Vendasta vs. UpWork

Overview

As an agency owner, you need to provide digital services for local businesses. They’ll seek your help to be found by more customers, enhance their online reputation, and promote their products.

However, you also need help to overcome your own challenges:

• How do you find time to sell?
• How do you hire a team of experts?
• How do you prove performance?

By outsourcing your fulfillment work to Vendasta or UpWork, you have more time to grow your business while someone else does the heavy lifting. In this comparison page, you’ll understand more about the difference between Vendasta and UpWork, and why Vendasta is better suited for agencies.

UpWork Pricing

UpWork will charge you a 3% processing fee on payments and leave it up to you and your freelancer to negotiate how much you pay for the service. Most freelancers will charge you an hourly rate.

UpWork’s Basic plan is free, but you’ll be limited to sending only 3 invites to freelancers per job post—meaning that you get only three shots to find the right individual.

You can pay $49.99/mo for the Plus plan to increase this limit to 15. For $849/mo, you can send unlimited invites, but the payment fee becomes 10%. The paid tiers also come with other benefits like an account manager and better reporting tools.

Here’s a pricing chart for UpWork:

Pricing Comparison

If you choose UpWork, you’ll find a wide variety of price ranges. For example, freelancers offering “social media content” can charge you anywhere from $20/hr to $120/hr depending on how skilled they are and what is included within the service.

The same is true for other services such as website development, blog writing, and digital advertising. Every freelancer has their own price.

Vendasta offers pretty much the same services as UpWork, but there are three main differences:

• Most of our services and products have a fixed price.
• We have teams working for you, not just a freelancer.
• You get an end-to-end marketing platform designed for resellers.

When it comes to who will execute the services, you have two options:

• Use our vendors, which are third-party apps available in our Marketplace.
• Use Marketing Services, our in-house full digital agency.

While the Marketplace is available at any subscription tier—including free—you need to be on a Pro subscription ($999/mo) to have access to Marketing Services.

If you run an agency, we understand that $999/mo can be a significant investment and you’re wondering if it’s really worth it. But before you close this page and run into the arms of the cheapest freelancers out there, here are 5 reasons why Vendasta can make you more money in the long run:

Time Savings

We asked some of our most successful partners about what they love about Marketing Services. It was no surprise to us that “time savings” was one of the most often mentioned benefits.

Many agency owners are struggling to grow their business because they can’t find time to sell more. Doing fulfillment work can eat up a good chunk of their time, but hiring, training, and managing people are all equally bad, if not worse.

Both Vendasta and UpWork can help agencies save time by handling their fulfillment work, but UpWork is far away from solving your people needs. While we have well-established teams to do all the heavy lifting for you, UpWork will leave it up to you to recruit the right individual.

Let’s say that you need someone to create a website for your client. You go to UpWork and find thousands of freelancers to choose from. You start clicking on profiles and reading one by one, taking note of price, portfolio, reviews, work experience, and what is included. When you finally find someone you like, you send them an invite and hope they’ll answer quickly because your clients can’t wait forever. Rinse and repeat.

It’s just crazy overwhelming and time-consuming!

Also, you have no guarantee that they’ll keep working for you in the future. At any time, you may be sent back to square one with your hiring process.

Expertise

Digital advertising, web design, content creation, social media management… You name it and we offer it! But, most important, the work will be done by a team of marketing strategists with decades of combined experience.

If you choose UpWork, you’re putting all your eggs in one basket. Freelancers work alone, they don’t have anyone overseeing their work to ensure it meets minimum quality standards. Also, many freelancers will rush to get things done as fast as they can without much attention to detail.

Think about how much effort you put into acquiring your clients.

What if you lose them because you outsourced your fulfillment work to the wrong person?

It’s almost impossible to understand the scope of his work just by reading his bio. You don’t know what is included, his methodology, and if you get a report. Most agency owners can’t waste time trying to figure these things out, they need a solution.

Vendasta’s Marketing Services team is a great alternative to UpWork because we have a laid out process for everything we do. We know how to respond to negative reviews, conduct an onboarding call, and develop an efficient social media strategy. We also have a lot of bright minds working together to stay on top of the latest trends.

Reporting

Your clients want to see results, so you need to provide them with proof-of-performance reports. If you decide to use UpWork for your agency’s needs, you’ll likely have one of these issues:

1. Your freelancers will (hopefully) give you reports, but they all look different and non-professional because they were made by different people.
2. You’re the one manually creating reports to ensure consistency, but it costs you time that you could be using to grow your business.

Now, here’s what happens when you use Vendasta:

• You have access to a powerful dashboard with key metrics about your agency.
• You also get the Executive Report with all your clients’ reports in one place.
• You can use Task Manager to keep track of all the work being done on your behalf.

Not convinced yet? Check out what our partners are saying about our reporting capabilities:

“The Executive Report gives our clients something tangible. It shows them that there’s some accountability to the work that we’re doing. It gives us credibility”

“My clients love the dashboard. They love the transparency of being able to log in and just look and see what I’m doing for them whenever they want”

Tools for Agencies

Before you decide between Vendasta and UpWork, you need to think about your needs. If what you seek is a platform to help you scale your business, Vendasta is better equipped with tools and features for that.

Here’s the first thing you read when you open our About Us page:

“Vendasta provides an end-to-end commerce platform to companies who sell digital products and services to small and medium businesses worldwide.”

Now, compare it with UpWork’s About Us page:

“Upwork makes it fast, simple, and cost-effective to find, hire, work with, and pay the best professionals anywhere, any time.”

The problem that UpWork is trying to solve is very relevant, but it’s more impactful for local businesses than agencies.

Agencies face a lot of other challenges that only Vendasta can help eliminate or reduce:

• They need marketing automation to help them engage with customers.
• They need a virtual store that is easy to manage, so they can sell more.
• They need a hot leads notification feature to optimize their sales efforts.
• They need CRM and pipeline management tools to track opportunities.
• They need automated task reports to promote transparency.
• They need a dashboard to manage all their clients and see their activity.
• They need access to training resources and sales materials.

UpWork isn’t made for that, but Vendasta is.

That’s why we have over 20,000 channel partners powering more than 2.2 million businesses with our platform. Yours can be the next one!

Conclusion

Both Vendasta and UpWork can help you with your fulfillment needs. The main difference is that UpWork won’t give you a team, but require you to play HR and spend some time trying to find the right professional for you. On the other hand, Vendasta can give you a team and a platform built for agencies that want to scale without increasing costs.