Sites Like Fiverr: Fiverr Alternatives, Upwork Alternatives and Sites Like Upwork Compared
Ten platforms, every fee read from the platform's own page, and two rows that honestly say the number could not be verified. Start with why you are leaving, not with a ranked list.
Four reasons people leave, four different answers.
1 · Pick a service
★ 4.9 Open
2 · Your three tiers
$
Most popular
3 · Share your gig page
Your share is spreading
1
Share
Views
Visits
Every share funnels buyers into the whole marketplace, and the marketplace sends new buyers back to you.
The short answer
The main sites like Fiverr and Upwork are Guru (5% to 9% from the seller, depending on a paid membership), Contra (0% from the freelancer, with the client paying $15 per payment or $29 above $500), Toptal and Braintrust at the vetted end, 99designs for design contests, and Freelancer.com and PeoplePerHour for open bidding. Fiverr charges the seller 20% and the buyer 5.5%; Upwork charges a talent fee of 0% to 15% fixed per contract plus 5% or 10% to the client. Which alternative is right depends on why you are leaving, and there are only four common reasons.
Last updated September 2026
Start here
Pick the alternative that fixes your reason for leaving
Every roundup ranks platforms as if freelancers all wanted the same thing. They do not. Four complaints account for almost every switch, and each one points at a different shortlist. Find yours before you read the table.
The fee is eating the work
You can name the number that annoys you. 20% on Fiverr, or a talent fee you did not choose.
Go to the lowest total spread you can reach, and count both sides of the fee. Contra takes nothing from the freelancer at all and bills the client instead. Guru runs 5% to 9%. A gig page you own runs 3% to 8% with no buyer fee. The table below has the arithmetic, and it is smaller than most people expect below about $5,000 of annual billing.
You are paying for demand you brought yourself
Most of your orders come from your own newsletter, Instagram or referrals, and the platform still takes its cut.
This is the clearest case in the whole list, and it is not really about price. Split the two things a marketplace sells you: discovery, and getting paid safely. Keep an expensive marketplace only for clients it genuinely found, and move your own audience onto something that charges for payment rails rather than for introductions.
The buyers are too cheap
You win work by being the lowest quote, and the briefs keep getting smaller.
Changing venue will not fix this on a like-for-like marketplace, because the pool is priced the same way everywhere. The move is upmarket: a vetted network like Toptal or Braintrust filters buyers before you meet them, at the cost of a long application and, in Toptal's case, no published fee. The other route is packaging, where you sell a defined outcome at a set price instead of competing on an hourly number.
You do not own anything you built
Five years of reviews live on a profile URL you cannot move, and the traffic belongs to the platform.
Own the page. A gig page on your own domain that ranks in search and reads well when shared keeps its equity when you change platforms, which a marketplace profile never does. Portfolio-first platforms and self-hosted gig pages both solve this; open marketplaces structurally cannot, because your visibility is the product they sell.
Sites like Fiverr and Upwork
Ten alternatives, on the fees they publish themselves
The last column is the one nobody else runs. Three of these ten will not tell you what they cost before you join, and two more serve fee pages that automated checks cannot read at all. That is a fact about the market worth knowing before you compare percentages.
| Platform | How it works | Freelancer pays | Client pays | Fee published? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FreelanceNation | Packaged tiers on a gig page you own, self-serve checkout | 8% Starter, 5% Pro, 3% Studio, plus $7 to $39 a month | None | Yes, in full |
| Fiverr | Packaged gigs, buyer browses and orders without talking to you | 20% flat | 5.5% | Yes, both sides |
| Upwork | Posted briefs and written proposals, paid Connects to apply | 0% to 15% talent fee, fixed per contract | 5% Basic, 10% Business Plus (3% and 8% by ACH) | Yes, both sides |
| Contra | Portfolio and payment rails around clients you already found | 0% commission | $15 per payment, $29 above $500 on the free plan | Yes, both sides |
| Guru | Bids and quotes, with paid memberships that buy a lower commission | 9% free plan, 7%, 6% or 5% on paid plans | None published | Seller side only |
| Toptal | Vetted matching, screened shortlist sent to the client | Not published | Not published | No |
| Braintrust | Vetted network aimed at longer enterprise contracts | 0%, stated as "zero platform fees for talent" | Not published | Seller side only |
| 99designs | Design contests and one-to-one projects at a fixed package price | Not published | Fixed package price per contest | Buyer side only, and not in USD on the page we could read |
| Freelancer.com | Bids and contests across a very large open pool | Could not be verified at the source | Could not be verified at the source | Not readable |
| PeoplePerHour | Hourlies and posted projects, UK-founded with a US buyer base | Could not be verified at the source | Could not be verified at the source | Not readable |
Contra, Upwork and Braintrust figures were read from those companies' own pages on 1 September 2026. Upwork's help centre states the freelancer service fee "ranges from 0% to 15% per contract", is shown before you accept an offer and is fixed once the contract begins, which replaced the old 20/10/5 sliding scale. 99designs' US pricing URL redirected to its European storefront, which prices in euros, so no dollar figure is published here. Freelancer.com and PeoplePerHour serve fee pages that automated checks cannot read, so every percentage circulating for them is secondhand and none appears above. Full workings are in the freelance platforms comparison, and you can run your own contract value through the freelance fee calculator.
