State of Apify Freelance Marketplace Scrapers — Q1 2026

The freelance-marketplace-scraper segment on Apify is both smaller and differently shaped than either the job-board or ATS segments. Three platforms clear the inclusion threshold in Q1 2026 — Upwork, Fiverr, and Freelancer.com — and Upwork alone accounts for 90% of all measured demand. One actor, neatrat~upwork-job-scraper, holds 35% of the entire segment.

But the real structural difference is what these actors scrape. 81% of measured demand goes to actors that scrape job postings — not freelancer profiles. The customer base for Apify-hosted freelance scrapers is overwhelmingly the supply side (freelancers looking for work, or tools that serve them), not the demand side (clients looking for talent). That inverts the usual framing of freelance marketplaces as client-to-worker platforms.

Three structural facts shape the rest.

First, Upwork is the category. 51 of 87 in-scope actors target Upwork, and those 51 actors pull 1,337 of 1,484 aggregated 30-day users. Fiverr (92 users) and Freelancer.com (55 users) together make up 10% of demand. Every other platform — Toptal, PeoplePerHour, Guru, Malt, Workana, TaskRabbit, FlexJobs — falls below threshold.

Second, this is a specialist game, not a portfolio game. The top four publishers — neatrat, upwork-vibe, flash_mage, and jupri — hold 67% of segment demand between them. Three of the four are Upwork-only specialists. The opposite pattern from the Q1 ATS report, where portfolio publishers dominated every qualifying platform.

Third, no single publisher owns the category. Nine top-3 slots exist (three per qualifying marketplace). All nine are held by nine different publishers. No publisher holds more than one top-3 position anywhere. That is a more distributed leader board than either the ATS or job-board segments produced.

Qualifying marketplaces

A freelance marketplace qualifies for this report when the Apify Store returns at least 3 distinct actors targeting it and those actors aggregate at least 15 total 30-day active users. Both thresholds exist to keep the report focused on markets with active buyer demand, not scraper-graveyards.

Three marketplaces met both thresholds.

In plain prose: Upwork is jobs-heavy, 51 actors, 1,337 30-day users, top actor neatrat / upwork-job-scraper at 515 users (39% share) — Competitive band. Fiverr is gigs-oriented, 13 actors, 92 users, top actor piotrv1001 / fiverr-listings-scraper at 26 users (28% share) — Fragmented band. Freelancer.com is project-bid oriented, 23 actors, 55 users, top actor jupri / freelancer-scraper at 18 users (33% share) — Competitive band.

Two patterns stand out.

Upwork operates in a different demand tier. At 1,337 30-day users and 51 actors, it is the only freelance marketplace on Apify with real breadth. The top actor (neatrat/upwork-job-scraper) at 515 users exceeds the entire Freelancer.com segment by an order of magnitude. Fiverr and Freelancer.com each produce more actors than users — a pattern that usually signals low-confidence, low-retention buyers.

Band concentration is high across the board. Upwork sits at 39% top-actor share (Competitive), Fiverr at 28% (Fragmented), Freelancer.com at 33% (Competitive). None is Concentrated in the strict sense, but all three sit at or above the level where the #1 actor meaningfully shapes the experience of any buyer searching for a scraper.

Upwork

The heart of the segment. 51 actors, 1,337 30-day users, and the only freelance marketplace where the leader board has three distinct top-3 players above 100 users each:

• neatrat~upwork-job-scraper — 515 users (39%)
• upwork-vibe~upwork-job-scraper — 263 users (20%)
• flash_mage~upwork — 113 users (8%)

Note the name collision. Both neatrat’s and upwork-vibe’s actor is literally called “Upwork Job Scraper” — they share the slug suffix exactly. That is unusual on the Store, where slug conflicts are resolved by user namespace only. In practice it means the #2 actor competes for the same keyword search as the #1 actor, at half the user base.

The top three are all jobs-focused. The Upwork listing that appears on the Store as “Upwork Freelancers Scraper” (17 users) sits in 14th place. Whatever Apify’s buyer base is doing with Upwork data, it is overwhelmingly looking at posted jobs, not available freelancers.

Fiverr

Thin. 13 actors, 92 aggregated 30-day users, no actor above 30 users. The top three are within one user of each other:

• piotrv1001~fiverr-listings-scraper — 26 users (28%)
• igview-owner~fiverr-scraper — 23 users (25%)
• automation-lab~fiverr-scraper — 21 users (23%)

Fiverr is gig-listings-oriented rather than jobs-oriented: the platform itself is sellers-post-gigs, so scrapers here look at what sellers offer, not what buyers post. That is the demand-side view of the marketplace, and it is small.

Freelancer.com

The thinnest qualifying market. 23 actors, 55 aggregated 30-day users. Only the top actor clears 10 users:

• jupri~freelancer-scraper — 18 users (33%)
• shahidirfan~freelancer-com-scraper — 9 users (16%)
• scrapestorm~freelancer-com-jobs-scraper---cheap — 4 users (7%)

Freelancer.com is project-bid oriented (clients post projects, freelancers bid). The top actor targets the project feed, not the freelancer directory. The long tail is notably long: 23 actors chase 55 users, an average of 2.4 users per actor. For context, on Upwork the average is 26.2 users per actor.

Supply side vs. demand side

The deepest pattern in Q1 is not about which marketplace wins. It is about which side of the marketplace the scrapers serve.

Of the 87 in-scope actors:

• 46 actors (1,204 users, 81%) scrape jobs, gigs, or project postings — the supply side.
• 17 actors (77 users, 5%) scrape freelancer or talent profiles — the demand side.
• 24 actors (203 users, 14%) scrape other surfaces (reviews, categories, general listings) or have ambiguous titles.

