Most in Demand Technologies for Freelance Developers on Upwork

As a freelancer, your goal is to land clients. The most common source of leads are freelancer marketplaces. For development, Upwork has been the preferred site for a long time. In its early days, it was a great place to land business, but now it’s flooded with competition. Freelancers regularly need to inventory check their skills and learn new technologies to be marketable on such platforms. So in 2024, going into 2025, what skills are high demand?

I decided to find out. With a few lines of Python and a 300k row dataset provided by @asaniczka on Kaggle, I was able to find some answers. To see how I came up with the results in this post, feel free to review the source code here.

There seems to be a new Javascript frontend framework popping up every year. While there are several solid options, the ones with the most jobs listed are: React (3170), Next.js (569), and Angular (531).

React has been the golden goose of libraries since Facebook open sourced it. It has one of the biggest communities, 100s of well supported npm packages built around it, and like the results show plenty of jobs. If you're an indiehacker or freelancer, you should be well aware of Next.js, which a server side framework powered by React and Vercel. It's very common to see a MongoDB or Supabase, Next.js, and TypeScript tech stack for MVPs.

The last option, Angular, is not surprising either. While developers either hate or love Angular, one can't deny the demand for the job. Well supported by Google and utilized by many enterprise companies, you are sure to run into clients or w2 jobs looking for Angular experience. Here in Utah, I've personally noticed a huge demand for Angular experience in startup community.

This list was very surprising to me. While I thought JavaScript was going to dominate the 10 languages searched for, Python (2405), Java (1277), and PHP (1135) were the most soft after programming language skills.

These results actually make sense seeing that Wordpress has such a presence on the web and utilizes PHP. Springboot web applications are also are a very utilized option and are built on the Java ecosystem. While Python can be used for web developmemnt, Python is in-demand for many areas including: AI development, web scraping, APIs, and data analytics. Seems like Python is still a great option for a developers first language.

The first 2 options in this category were obvious, Wordpress (8141) and Shopify (6579). 43% of websites on the internet are powered by Wordpress and Shopify's ecosystem of integratable apps, marketing, and tools is unmatched in the eccommerce industry.

Webflow was the third most requested website builder skillset. While there are many website builders, Webflow is awesome tremendous power out of the box. Millions of users utilize the platform for things like it's built in hosting, customization abilities, bridge between developer and designer, visual editor, and much more. I had a chance to do some work with Webflow and it is definitely a great option new freelancers.

In this category, there could have been several technologies. I honestly think this will depend on platform, but for Upwork the most sought after were AWS (1368), HTML (1077), and SQL (832) experience. While there are several providers in the cloud services space like GCP and Azure, most jobs I've applied used AWS as their cloud provider. HTML is self explanatory. You can't say web development without Hyper Text Markup Language.

Lastly, On the database side of things, document databases like MongoDB, were heavily pushed between 2017 and 2020. However, relational databases have been the dominate option. With how easy it is to get relational database going on PaaS like Render or Neon, Postgresql's recent capability expansion like PgVector, and SQlites ease of use, I'm not surprised in SQL-based databases being in so much demand.

To cap this analyzist off, let's go over specializations. If you are looking to make a certain website optimization your thing, here are the 3 to focus on: SEO (6402), Testing (855), and Responsive Design (761).

Now a days, people really understand the value of organic traffic. While SEO is a known accronym, most don't even know where to start to improve their scores. Clients will pay top dollar for you to make sure their website is showing when users browse the internet.

I was very surprised to see Testing as an option on this list. As a software engineer, I understand the value of testing, however, many startups and individual builders skip over testing and bigger companies have the budget to higher QA teams. If you are a wizard when it comes practices like unit, e2e, and a/b testing, there maybe money to be made for you.

After reading this Pzerro article, I hope that you have a better understanding of what skills you may need to acquire to stay competitive in the freelance space as a developer. At the end of the day, there are plenty of technologies out there being used to build software and websites. If you can code, there is probably freelance opportunities for your skillset.