What has been more successful for freelancers, UpWork or LinkedIn Profinder?

The freelance economy is on the rise. People are turning towards learning a skill online or opening a small office with skilled labor and bidding farewell to their full-time jobs. Freelancing is freedom and you can make more money by working your heart out and spending time on your work.

Upwork is by far the biggest, arguably the best freelance marketplace too but with the growing emergence of LinkedIn ProFinder, the latter is beginning to give some good competition and facilitating freelancers in the USA.

To begin with, ProFinder is a non-Asian thing, at least for now and I do not know if they plan to roll it out to the world yet. It furbishes local project requests only. It’s been a couple of years now since they surfaced on the web and have gained quite a success in a short time. The company focuses on empowering freelancers and maintaining a balance in the marketplace by floating quality projects.

From an inside, first-hand news from a freelancer who works at ProFinder, the jobs on ProFinder is high paying too. They have to be because the idea is to do matchmaking between premium clients and freelancers.

ProFinder is not free for freelancers. As a freelancer, you’ll get 10 free proposals allowing you to test out the system. After that, you’ll be asked to start paying $59.99 monthly for LinkedIn Premium. $59.99 per month is about $719.88 per year.

On the other hand, to put things in perspective, Upwork is huge, it is the Godzilla of freelance marketplaces. It offers projects from clients all over the world and freelancers worldwide get a fair chance to show their muscle as a rising talent.

With new policies introduced by UpWork to scrape any free bid thus ensuring only the qualified, paid freelancers place bids on the projects, would go in a long way towards cementing its place as the marketplace leader.

As a freelancer with about two decades of freelancing experience, if you ask me to choose, I would go with Upwork simply because of the large number of projects, and honestly speaking, the success rate of finding work on Upwork is one out of 7 bids and that’s pretty neat.

Higher you bid, the more the chances of being hired and making money.

Show up folks, it’s equal, leveled playing field and if you are the best and know how to craft a winning proposal, you will mint money.