Guru Reviews 196

Job postings are marginally better than Outsource in frequency and provide some transparency as to the hiring party to legitimize the project. That said, Guru's platform attracts employers looking for free mockups - or completed work for next to nothing.

Their customer service is the worst I have experienced of any freelance site, IF you can even manage to get a hold of them!

Their policies regarding payment issues for freelancers verge on fraudulent and they ONLY have their own interests in mind.

Guru was far from perfect several years ago, when I was a loyal Guru freelancer. I abandoned the site for better prospects and rejoined recently out of curiosity, hoping perhaps they had strengthened their platform. Nope. Guru is an empty shell of its 'former glory', such as it was. Everything I am seeing (from their non-existent support staff to their ghost town of a Facebook page with nothing but complaints from users, to the fact that their website is DOWN 75% of the time - it isn't functioning as I write this!), points to the site's imminent and inevitable demise.

Good thing their are better options!

Extremely complicated system - makes trying to bid for a project a time consuming and pointless affair - would not recommend this platform to anyone who takes their work seriously!

This site keep on showing the jobs which are few weeks old. Either the client don't get the right freelancer or vice versa.

The quality and pay rate of jobs available on Guru.com seems higher than on some of the other freelancing sites. (There are few, if any, $3 an hour jobs posted here. And no students looking to have their school projects done by someone else.) This is, no doubt, part of the reason there are also a lot fewer projects posted here than on Elance or Freelancer.

However, Guru is also the most difficult and time-consuming of the freelancing sites to set up and use. From a freelancer's perspective, you really have to dig into the site to cross your i's and dot your t's when you are setting up your account. For example, if you are a US citizen Guru won't actually transfer your project earnings to PayPal or your checking account unless it has a signed W-9 on file. This takes a few days. (None of the other three freelancing sites I use require this.) Unlike Elance,transfers to PayPal are not done the same day they are requested. And it also takes a few days to get a US checking account linked to your Guru account, so forget about being able to use the money you have earned until these two things are done. Like other freelancing sites, Guru finds ways to sit on funds rather than distribute them as quickly as possible to the freelancer who has earned them.

If you are new to Guru.com, I recommend you try to win a bid as soon as possible, even if it's a small one and you have to underbid in order to win it. Only then will Guru.com then allow you to set up your PayPal account and US bank accounts to receive transfers after the employer pays you for the project. You will then end up waiting a week or so on only a small amount of money, instead of running up against this problem with delays in transfers to you after you have received your first significant payment on a Guru.com project.

Guru.com's work room set up for each project you are working on is very good, but it is somewhat complicated. The work room's messaging board is strong (although my first Guru employer hated Guru's messaging, saying he couldn't easily get messages and attachments didn't come through). Having all your project's files in one place is helpful., especially if you have an employer who disputes when and if he received work from you. If you talk to an employer on the phone or via e-mail, be sure to repeat everything discussed with a note to the employer via messaging in the work room.

Like the other freelancing sites, many of the posted projects on Guru.com seem to never get awarded to anyone. They just expire or otherwise wither away without explanation.

Guru.com's search function for finding projects to bid on is one of the site's weakest elements, Perhaps because there are so few projects available, using the search function results in an overly broad search and turns up many projects that are barely, if at all, relevant to the search word or phrase used. (For example, a search for "financial forecast" turns up 61 project postings with the word "financial" in them, including an Italian translation project and a job to edit a book about business.)

You might as well include Guru.com on the list of freelancing sites you use, but do expect to go through some hassle setting up your account and don't expect it to be a major source of new projects for you.