Zenfl alternative: where to move your Upwork job alerts
Zenfl is closed. The site is offline and the Telegram bot is silent. If you were on it, here is what to look for in a replacement and how to move your feeds to Vollna in about 15 minutes.
What Zenfl was
Zenfl shut down in 2026 after two years on the market. It was a Telegram bot that sent Upwork job alerts a few minutes after posting, with a set of filters, several feeds per account, webhooks and a monthly batch of AI proposal credits. You probably had a feed tuned for months.
What to look for in a replacement
Zenfl was worth paying for because alerts arrived fast, filters kept junk out, and it lived in Telegram, where you already look. A replacement has to do those three things first.
Upwork's own job alerts are free. If a plain alert is all you want, use them and stop reading. They are slower and the filters are thin, but they cost nothing.
Vollna as the Zenfl replacement
Vollna is the most mature product on the market, with over 10 years of monitoring the freelance market and building tools for Upwork freelancers and agencies. If you are looking for the best Zenfl alternative, Vollna is the right tool.
| Feature | Zenfl | Vollna |
|---|---|---|
| Alert speed | Within minutes of posting | Within seconds of posting |
| Alert channels | Telegram | Telegram, email, push and RSS. Slack and Discord on Agency |
| Filters | 40 options, set up inside a bot | 30+ job attributes in a dashboard with a live preview of matching jobs, so you see what a rule does before you save it |
| Client information | Client quality filters | Spend, hire rate, reviews, location and payment status on every job card, and as filter rules |
| AI job screening | AI feed optimisation | AI Job Qualifier reads the full posting and scores it against rules you write in plain language |
| AI proposals | Credits, written from the job text | Written from your own prompt, templates and profile. Your choice of model: GPT, Claude, Gemini or Grok |
| Proposal templates | None | Reusable templates with attachments, A/B tests between templates, AI answers to screening questions |
| Integrations | Webhooks | Webhooks, Google Sheets, Zapier, Pipedrive, HubSpot and an API |
| Analytics | None | Views, replies, reply rate, cost per reply and boost results, per profile and per template, with CSV export |
| Team | One account | Team members and every profile in your agency, with reply rates per profile |
| Market data | None | Market Insights: demand, rates and connects costs in your niche, with your reply rate against the market |
| Profile | None | AI Profile Audit with the changes that win more invites |
| Automation | None | Auto-bidding through a verified Business Manager profile, around the clock |
What Vollna adds beyond alerts
The qualifier checks the job before you spend a connect
Keyword filters match words. They do not read the posting. A job tagged "React developer" can turn out to be a project manager role, and a "WordPress" exclusion hides the $12,000 migration away from WordPress. The AI Job Qualifier reads the full description, the client's history and the screening questions, then scores the job against rules you wrote yourself, such as "skip anything under $30 an hour, skip clients with no verified payment, skip agencies looking for white-label work". Only jobs that pass reach your Telegram. Connects stay in your pocket.
Proposals you can read before they go out
Zenfl's credits wrote a letter from the job text. Vollna writes from your prompt, your templates and your profile, and you pick the model. You see the exact letter before you send it. Templates hold your case studies and portfolio files, and you can run two templates against each other to learn which opener gets replies. Screening questions get a drafted answer matched to what the client asked. If you run an agency, the same setup drafts for every profile in it.
Analytics that show what moved the reply rate
Every proposal you send through Vollna is tracked: viewed or not, replied or not, how many connects it cost, whether a boost helped. After a month you know your reply rate per filter, per template and per boost level, and what a reply costs you in connects. That is the number that decides whether Upwork pays your rent, and no alert bot shows it to you.
Slack, CRM and the rest of your stack
The Agency plan sends matching jobs to a Slack or Discord channel, appends them to a Google Sheet, and pushes jobs and clients into Pipedrive or HubSpot. Zapier and the API cover everything else. Team members share one account, and a manager sees reply rates per profile.
Once the numbers are stable, the Automation tier submits proposals for you through a verified Business Manager profile, around the clock. Upwork does not allow this for US and UK profiles, so if that is you, the manual plans are the ones to look at.
About Upwork's MCP server
Upwork now has an official MCP server, and some people read that as the end of third-party tools. An MCP server is an interface. It lets an AI agent act inside your Upwork account when you ask it to. It does not watch the feed 24 hours a day, score every new posting against your rules, or track which of your proposals got a reply. That work is what Vollna does.
Who should not switch
If you bid a few times a month and only need a nudge, Upwork's free alerts are enough. If you want a bare Telegram bot and nothing more, Vollna will feel like too much tool. And if you are on a US or UK profile and the only thing you want is auto-bidding, Vollna cannot give you that.
Move in 15 minutes
- Start the free trial. No card is needed.
- Create a filter. Take the keywords, budget floor and client rules from your Zenfl feed and put them in. Vollna shows matching jobs live while you edit.
- Open Telegram, message @vollna_bot and press Start. Vollna links the chat to your account. For a second chat or a group, send /newalert to the bot.
- Turn on Telegram in the filter's notification settings. The next matching job arrives in your chat.
- Repeat for each Zenfl feed you had. Then write two or three qualifier rules for the jobs you always regretted bidding on.
Questions Zenfl users ask
Is Zenfl coming back? No. The service is closed and the domain and bot are offline.
Can I import my Zenfl feeds? No. Zenfl's data went offline with the site. Rebuilding a feed as a Vollna filter takes a few minutes.
Is Vollna safe for my Upwork account? The alert, filter and proposal features never touch your account. They read public job data and send you a letter to paste. Auto-bidding runs through a verified Business Manager profile that joins your agency as a real team member, which is how Upwork designed that role.
Your Zenfl feed is gone. The jobs are still posting. Start the 14-day trial and have Telegram alerts back before the end of the day.