Affiliate marketing software is a must for an online business, especially SaaS. Utilizing this kind of software, you can significantly increase sales and profits through the network of affiliates and content creators.
The best affiliate software should come with many features, including but not limited to
- An accurate tracking system, optimally equipped with fraud detection and prevention features
- Easy and smooth payment system
- Detailed performance reports
- Customizable partnership (For example, the software can handle many types of payments and rewards.)
- Numerous integration possibilities
As there are many affiliate marketing software products in the market, it is challenging to choose the right software for your venture.
In this blog post, I’ll provide you with a rundown of the eight best affiliate marketing software. You could then compare and contrast to find the one that is the most suitable for your business.
Affiliate Disclosure: This post from Victory Tale contains affiliate links. We will receive a small affiliate commission if you subscribe through our links. We will use this income to create better content for all visitors.
As we always prioritize our audience’s interests, you can rest assured that all software products recommended by us are of high quality.
1. Post Affiliate Pro
Post Affiliate Pro or PAP is another excellent affiliate software that helps you manage your performance marketing campaigns. It gives you access to various helpful features, including customizable commissions, fraud detection, detailed partner reports, and many more.
Key Features
Post Affiliate Pro offers hundreds of features that help you create a flawless affiliate program, including
Various tracking methods – Post Affiliate Pro offers many tracking methods that ensure accurate results. These include browser cookie tracking (first-party and third-party cookie tracking), HTML5 cookie tracking, IP address tracking, direct link tracking, and many more.
Thus, if third-party cookies are absent, your affiliate program on Post Affiliate Pro will still be in good shape.
Fraud Detection and Protection – Post Affiliate Pro implements a system that will prevent several types of fraud, including click fraud, sale fraud, or signup fraud. The system will decline any fraudulent transactions immediately.
Promotion Materials – Post Affiliate Pro offers several types of promotional materials you can use in your advertising campaigns, including but not limited to
- Discounted Coupons
- Text Links
- Various types of banners (HTML, Image, LightBox, Peel, Zip)
- Smart links (for deep linking)
- Site Replication (for affiliates who don’t have websites)
Customizable Interface – You can customize every element of the platform, including the signup form, to make it more appealing and fit your corporate design.
Reports – Pro Affiliate Pro provides highly-detailed reports about your marketing campaigns, including the performance of each affiliate or any specific campaign. You can then conduct further data analysis with ease.
Commission Management
You can fully customize your commission structure, whether it’s CPA, lifetime, or multi-tier. Outstandingly, you can utilize Splitcommission, a feature that splits commissions among affiliates involved in the sale (instead of first-click or last-click.)
Mass Payment – This feature helps you pay commissions to all affiliates within a single click after approval. This will eliminate the time-consuming task of paying each affiliate individually, saving your team hours in the process.
Pricing
Currently, Post Affiliate Pro offers three pricing plans as follows:
- Pro – $97 per month
- Ultimate – $197 per month
- Network – $477 per month
Each plan differs by feature, the number of tracking requests allowed, and the cost of additional requests.
The Pro plan has basic features, and the pricing is affordable. However, I do not recommend it because it lacks several essential features, including paying recurring commissions and performance rewards which are indispensable for many companies, especially SaaSes.
Furthermore, your program will be limited to 1,000,000 requests, which could be too few if you partner with high-traffic affiliates such as a Youtuber with 1 million subscribers. Additional requests are also costly, as it will cost you $1 for 10,000 requests.
Hence, the Ultimate plan seems to work best as it provides access to almost all features on the Post Affiliate Pro’s platform.
It will also enlarge your monthly tracking requests limit to 5 million and reduce the pricing of additional requests to $0.4 per 10,000 requests or a 60% discount off the Pro plan!
The Ultimate plan’s only drawback is that you still need to pay $19 per month for Smartlinks used for deep linking.
