Tired of building your business by yourself? Ready to hire skilled professionals to help you grow? Whether it’s design, development, copywriting, or more, hiring freelancers can be an intimidating journey. Finding talent in your budget is tough, and finding quality, reliable talent can feel impossible.

In this post, we’re going to ease that pain. We’ll introduce you to three top freelancing marketplaces—Fiverr, Upwork, and Toptal— and help you decide which is best for you. By the end, you’ll know exactly where to hire the perfect freelancer to meet your business goals.

Fiverr

If you’re looking for fast, affordable solutions for specific tasks, Fiverr is often the first stop for many business owners. The platform is known for its prepackaged services and quick turnaround, making it ideal for small, well-defined projects.

Benefits of Fiverr

• Low cost: Fiverr can be very budget friendly, with many services, like logo design, copywriting, and small translations, available for as little as $5.
• Quick turnaround: If you’re in a pinch and need skilled work done quickly, Fiverr might be a great choice. Freelancers on the platform often offer turnarounds of just a few days with some offering same day turnaround.
• Talent variety: Fiverr is one of the world’s largest freelance marketplaces, connecting businesses to over 380,000 freelancers according to Skillademia, a leading online learning platform. With careful vetting, you may uncover a high-quality freelancer offering exceptional services at affordable prices.

Drawbacks of Fiverr

• Low flexibility in projects: Because of the off-the-shelf nature of the platform, finding a freelancer that deeply understands your business needs is unlikely. Although the platform does facilitate some less off-the-shelf solutions, it is mostly known for quick turnaround, prepackaged projects.
• Focus on short-term relationships: Due to the quick turnaround nature of Fiverr projects, you may not have the opportunity to develop a deeper relationship with your chosen freelancer.
• More options means harder decisions: More options is not always a great thing. It can feel overwhelming to navigate the platform and filter through talent to make the right hiring decision.

Overall, Fiverr is a great option for simple projects with quick turnaround. For more tailored, ongoing needs, however, you may want to consider a platform oriented more towards long term client relationships, like Upwork.

Upwork

Upwork brings a stronger focus on establishing and developing long term client relationships. On Upwork, you’ll find a large range of talent from beginner to expert level. This process is going to feel closer to a more traditional hiring process. You’ll put out a job post explaining your business needs, your budget range, and the experience level you’re looking for, and then vet and interview candidates before moving forward.

Benefits of Upwork

• Deeper working relationships: Upwork encourages long-term working relationships between client and freelancer. On Upwork, you’re hiring a skilled professional with the potential to continually service your business for the foreseeable future.
• Less noise: Unlike Fiverr, when you’re looking for talent on Upwork, you’re often evaluating candidates based on their skills rather than just what they’re offering. This can give you a stronger sense of the deeper capabilities of your potential freelancer.
• Increased likelihood of satisfaction: Because of the deeper working relationship, a freelancer experience on Upwork is more likely to result in a solution truly tailored to the needs of your business. 

Drawbacks of Upwork

• Custom solutions increase complexity: The back-and forth required for more custom solutions increases complexity. A poorly managed client-freelancer relationship can result in low quality results from even the best freelancers.
• Stronger requirements for soft skills: Project updates, project planning, task prioritization, and more, all become more of a consideration when your freelancer interaction is spanning more than one communication exchange. It’s critical to ensure your freelancer candidates demonstrate these qualities in addition to hard skills.
• Greater investment, greater risk: The increased communication and custom solution experience of Upwork lends itself to higher costs than a pre-packaged solution typically offered on platforms like Fiverr. If not managed properly, hires on Upwork can result in costly solutions that don’t meet your business needs.

Upwork is a great platform for a diverse spread between quick turnover products and long-term working relationships. That said, with so many options, there is a lot of risk. This risk can be mitigated at higher price points through platforms like Toptal.

Toptal

Toptal is like the ivy-leagues of freelance platforms. Here you’re paying for carefully vetted talent. Toptal prides itself on only accepting 3% of freelancer applicants to the platform. This exclusive nature lends itself to a strong pool of talent with highly desirable credentials.

Benefits of Toptal

• Mitigated risk: With such rigorously vetted talent, the likelihood that you hire an excellent freelancer that meets the needs of your business is very high. Toptal does the work of filtering candidates for you, reducing the need for you to do this yourself.
• Strong candidates with strong track records: Talent on Toptal often have strong backgrounds of delivering on expectations. This talent often comes from ivy-league schools or Fortune-500 enterprises. These institutions apply their own rigorous filtering for candidates, further leading to top quality reaching your inbox.
• Exposure to top-talent perspectives: The global nature of Toptal talent’s backgrounds often gives them unique insights into business and operations. These insights could pay dividends for your business as these freelancers can lay a stable and scalable foundation for your future.

Drawbacks of Toptal

• Cost: An obvious drawback to Toptal is cost. Toptal developers, for example, charge between $60-150 per hour according to TeilurTalent, A popular Latin-American talent sourcing firm. These premium fees can limit the economic viability of investing in these solutions for many businesses.
• Illusion of security: Because Toptal so carefully vets their candidates, this may incline business owners to let their guard down when vetting talent. This has the potential to result in poor working experiences if candidates are better at meeting expectations of institutions than they are deeply aligning with their value proposition.
• Less flexibility: A less obvious drawback to Toptal may be the lack of influence on your project. Because you’re working with such an accredited freelancer, you may be less inclined to prioritize your true needs, instead opting to follow the direction of the freelancer. This may result in a great solution, but it just won’t feel like yours.

If cost is less of a concern and the success of your project is critical, Toptal may be the right choice for you. Despite the platforms exclusive nature, it’s important that you still vet talent accordingly to ensure that they are the right fit for your needs.

Final Thoughts

Although hiring talent to grow your business can be daunting, hopefully this article broke down some important considerations for you and your business in this process. Balancing cost with quality and time in your project can be extremely difficult, so it’s important to know what options are available and how they might suit your priorities.

Need help navigating these platforms or managing your project? Boxhouse is here to help. We build top-quality web-based software solutions that help your business grow. Schedule a free consultation today and let us handle the complexity.

Joseph Marella, the Founder of Boxhouse Consulting, is a top-rated plus Freelancer on the platform Upwork with a job success score of 100% for delivering quality projects that exceed clients needs.