Best for
Which alternative fits which seller
The same ten platforms, sorted by the situation they actually suit rather than by a ranking.
FreelanceNation
Leaving because the fee is too high and you already have an audience
Fiverr
The baseline people are leaving
Upwork
The other baseline people are leaving
Contra
Leaving because the platform is charging you for clients it never found
Guru
Leaving Upwork but still wanting a bidding marketplace
Toptal
Leaving because the buyer pool is too price-sensitive
Braintrust
Leaving for larger, longer contracts than gig work supports
99designs
Buyers who want several design directions before choosing one
Freelancer.com
Not assessable on cost until it publishes a readable fee page
PeoplePerHour
Not assessable on cost until it publishes a readable fee page
What switching is actually worth
A lower commission has a break-even, including ours
Almost every alternative that undercuts a 20% marketplace pays for the discount with a subscription. That means the cheaper-looking option is genuinely more expensive below a certain level of billing, and nobody publishes where that line is. Here it is, including for our own plans.
| Option | Commission | Subscription | Beats Fiverr's 20% above |
|---|---|---|---|
| Contra, free plan | 0% from the freelancer | None | Immediately, but the client pays $15 or $29 per payment |
| Guru, free membership | 9% | None | Immediately |
| Upwork, 10% worked example | 0% to 15%, fixed per contract | Connects to apply | Immediately at 10%, never at 15% plus Connects |
| FreelanceNation Starter | 8% | $84 a year | $700 of annual billing |
| FreelanceNation Pro | 5% | $180 a year | $1,200 of annual billing |
| Guru Executive | 5% | $299 a year | $1,996 of annual billing |
| FreelanceNation Studio | 3% | $468 a year | $2,753 of annual billing |
Read that table honestly and it says something inconvenient about our own pricing. Our cheapest plan is not our best value: Starter beats a 20% marketplace from $700 of annual billing, but Pro overtakes Starter at $3,200 and Studio only overtakes Pro at $14,400. A freelancer billing $2,000 a year should be on Starter, and putting them on Studio would cost them $128 more than staying on Fiverr. The same logic applies to Guru: its Executive membership needs about $1,996 of annual billing before the lower commission covers the $299 subscription. Any platform selling you a discount for a monthly fee has one of these lines, and it is worth finding before you switch.
| You bill per year | Fiverr keeps | Saved on Starter | Saved on Pro | Saved on Studio | Saved on Contra |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $2,000 | $400 | $156 | $120 | Costs $128 more | $400 |
| $5,000 | $1,000 | $516 | $570 | $382 | $1,000 |
| $12,000 | $2,400 | $1,356 | $1,620 | $1,572 | $2,400 |
| $25,000 | $5,000 | $2,916 | $3,570 | $3,782 | $5,000 |
| $50,000 | $10,000 | $5,916 | $7,320 | $8,032 | $10,000 |
Savings are net of the annual subscription where one applies, against Fiverr's 20% seller fee. The Contra column shows the freelancer side only, because Contra charges the client instead: $15 per payment, rising to $29 above $500. On twenty payments of $600 that is $580 out of the client's budget, which is real money even though it never appears on the freelancer's statement. The honest summary is that the fee gap only becomes decisive above roughly $12,000 of annual billing, and below that the model matters more than the percentage.
The other side of it
What you actually give up when you leave
Search demand
The large marketplaces sit at the top of the search results for almost every service term, and a share of your orders arrives because of that, not because of you. If you cannot name where your last ten clients came from, assume the platform found some of them and plan a replacement channel before you move.
Review history
Reviews do not transfer. Four years of five-star feedback is worth real money in conversion and it stays behind. The practical move is to build the new page first, run both for a quarter, and ask recent clients for a testimonial you own while the relationship is still fresh.
Dispute cover
Escrow, chargeback handling and a dispute process are part of what the commission buys. Any alternative you consider should say clearly how money is held and what happens when a client refuses to pay. If a platform is cheap and silent on that, the discount has a cost attached.
The switch that works almost every time is not a switch at all. Keep the marketplace that genuinely brings you strangers, and stop routing your own audience through it. A newsletter subscriber who buys from you on a 20% platform costs you 20% for a payment button. Sending that same person to a gig page you own, with the same fixed tiers and the same checkout, changes nothing about the buying experience and changes a lot about the arithmetic. Work out what to charge first in the freelance rate calculator, then see how packaging a service into Basic, Standard and Premium tiers makes it orderable without a conversation.