This feature is beneficial or even essential for many affiliates, including me, since it helps direct our audience to be the most relevant page on the advertiser’s website.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- Highly accurate affiliate tracking platform
- Totally customizable
- Various commission structures offered
- Allows many types of promotional materials and marketing tools
- Mass Payments can ease the affiliate payment process and save time.
- Fast and clean user interface
- Highly-detailed report
- Integrate with any HTML-based web app
- Multi-currency support
- Overall excellent affiliate marketing platform
Cons
- Post Affiliate Pro allows limited tracking requests. Additional requests could be expensive.
- Pro and Ultimate plan users have to pay additional fees for Smartlinks.
- The Pro plan lacks the core affiliate marketing features needed by marketing agencies and SaaSes.
- No phone support for all plans (Have only email, chat, forum and knowledgebase)
Post Affiliate Pro offers a 14-day free trial for those who want to try their software.
Score: g2 (4.6/5.0), Capterra (4.6/5.0), Trustpilot (4.5/5.0)
2. Scaleo
If you are looking for reliable and affordable affiliate marketing software, I suggest you try Scaleo. Scaleo is a comprehensive platform that can help advertisers create affiliate marketing programs, support an affiliate network or even track advertising campaigns for media buyers.
Key Features
Scaleo has wide ranges of features that help build a secure and profitable affiliate program, including:
UI Customization – You can fully customize your affiliate platform to fit your business design. You can add your logo, connect to your custom domain, change to local languages, and many more.
2-tier Affiliate Program – You can create an affiliate program that pays commissions to affiliates that generate sales and those who find new affiliates for your network.
Tracking – Scaleo offers various methods to accurately track the results, including cookieless tracking, postback tracking, and many more. Thus, third-party cookie retirement won’t cause any issues with your program.
Fraud Detection – Scaleo includes a built-in fraud detection and protection system to eliminate all fraudulent traffic.
Detailed Reports – You can create a rich report with tons of statistics within seconds. The information will be in real-time. Thus, you will always be up-to-date on the performance of your campaigns.
Automation – Scaleo utilizes AI and machine learning to help you manage the program, eliminating boring and repetitive tasks.
Advanced API – You can fully access the API and make changes as you wish. Furthermore, you can export data to business intelligence tools such as Tableau for further data analysis.
Pricing
Currently, Scaleo offers a four-tier pricing plan as follows:
- Starter – $79 per month
- Professional – $239 per month
- Enterprise – $399 per month
- Custom – Starting at $799 per month
The Starter plan has minimal features and functionalities. It is only available upon request. You will need to contact Scaleo’s customer support directly.
Most affiliates should use the Professional plan, which provides almost all features on the platform. The plan allows an unlimited number of affiliates and clicks and up to 10,000 monthly conversions.
However, if your conversions exceed the limits, there will be extra fees on top of that. You will pay as high as $20 for 1,000 conversions.
Higher plans will expand conversion limits, reduce extra fees and provide better support and personalized product training. Users can also request customized features.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- Excellent affiliate tracking software
- Unlimited number of affiliates and clicks (except the Starter Plan)
- Beautiful, clean and fast user interface
- Multi-currency support
- Cookieless tracking
- All plans have an account manager.
- Access development team to request customized features
Cons
- Limited conversions per month
- High starting price
- Expensive overcharge fees
- No phone support (Email and Live chat only)
Score: Capterra (4.8/5.0)
You can try Scaleo for free for 14 days.
3. Tapfiliate
If Post AffiliatePro, or other platforms are too expensive for your business, you might want to consider Tapfiliate. Tapfiliate is a reliable affiliate management software with various features that can help your team alleviate the pain of managing in-house affiliate programs.
Key Features
White-labeled affiliate program – You can create affiliate pages that fit your corporate design by adding your brand to every page. All affiliate links from Tapfiliate will also use your domain name, improving the user’s click-through rate on the affiliate’s website.
Furthermore, you can customize the signup form to ensure it matches your brand voice and specific marketing campaigns.
