RentACoder (vWorker) vs Elance

If you’ve heard about outsourcing through Elance, but aren’t sure if it’s the best choice, take a look at this.

Here, we compare Elance to RentACoder (now vWorker) on some some of the most important points to the online outsourcer, so you can see how both Elance and vWorker stack up against not only each other, but against what you need as an outsourcer as well. 

Fees

Elance charges a non-refundable $10 fee to sign up with its service whereas vWorker charges nothing. It also charges a $5 payment verification fee. There are no charges to post a project, select a worker, verify payments, or make a transaction at vWorker. vWorker simply appends 15% to each project final bid to cover costs.

Bid Limits

Elance workers can’t make more than 3 bids a month unless they pay a subscription fee ($9.95/month for 20, $19.94/month for 40 or $39.95/month for 60), which may reduce the number of quality bids you receive. Hired Elance workers may pass these fees on to you in the form of a higher price as well. The majority of sites, like vWorker, do not charge subscription fees.

Ratings

If you haven’t already, register a username for yourself so you can discuss this topic in our Online Outsourcing Services forum.

Elance doesn’t offer a blind rating system, which could allow poor-performing workers to intimidate buyers into giving them better ratings than they deserve. As a result, buyers realize the only way to preserve their own ratings is to rate everyone highly, which compromises the accuracy and usefulness of the ratings system. At vWorker, you’ll find a blind rating system which prevents such fear-based or manipulative ratings.

Per Hour Monitoring

Elance’s time clock mechanism is limited in that it doesn’t allow you to verify the time worked on a project with an application that records a worker’s desktop and webcam (like vWorker’s time clock mechanism).

Money Back Guarantee

Current events can be found in our Elance News section.Text

Although Elance provides a money-back guarantee via arbitration (quality of work is not covered by the Elance Hourly Guarantee), it charges a non-refundable $66.66 – $133.33 fee for this service, which may make it too expensive to exercise the guarantee on your project. The majority of sites that offer a money-back guarantee, like vWorker, do so for free. UPDATE 2/21/2011: Elance Raises Arbitration Fee by 50%

Source Code Protection

Elance doesn’t offer source-code protection, but vWorker allows you to require all workers who bid on your project to be Chaperon enabled. Chaperon makes it virtually impossible for a worker to copy or pirate your source code by protecting it from creation and transport to storage and retrieval. See the vWorker website for more information regarding Chaperon.

Arbitration

At Elance, a worker can challenge you at any time with an arbitration and basically force you to pay a non-refundable arbitration fee (either $66 or $133.33). UPDATE 2/21/2011: Elance Raises Arbitration Fee by 50%

In addition, arbitration at Elance can be stalled for 10 business days in which your project funds are not available to you.During the first phase (dispute assistance), an Elance worker can stall the process an additional 7 days, only to turn around and stall the actual arbitration phase 6 days until all parties respond. (See the Elance contract for more information:  http://www.elance.com/p/legal/dispute-resolution-process.pdf)

vWorker offers arbitration on all projects free of charge, and it additionally prevents workers from stalling an arbitration’s start. 45% of vWorker’s arbitrations are completed under a day and 75% of them are completed under a week. You can even read how vWorker’s arbitrators make their decisions on the vWorker website.

Support

For more, read how Elance Negligently Downplays U.S. Unemployment.

Unlike Elance, vWorker offers a requirements wizard and a project posting wizard to help you build a project that’s easy for workers to understand. And it’s the only service that offers one like it!

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