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Hubstaff vs Upwork
March 10, 2025 | Author: Adam Levine
9★
One app to automate time tracking processes, workforce management, and productivity metrics.
12★
Upwork stands out of all other alternatives on freelance market. Allows to post both short-term projects and long-term contracts, offering flexibility in hiring. The platform provides a robust time tracking tool for hourly contracts, ensuring transparency in billing.
Hubstaff and Upwork both claim to make remote work easier, though in reality, they mostly make people feel watched. Both track time, generate reports and ensure that no one is slacking off—not even for a sneaky cup of tea. They integrate with all sorts of other software, which is great if you enjoy living in an endless ecosystem of blinking dashboards. And, of course, both will gladly help move money around, ensuring that workers get paid and companies remain blissfully unaware of just how much time was spent staring blankly at the screen.
Hubstaff appeared in 2012, possibly as a well-meaning attempt to optimize the concept of staring blankly at a screen. It’s mostly used by businesses that like to keep an eye on remote teams, as well as the occasional field worker whose boss enjoys knowing their exact longitude and latitude. Unlike Upwork, it doesn’t offer a marketplace for freelancers, because why encourage people to find jobs when you could just monitor the ones they already have? But it does automate payroll, which is handy if you’d rather let an algorithm decide who gets paid this month.
Upwork, on the other hand, emerged in 2015 from the unholy fusion of Elance and oDesk, presumably in an attempt to create a freelance marketplace so vast that no one could ever escape the gig economy. Freelancers scramble to win projects while clients sift through an infinite stack of proposals, occasionally hiring someone but mostly just enjoying the power trip. Unlike Hubstaff, Upwork takes a chunk of every transaction, because middlemen need love too. And while it does offer time tracking, it also allows fixed-price projects—because sometimes, you just want to agree on a number and then completely forget how long it actually took.
See also: Top 10 Time Trackers
Hubstaff appeared in 2012, possibly as a well-meaning attempt to optimize the concept of staring blankly at a screen. It’s mostly used by businesses that like to keep an eye on remote teams, as well as the occasional field worker whose boss enjoys knowing their exact longitude and latitude. Unlike Upwork, it doesn’t offer a marketplace for freelancers, because why encourage people to find jobs when you could just monitor the ones they already have? But it does automate payroll, which is handy if you’d rather let an algorithm decide who gets paid this month.
Upwork, on the other hand, emerged in 2015 from the unholy fusion of Elance and oDesk, presumably in an attempt to create a freelance marketplace so vast that no one could ever escape the gig economy. Freelancers scramble to win projects while clients sift through an infinite stack of proposals, occasionally hiring someone but mostly just enjoying the power trip. Unlike Hubstaff, Upwork takes a chunk of every transaction, because middlemen need love too. And while it does offer time tracking, it also allows fixed-price projects—because sometimes, you just want to agree on a number and then completely forget how long it actually took.
See also: Top 10 Time Trackers