Go Viral – This feature helps affiliates with vast numbers of followers. You can create shareable social media posts or even marketing videos for your partners to share on their social accounts.
Real-time reporting – Unlike several other platforms, Tapfiliate reports on the performance of all affiliate marketers in real-time.
All Access API – Your developers can assume complete control of the affiliate program through REST API. You can then automate the workflow and free your team from tedious and repetitive tasks.
Tracking – Tapfiliate uses first-party cookies for affiliate tracking. Thus, there won’t be any issue if browsers block third-party cookies.
Commission Management
You can award various types of commissions to affiliates, including one-time, recurring, or lifetime percentage-based commissions, thus suitable for every business.
Like other platforms, you can create an affiliate tier or performance threshold that provides better commissions to affiliates if their sales in a certain period surpass the target.
This feature will help motivate affiliates to promote your products and services more.
Tapfiliate supports all payment methods, including ACH, Bank Transfer, Paypal, Payoneer, and even cryptocurrency. You can even add a custom payout method (one of my advertisers uses Tipalti.)
Therefore, you can always choose the most cost-effective method to pay your affiliates on the affiliate marketing platform.
Pricing
Tapfiliate now has three pricing plans for users as follows:
- Essential – $89 per month
- Pro – $149 per month
- Enterprise – Contact support
Resources and features differ between each plan. Unlike most affiliate marketing software, Tapfiliate limits the number of affiliates, monthly clicks, and conversions.
Thus, there are overage fees that Tapfiliate will charge you if your monthly clicks or conversions exceed the limit for each plan.
Extra 1,000 clicks will cost $0.45 for the Essential plan users and $0.30 for the Pro plan users, while the extra 1,000 conversions will cost $0.70 and $0.60, respectively.
However, if you exceed the affiliate limit, you will need to upgrade to a higher plan. The Enterprise plan will have no limits on resources.
Essential plans are adequate for small online businesses and SaaS companies, as you will get access to all major features, excluding bonus incentives, a feature that you may not need when you start your affiliate program.
Within this plan, you can have as many as 1,000 affiliates, 200,000 monthly clicks, and 75,000 monthly conversions. I think this amount of resources is sufficient.
Since you will be paying subscription fees month-to-month to Tapfiliate, there is no long-term commitment. Hence, if you want to upgrade your plan, you might want to consider other affiliate platforms as well since they offer more features at a slightly higher price.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- Lower prices than most other affiliate software solutions
- Support various commission types
- Brandable affiliate links and pages
- Create shareable social media posts and videos
- 30+ direct integrations including WordPress, Shopify, Wix and other website builders (More on Zapier)
- Support all payment methods (can even add one on your own)
- No long-term commitment
- 30-day money-back guarantee
Cons
- Limit the number of affiliates in the program
- Overage fees for both Essential and Pro plans
- Fewer features than other affiliate marketing software
Score: 4.5/5.0
You can try Tapfiliate free for 14 days
4. Rewardful
Rewardful is worthwhile affiliate software that balances quality and affordability. After a simple 15-minute installation, you can start turning your top customers and bloggers into your best marketers right away.
Subsequently, this could potentially become one of the most effective customer acquisition methods for your business within a few months.
Key Features
Rewardful is specifically designed to assist small SaaSes in getting traction. Below are features that can help you get started.
Affiliate Program Customization – You can customize everything in your program by adding your logo, changing colors, and many more to make it suitable for your corporate design.
Multiple Programs – It is possible to create multiple affiliate programs on the same platform. Each program can have different commission structures and cookie lengths.
Affiliate Segments – You can create segments for groups of affiliates on your platform.
A/B Testing – Affiliates can use this powerful tool to generate links with different parameters to find one that provides the highest conversion rate, possibly providing more sales for advertisers and commissions for affiliates.
Reporting & Analytics – This feature provides you with a reporting dashboard where you can quickly analyze your stats, including clicks, conversions, functional cookies, revenue, and many more.
