Toptal Review: Is it suitable for you?

Varun Omprakash

Content writer at Flexiple. Passionate about sales. Loves reading.

In this blog post, we take a comprehensive look at the popular hiring platform Toptal and its suitability for hiring freelance developers. We also underline some real Toptal reviews from clients and freelancers.

Table of Contents

• What is Toptal?
• A background on Toptal
• How does Toptal work?
• Toptal’s business model
• How much does Toptal cost?
• Toptal reviews from 3rd-party review sites
• Is Toptal the right fit for you?
• Toptal alternatives to hire freelancers
• Toptal Glassdoor reviews
• Tl; DR: A brief summary of Toptal’s review

What is Toptal?

Toptal is an established and popular freelance network that connects clients with highly-vetted freelance talent. When it started out, Toptal only offered freelance software developers. Toptal has since expanded to other verticals to include freelance designers, financial experts, product managers, and project managers.

Toptal’s key features are its rigorous screening process and a large community of quality talent. Its multi-stage vetting process consists of code reviews, portfolio review, real-time testing, and an English language skill test. Toptal claims that this stringent vetting helps it zero down on the ‘Top 3%’ of freelance talent.

During the screening process, Toptal’s recruiters understand freelancers’ core competencies, skills, and past work experience. On receiving a client requirement, Toptal understands their requirements in detail and accordingly matches them with the right freelancer from its talent pool.

However, like any other solution, Toptal might not always be the best-suited for your startup.

A background on Toptal

Toptal was founded in 2010 by Taso du Val and Breanden Beneschott. Beneschott exited the company in 2018 amid muddy waters between him and du Val, which involved the company even suing him.

Since Toptal’s inception, it has reportedly remained profitable. Interestingly, it has only raised capital once – an early-stage seed round that included investors like Andreesen Horowitz.

Toptal also prides itself on operating a remote workforce with zero physical offices – a fully-distributed company.

How does Toptal work?

Toptal relies on a personalised matching process to pair freelancers with relevant projects posted by clients on its website. Here’s the step-wise process that Toptal follows broken down below:

1. Sign up on the site and post a job request:

• Clients looking to hire freelancers have to submit their requirements through a form on Toptal’s website with relevant details of the job.

2. Get on a call with Toptal’s team and share your requirements in detail:

• After the client submits the job description, Toptal’s internal team reviews it and gets in touch with the client.
• Over a conversation, Toptal’s team tries to gain an in-depth understanding of the requirements.

3. Get recommendations from Toptal

• After gaining an understanding, Toptal gets to work on finding freelancers who would be a good fit for the job at hand.
• If there are freelancers available immediately, Toptal will recommend them to the client by sharing their digital resumes (created by the respective freelancers with help from Toptal).
• If there’s no one available in their ‘selected’ pool, Toptal will work on finding suitable freelancers and will notify clients after completing their respective screening process.

4. Review and evaluate the recommended freelancers via your own interviews

• The client can then choose to interview the freelancers recommended by Toptal, and evaluate them on their own terms.

5. Select the right freelancer for the job and start work with a trial period

• If the client likes the freelancer, they can start working with them immediately after signing the contract agreement.
• Toptal also requires an initial deposit of $500 from clients, which will be settled as a credit to their first invoice in the engagement.

6. Choose to continue working, request for a replacement, or part ways with Toptal

• Toptal offers a no-risk trial period, for clients to evaluate the performance of the freelancer and confirm a good fit.
• If the client decides against moving ahead on the engagement, they are not liable to pay anything – Toptal refunds the $500 deposit in full.
• Toptal freelancers usually work remotely. However, clients can also make requests to have the freelancer work out of their office. The availability, though, of such freelancers is quite low.

7. Review the freelancer’s work and approve payments

• Toptal provides flexible payment solutions. Typically, invoicing takes place every fortnight with payments due within 10 days of invoicing (‘Net 10’ terms).

Toptal’s business model

Toptal’s business model can be attributed to the category of ‘multi-sided platforms’, like a marketplace. And like all marketplaces, it is dependent on network effects to provide enough value to both clients and freelancers.

