There are a lot of outsourcing marketplaces and communities made available to us, and sometimes it can get a bit confusing when it comes time to finding the right one for you personally. Today I want to put two of the bigger players face to face. vWorker or oDesk?
Let’s Look At The Contenders
vWorker
vWorker.com is a dynamic online marketplace where 143,207 employers hire and manage 296,636 virtual workers to assist them in business and personal projects. Virtual workers span every country across the globe and every imaginable expertise, including computer programming, writing, graphic design, marketing and many more. vWorker.com offers the safety features and money-back/payment guarantees that allow thousands of these transactions to be done succesfully every month. (Quoted from vWorker Website)
oDesk
oDesk is the marketplace for online workteams, with the best business model for both employers and contractors. Our unique approach guarantees to employers that an hour billed is an hour worked, while guaranteeing to contractors that an hour worked is an hour paid.
This win-win approach attracts more work to oDesk than to any other online work marketplace. Each month, thousands of companies of all sizes post jobs on oDesk, representing more than $65,000,000. (Quoted from oDesk Website)
So let’s take a closer look at each of them, and who they are best suited for.
1. Marketplace Size
The more workers in a marketplace the greater the competition – and if economics taught me one thing it was ‘supply and demand’. The greater the supply of workers, the lower the price becomes.
vWorker = 296,636 workers
oDesk = 679,485 workers
2. Design Interface & Navigation
I think that it is important for websites to have an easy to navigate interface to ease of use (for both employers and workers). Here are my thoughts of the design and navigation of vWorker and oDesk.
vWorker
I remember when vWorker was RentACoder – and thinking that their website was so outdated. So I am glad that with the rebranding they have updated their website, however I still find their interface ‘clunky’ a little bit hard to navigate (and they have a strange fascination with gradients. It still has the same feel as RentACoder but with a new template.
oDesk
oDesk has an extremely clean interface, and one thing I absolutely love is that you are always just one click away from seeing the categories of jobs or workers that are available to you! Plus their ‘How It Works‘ is quite entertaining.
In my personal opinion, I feel that oDesk has a much more credible feel – based on design and interface.
3. What Other People Are Saying
I think it is always important to do your research on a company before doing business with them. So what I did was head to Google and type in ‘vWorker review‘ and then ‘oDesk review‘ so that I could do an unbiased analysis of what people are saying about these two outsourcing marketplaces.
vWorker
To be honest vWorker didn’t have many reviews on the first couple of pages. A lot of news stories and vWorker pages – but not many reviews. However, here is what I found:
…apart from the unpleasant user interface I had positive as well as negative experiences when I used the platform last time. Anyway, I believe it’s worth a second look. (Rent-A-Tutor)
The years have passed, and now I’m a software engineer and a buyer, not a coder, and I use Vworker more than ever. It’s incredible what I can do with $50 usd in 12 hours; jobs that a designer could take weeks to do…and also, minor jobs that a designer doesn’t want to take. (Review-Inc)
oDesk
Now oDesk was quite the opposite. The first two pages were riddled with reviews. Here is a sample of what I found:
After using both those sites, as well as oDesk, I found myself coming back to oDesk repeatedly for a few reasons:
- oDesk lets you see what your employee is doing–it takes screenshots of their computer every so often, and shows their level of activity (i.e. are they idle or actually working?) That way you know you’re getting someone who is actually motivated to work. (Erica.Biz)
For anyone with writing, editing, web design, graphic design, coding, scripting, marketing, e-commerce, or any other type of skill that can be provided remotely, from a distance, this site is an amazing resource for any freelance contractor. The hourly positions tracked through the oDesk work diary also offer a guaranteed payment. There are a massive number of jobs available on this site every day, and I highly recommend it! (HubPages)
4. My Personal Experience
vWorker
To be completely honest, I haven’t used vWorker since it has been rebranded. I did use it a couple of times several years ago and found quality workers and as far as I can remember I paid a great price as well.
It was quite a while ago, but the experience I had with vWorker (then RentACoder) was fantastic.
oDesk
oDesk is the company that I started using after reading Timothy Ferriss‘ book ‘The 4-Hour Workweek’ and learnt the concept of geoarbitrage. Since then I have hired workers for close to 200 hours of work and have not had one bad experience.
While there have been the odd errors with some workers, they have always offered to fix it immediately and the prices that I am paying between 83cents/hr and $2/hr for outsourcing link builders – I must say that I am a raving fan.
Now both of these companies are in the top 5 freelance marketplaces, which means both have a large following of happy employers an workers, but my pick from the two would have to be oDesk!