You can sort out an affiliate to see who is a top or rising performer or use Rewardful’s built-in search feature to find a particular affiliate to view their stats.
Beautiful links – As an affiliate, I am always fond of Rewardful links. Unlike those offered by most affiliate networks, all links from Rewardful are concise with a clean URL parameter and no redirects. Visitors will hence be more inclined to click on them.
Cookie Customization – In addition to the design, you can customize the cookie length to correspond with your sales cycle.
Affiliate Finder – If you are unable to find hardworking affiliates for your brand, you can use this new feature to do so. You can use the exclusive affiliate search engine to search for them and handily recruit them to your network.
Commission Management
Rewardful grants you complete control over commissions. You can give your affiliates one-time, limited-time, lifetime recurring commissions, or even non-cash rewards. You can also manually associate a referred customer even if they do not come from an affiliate link.
The software will also help you in communications. Your affiliates will receive an email whenever they receive a commission. On the other hand, Rewardful will also notify you that it’s time to pay your affiliates.
Rewardful allows you to send mass payouts. Within a single click and a few minutes, all affiliates will receive part or all of their commissions.
If you are still unsure whether Rewardful is right for you, I suggest you start a free trial to try the features for 14 days.
Pricing
Rewardful offers four-tier pricing plans as follows:
- Performance – $29 per month
- Starter – $49 per month
- Growth – $79 per month
- Enterprise – starting from $299 per month
You will get two months free if you subscribe to annual plans.
The Performance plan will be essentially different from the other plans because you have to pay a 9% transaction fee. This condition alone is worse enough for you to select higher plans.
I suggest you choose the Growth plan. At $79 per month ($63.2 if you select annual plans), you will get almost all features on the platform except for custom feature requests and phone support.
The only drawback to this plan is that it caps revenues from affiliates at $15,000 per month. You will need to upgrade to the Enterprise plan if yours exceeds the limit.
However, you will have to pay $299 or more per month for the Enterprise plan. At this rate, I believe there are other affiliate marketing software that have more features than Rewardful, such as Post Affiliate Pro, or Tune.
Thus, I recommend switching to another software rather than upgrading to the Enterprise plan.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- Affordable Pricing + Low starting price
- One of the best affiliate marketing software for SaaS companies
- Allow unlimited affiliates and clicks
- Simple installation + Handy affiliate management features
- Affiliate Finder to search for active affiliates
- Provide REST API Access
- Support most programming languages and their libraries & frameworks, including Python, PHP, Node, Laravel, Vue, React, and many more
- Support multiple currencies
- Cross-subdomain tracking
- Integrate with various email marketing platforms
- Custom features
- Comprehensive support (Live, Chat, Phone)
Cons
- Limit earnings from affiliates (except enterprise plans)
- No cookieless tracking (Rewardful uses first-party cookies in tracking)
- No fraud detection system
Score: Cuspera 4/5
5. Tune
Tune, formerly HasOffers, is one of the most popular affiliate marketing software. I have worked with many companies that utilize it with excellent results. If you want reliable tracking software for your performance marketing campaigns, Tune is probably your optimal choice.
Key Features
Tune has provided affiliate tracking software solutions to both advertisers and networks.
Tracking System – Tune utilizes server postback tracking and pixel tracking. The former is Tune’s core recommendation. It will function separately from the browser. Thus, you can always track referrals accurately across different platforms where the system can’t track cookies.
Proactive Fraud Detection and Prevention – Tune has a built-in fraud protection system that detects click fraud in real-time and eliminates them from polluting your campaigns.
Customizable Affiliate Program – You can manage and customize everything related to your affiliate marketing programs, such as rewards, payout tiers, conversion goals, offers, and many more.
Intelligent dashboards – It is effortless to analyze your data with Tune through excellent-visualized real-time dashboards.
Automation – You can set several automated rules to manage repetitive tasks such as invoicing and performance optimization.