By what you do
Alternatives by discipline
The right platform is different for a motion designer and a Salesforce contractor, because the buyers behave differently. These guides carry sourced rate data with sample sizes for each field.
Questions people ask
Sites like Fiverr and Upwork: common questions
The questions people type before they pick a replacement, answered directly.
What are sites like Fiverr?
The closest sites like Fiverr are Upwork, Guru, Freelancer.com, PeoplePerHour and 99designs, plus low-fee options such as Contra and a gig page you host yourself. Only a handful of them work the way Fiverr does, where a buyer orders a fixed package without a conversation. Most of the rest run on posted briefs and written proposals, which is a different job for the seller.
What is the best alternative to Fiverr?
There is no single best one, and the useful question is why you are leaving. If the fee is the problem, Contra takes 0% from the freelancer and a gig page you own runs 3% to 8%. If the buyers are too cheap, a vetted network like Toptal or Braintrust changes who you meet. If you want the same order-a-package model with a smaller cut, a self-serve gig page is the direct swap.
Is there a better site than Fiverr?
Better depends on which of Fiverr's three jobs you actually need. Fiverr supplies demand, a packaged checkout and a payment guarantee, and it charges 20% of your side plus 5.5% of the buyer's for the bundle. If you already have demand, you are paying full price for one third of the product, and almost every alternative on this page is better for you. If you have no audience yet, Fiverr's traffic is genuinely hard to replace.
What are other sites like Fiverr and Upwork?
Guru and Freelancer.com run the closest model to Upwork, with posted briefs and competitive bidding. PeoplePerHour sells fixed hourlies in a format close to Fiverr's. Contra sits apart as portfolio plus payment rails with no commission on the freelancer, Toptal and Braintrust sit at the vetted end, and 99designs runs design contests where several people work before one gets paid.
What is the best Upwork alternative?
For work that still needs proposals and negotiation, Guru is the nearest like-for-like swap and publishes a seller fee of 5% to 9%. For work you can define and price up front, a packaged marketplace removes proposals entirely, which is usually worth more than the fee difference: most freelancers write several proposals for every contract they win, and none of that time is billable.
Are there Upwork alternatives without Connects?
Yes. Connects are specific to Upwork's bidding model, and any platform that does not run on proposals has nothing equivalent. Packaged marketplaces charge you a commission when you actually earn, not a token to apply. Guru includes a bid allowance in its membership rather than selling credits separately, and portfolio platforms like Contra have no application step at all.
What are the best Upwork alternatives for agencies?
Agencies usually need three things a general marketplace handles badly: multiple people under one brand, contracts long enough to plan around, and a client relationship nobody can intercept. Braintrust and Toptal are built for the longer-contract end. A team plan on a gig page you own solves the branding and ownership problem, since the page and the domain stay yours when a platform changes its terms.
What are the best Upwork alternatives for developers?
Developers have the most options because demand outstrips supply at the senior end. Braintrust and Toptal both target longer engineering contracts and Braintrust publishes zero platform fees for talent. Guru carries steady development work at 5% to 9%. For productized work such as a fixed audit, integration or migration, selling a defined package beats bidding, because you are paid for the outcome rather than the hours.
Are there free Upwork alternatives?
No platform is free end to end, and the ones marketed as zero commission move the cost somewhere else, into a subscription, a payment fee or a buyer charge. Contra takes 0% from the freelancer and bills the client $15 per payment, or $29 above $500. Guru has a free membership but charges 9% on invoices. Compare the total spread on a job your size instead of the headline word.
What are gig websites like Fiverr for artists?
For illustration and design, 99designs and DesignCrowd run the contest model, where several artists work speculatively and one gets paid, which suits buyers more than it suits artists. ArtStation and Behance work as portfolios that generate inbound enquiries rather than as marketplaces. Selling fixed packages from a page you own avoids speculative work entirely, since nothing is produced before an order is placed.
Why do freelancers leave Fiverr and Upwork?
Four reasons account for almost all of it: the commission, paying that commission on clients they introduced themselves, a buyer pool that competes on price, and having no ownership of the reviews and ranking they spent years building. Each one points at a different replacement, which is why generic best-of lists rarely help. Diagnose the reason first, then pick from the shortlist that fixes it.
Can I use more than one freelance platform at once?
Yes, and most established freelancers do. The common split is one marketplace kept for discovery and a low-fee platform for clients who already know you, which attaches the high commission only to work the platform genuinely found. Read each platform's terms first: several restrict taking a client you met there off the platform, usually for a fixed period or a buyout fee.
Keep the packaged checkout, drop the 20%
Publish fixed Basic, Standard and Premium tiers on a shareable gig page you own. Buyers see the price up front and check out self-serve, they pay no buyer fee, and you keep 92% on Starter, 95% on Pro and 97% on Studio.
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