For example: to fulfill its promise of connecting clients with the right freelancers within 24 hours, Toptal needs to have a lot of freelancers in its talent pool, along with their real-time work status. Similarly, Toptal also needs a large enough client base to guarantee a steady stream of projects for its freelancers.

Toptal’s premise for making money is simple. It invoices clients directly for the duration of the freelance project. It receives this payment, holds the commission charge, and pays freelancers a lower, pre-determined rate. Freelancers are given the option to set their hourly rates based on Toptal’s recommended rates. These are derived by considering factors like the freelancer’s place of residence and expertise level.

How much does Toptal cost?

Toptal’s pricing varies for the scope of the project, geographic region, and the experience level of the freelance developers.

Toptal reviews from 3rd-party review sites

Here, we’ve outlined some positive and negative Toptal reviews by clients, published on two of the most-reputed review sites: Trustpilot and G2crowd. Of course, these review sites do their best to ensure that reviews from customers are 100% genuine.

On a broad perspective, Toptal’s performance on review sites is good as only 2% of customers have given them a severely negative review.

In this particular Toptal review, the client seems to sum up perfectly what’s great about Toptal and the areas in which it is lacking.

One key point that stands out in this Toptal review is the lack of transparency in the billing process. As this customer has pointed out, clients need information on exactly how much is being spent on what, so they can optimise for costs. Furthermore, Toptal’s overpriced service has been underlined again in this review.

Here is another Toptal review, where the customer highlights the company’s good quality of talent and their responsiveness but has raised concerns over the high prices.

Among the negative reviews about Toptal, here is a customer who has criticised its flaws in service delivery and customer support as being “slow”, never solving problems, and tough to track down. The person was particularly unhappy as they were paying “astronomical” prices to Toptal.

Is Toptal the right fit for you?

Toptal may be a good option for you if hiring the best quality developers is your biggest priority, with a lesser focus on budget.

The hiring process at Toptal does give you a fair chance of finding a quality developer for your requirements within a couple of weeks.

Other alternatives, like Flexiple, also offer developers of similar quality at an affordable cost.

Toptal alternatives to hire freelancers

In certain instances, Toptal may not be the ideal hiring solution for you. If Toptal doesn't have a freelancer suited to your requirement and budget, you would have to consider an alternative platform.

It could also be that they do not yet support clients from your location so you have to pick a Toptal alternative.

We’ve written in more detail about the alternatives to Toptal here – Toptal Alternatives and Competitors.

To summarise, these are some viable alternatives to Toptal:

• Flexiple
• Gun.io
• Gigster
• Arc.dev

Toptal Glassdoor reviews

Of course, Toptal’s excellent service needs a great team for execution. On the employee-employer review site Glassdoor, we can see that most of their employees love the superior work-life balance gained from working at a fully-remote company like Toptal.

From the outside, it does seem like Toptal is a good place to work at.

Below, we’ve also outlined some Glassdoor Toptal reviews by freelancers who’ve gotten selected to the platform.

This freelancer highlights how the intense competition for freelance projects in the Toptal community can lead to disproportionate delays in getting that first project.

In the Toptal review shown below, the freelancer seems particularly unimpressed with the low reward for effort ratio from the platform’s vetting process.

Freelancers spend a lot of time and effort to complete Toptal’s drawn-out screening process, but can sometimes fail to get any projects soon after they’re selected.

Tl; DR: A brief summary of Toptal’s review

Ultimately, Toptal has used a good vetting process to be a consistent performer in the premium freelance market over the past decade. This has allowed Toptal to grow significantly. With that said,

In our experience, many companies might find Toptal's pricing high.

The market for freelance workers is growing due to the increasing popularity of remote working, distributed teams, and a flexible workforce. This has helped in the emergence of new innovative solutions – from pure bidding marketplaces to powerful vetted talent networks.

So, if you don’t fancy Toptal, fret not. There is a freelance talent network out there today that can do the job for you.

You can find a more comprehensive list here to get you started.