That 16-to-1 ratio of supply-side to demand-side demand is the single clearest shape of the category. The buyer pool on Apify for freelance data is not recruiters looking for talent. It is freelancers looking for work — or tools built to serve them — along with automation-minded operators monitoring the job feed for matching, filtering, or lead-generation.

This also explains why Upwork dominates so completely. Upwork’s job feed is the largest, most structured, most monetizable “work I can apply to” feed among freelance platforms. Fiverr’s sellers-post model produces nothing equivalent; Freelancer.com’s project-bid feed is smaller and lower quality. Supply-side tooling follows supply-side feed quality.

Publisher concentration

The marketplace-level view above shows where demand sits. Rotating the same data by publisher shows who captures it — and the head of this distribution is flatter than ATS but still steep.

In plain prose, the top ten publishers by Q1 2026 freelance-marketplace-scraper demand run: neatrat (515 users, 34.7% of segment demand, Upwork only, 1 top-3 slot); upwork-vibe (263, 17.7%, Upwork only, 1 top-3); flash_mage (113, 7.6%, Upwork only, 1 top-3); jupri (109, 7.3%, 2 markets, 1 top-3); sovereigntaylor (55, 3.7%, 2 markets, 0 top-3); gio21 (40, 2.7%, all 3 markets, 0 top-3); getdataforme (36, 2.4%, 2 markets); matthewjames (35, 2.4%, 1 market); piotrv1001 (30, 2.0%, 2 markets, 1 top-3); igview-owner (29, 2.0%, 2 markets, 1 top-3). Top-3 publishers take 60% of segment demand; top-10 take 83%; everyone else splits the remaining 17%.

Two patterns from the ATS report invert here.

Where the ATS segment rewarded portfolio publishers (fantastic-jobs held top-3 slots on four of five ATS platforms), the freelance segment rewards single-platform specialists: nine top-3 slots, nine different holders, no overlap. gio21 is the only publisher with actors across all three qualifying marketplaces, and it ranks #6 by demand — below three Upwork-only specialists.

And where ATS concentration came from a single thick-head publisher, freelance concentration comes from a single thick-head platform. neatrat’s 35% of category demand is entirely one actor on Upwork. Strip Upwork out of the data and the category shrinks from 1,484 to 147 aggregated 30-day users — smaller than a typical mid-tier ATS in the Q1 ATS report.

The portfolio publishers that do exist (gio21 with 3 markets, jupri with 2, sovereigntaylor with 2, getdataforme with 2) all sit below 110 users each. Multi-market coverage is not currently a winning strategy on the Apify freelance segment. The economics favor concentrating on the deepest single feed — Upwork’s job postings — and iterating on that single actor’s quality rather than spreading across platforms.

What was excluded

The eight close-misses — platforms that had at least one actor but failed the inclusion threshold — are a map of where the Apify freelance ecosystem hasn’t yet priced in demand:

• PeoplePerHour — 6 actors, 14 users (just under 15-user threshold)
• FlexJobs — 6 actors, 9 users
• Malt (FR/EU) — 2 actors, 9 users
• Freelancermap (DACH) — 1 actor, 8 users
• Workana (LATAM) — 2 actors, 5 users
• TaskRabbit — 1 actor, 3 users
• Guru — 1 actor, 1 user
• Toptal, Codementor, Contra, Turing, 99designs, Truelancer, Hubstaff Talent — no qualifying actors at all

Two patterns in the exclusion list. First, regional marketplaces are undercovered. Malt (France/EU), Freelancermap (DACH), Workana (LATAM), and Truelancer (India) all have real marketplaces in their regions, but Apify’s buyer base isn’t large enough in those geographies to produce scraper demand. Second, premium vetted platforms produce no scrapers at all. Toptal, Codementor, and Turing all run tight invite-only funnels that resist bulk extraction — and the buyer types who would want scraping data on them (enterprise recruiters) are already using the platforms’ own API or search tools.

The segment is unlikely to broaden meaningfully before Q3 unless one of two things happens: a regional marketplace grows enough to pull Apify buyers in (unlikely on current growth rates), or the demand side of the market — clients looking for talent — starts building on Apify at a scale the supply side currently occupies alone.

Methodology

This report covers every Apify Store actor whose primary purpose is to scrape a freelance marketplace. The Q1 2026 census began with a full snapshot of 24,333 Store actors; each was reviewed and, where applicable, assigned to a single freelance-marketplace target. Actors that merely mention a marketplace in passing — without actually scraping it — are excluded before any counts are taken.

A marketplace is reported on only when it clears two demand thresholds: at least three distinct actors targeting it, and at least fifteen aggregated 30-day active users across those actors. These thresholds exist to keep the focus on markets with real, sustained buyer interest rather than long-tail or abandoned entries. A market’s top-actor share is the leading actor’s 30-day users expressed as a percentage of that market’s total measured demand.

The supply-side and demand-side split reflects what each actor scrapes, not who publishes it. Actors that pull posted jobs, gigs, or projects — the feed freelancers and automation tools read to find work — are classified as supply-side. Actors that pull freelancer or talent profiles — the directory clients search to find workers — are classified as demand-side.

Raw per-actor classification with decision reasons is at discovery.csv. Kept-only rows are at included.csv. Per-market aggregates with top-actor stats are at markets.csv.

Next quarter’s edition rolls the census forward to the Q2 2026 snapshot. Thresholds will not be lowered to chase a larger qualifying set; if the freelance segment’s shape changes, the report will show it.