Appen vs Outlier

Side by side from today's live listings and each platform's own documentation.

	Appen	Outlier
Live roles	51	Behind login
Median hourly	$34 (from the 10 of 51 roles that state an hourly rate)	n/a
Top rate	$100	n/a
How it pays	Monthly, judging by CrowdGen's fee terms (fees are counted per payment per month). Appen says it charges no fees itself; payment providers do. In the US, one ACH or PayPal payment a month is free, then $0.20 (ACH) or $0.25 (PayPal); PayPal outside the US costs 2%, capped at $20. Methods include PayPal, Payoneer, Airtm, local bank transfer, SWIFT and gift cards, depending on country.	Weekly, through PayPal or Airtm, according to Outlier's own job pages. Rates are set per project and country and published as ceilings, from up to $28/hr for Swedish writing to up to $150/hr for electrical engineering experts. Onboarding and overtime phases pay less than core work.
Hiring	Apply to a CrowdGen project opening. If you're shortlisted, you finish signing up from the welcome email, add your details, sign three agreements (including a Master Services Agreement), set up two-factor authentication, then continue to the project's qualification and choose a payment method.	Sign up at outlier.ai, complete onboarding and skill assessments, then projects appear in your dashboard.
Run by	Appen, an AI training data company founded in 1996. Its contributor platform is CrowdGen, which replaced Appen Connect.	Scale AI, which runs Outlier as its contributor platform. Meta took a minority stake in Scale (reported as 49%) in June 2025.

Median hourly by field

Number of hourly listings in brackets.