate the agency’s strategy.
After rotating through multiple account managers and still feeling left in the dark, they knew it was time for a change. Camille turned to her network and was referred to MarketerHire. After a quick consultation, we matched her with Lisa, a freelance paid media expert with 15+ years of experience and deep knowledge of the French market.
Lisa offered full transparency, a tailored strategy, and clear explanations behind every result. She rebuilt their paid media approach from scratch and worked closely with the team, helping them not only improve ROAS but also gain confidence in their own understanding of digital marketing.
The collaboration was fast, flexible, and deeply integrated—precisely what the team needed. MarketerHire gave them access to true expertise without the overhead or guesswork. As Camille shared, “I would say [the MarketerHire freelancers] know what they're doing. They have an opinion on what's working—they're real experts... So that's very reassuring when you're not the day-to-day expert.”
Read: Molton Brown Finds Success in France with MarketerHire's Paid Media Expertise
Is Upwork the Right Fit for Your Hiring Needs?
Upwork offers flexible, affordable access to a massive global pool of freelance talent. It’s best suited for one-off tasks, quick-turnaround projects, or when you need help fast and cheap, especially if you have the time (and patience) to sort through applicants and vet them yourself.
But for strategic marketing hires, long-term execution, or results-driven campaigns, Upwork may fall short. The lack of vetting, inconsistent talent quality, and high competition make it tough to find marketers who can truly own outcomes and drive growth.
If you’re scaling and need a proven marketer who can plug in quickly, align with your goals, and deliver from day one, MarketerHire can match you fast, with no long-term contracts and zero guesswork.
Ready to find the right marketer without the noise? Book a free consultation with us today.