Which Freelancing Site is Better?

I’ve used eLance, RentACoder, and oDesk. Of the three, I vastly prefer oDesk.
Elance charges a minimum of $50 for project tasks, and a $5 minimum per hour. This alone makes eLance a complete waste of time for me. Often the tasks I want to outsource will only take 30 minutes or so, and many of the bids are far lower than $5 per hour.

RentACoder(now vworker.com) is great for finding talented programmers, but the interface is cumbersome and they encourage you to make the bids per-project instead of hourly. My preference is to pay hourly. I have used RentACoder successfully, but the interface bugs bothered me.

They also force you to communicate through their buggy system. For instance, when I was using it, every time I wrote a comma, it would delete the rest of my post. For a system written by programmers, I was amazed it had those bugs. They fixed that bug a few days later, but I was already used to editing out all my commas. Blech!
After using both those sites, as well as oDesk, I found myself coming back to oDesk repeatedly for a few reasons:

- oDesk lets you see what your employee is doing–it takes screenshots of their computer every so often, and shows their level of activity (i.e. are they idle or actually working?) That way you know you’re getting someone who is actually motivated to work.

- There’s no minimum bid or minimum per-project amount. I’ve hired freelancers who have billed me $7 for a couple hours of work. oDesk bills your credit card once a week, and manages all the payments to providers. If you have a dispute, there is a dispute resolution process. I used their dispute resolution process once and managed to get all my money back, so I’m happy with that.