Custom Development – Tune provides full API access for customers who want complete control of the software. Furthermore, each customer can contact Tune’s dev team for further customizable options.
Tune Partners – This partner discovery tool allows you to find new high-quality influencers (social media celebrities or bloggers), marketing agencies, and even technology partners and form long-lasting partnerships with them.
Commission Management
Tune Pay – Tune provides a built-in system that allows you to manage invoices and pay your affiliate partners easily and quickly through Transferwise, Direct Bank Transfer, or PayPal.
Each payment is flexible, as you can adjust payment periods, methods, and currencies.
Pricing
Tune offers two types of pricing plans for advertisers as follows:
- Bootstrap – $499 per month
- Startup – $879 per month
- Scale – $1500 per month
- Contract – Custom pricing
The Bootstrap plan has all the essential features, which is certainly sufficient for creating an effective affiliate program. Nevertheless, this plan limits monthly conversions to 1,000.
If you need more conversions, you will need to upgrade to higher plans, which will provide you with more resources, features, support, and most importantly, more customizable options through a complete 2-way API.
As Tune’s pricing is relatively high compared to other affiliate tracking software, small businesses and SaaS companies may want to look for affordable alternatives elsewhere.
Still, if you want a consolidated solution for affiliate management, Tune is among the best that can provide it.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- Excellent affiliate marketing software
- Unlimited affiliates and clicks
- Cookieless tracking
- Good customer support
- Custom development and technical consulting included for all plans
- API Access
- Automation to help with repetitive tasks
- Integrate well with mobile measurement partners
- Good partner discovery tool (for influencer marketing)
- Complete support channels (Phone, Chat, Email, Dev Team)
Cons
- I once had an issue with missing payments. However, their support team solved this problem swiftly.
- More expensive than other affiliate marketing software, thus suitable for medium-sized companies or enterprises
- Low monthly conversion limit for each plan
You can try Tune free for 30 days.
Score: g2 (4.2/5.0), Capterra (4.6/5.0)
6. Ambassador
Ambassador is unarguably one of the best referral software. With a wide range of features, the software can help users create and manage profitable marketing partnerships painlessly.
Key Features
Customized Affiliate Program – You can create a perfectly customized affiliate program that fits your brand design. Design templates and visual editors are also provided to help users create a registration page and an entire partner recruitment process within minutes.
Furthermore, you can have multiple affiliate programs on this single platform. Each one can have different commission payouts or revenue shares, which is suitable for companies with various types of partners.
Affiliate Portal – This portal provides your affiliates with promotional materials, performance insights, and links, reducing your team’s workload in responding to their constant requests.
Fraud Detection – Ambassador utilizes the best security to protect your affiliate program from fraud or any suspicious activity.
Smart Segmentation – You can quickly identify and segment affiliates, influencers, and customers into manageable groups.
Advanced Analytics – The analytics dashboard will visualize the data to show which partner, affiliate, or influencer is the top performer. You can then run a cohort analysis to optimize your program.
Incentives – You can provide incentives such as coupons and gift cards for your affiliates, partners, influencers, or even customers to distribute them, boosting your campaign performance and ROI even further.
Other referral programs – With Ambassador, you can create other performance marketing campaigns besides an affiliate program such as a partner program, influencer program, advocacy program, and refer-a-friend program.
A/B Testing – You can A/B test your landing pages, marketing copies, and rewards for optimal performance of your program.
Automation – True automation helps your affiliate programs run seamlessly without manual intervention, freeing up your team’s valuable time.
Commission Management
Tiered Rewards – Like other affiliate marketing software, Ambassador can structure different payout models based on several factors such as sales generated, special promotions, and many more.
Automated Cash Payouts – Paying affiliates would not be easier. Ambassador can pay affiliates automatically based on your preferences: real-time or scheduled.
Pricing
Ambassador provides as many as three pricing plans for users: Starter, Professional, and Enterprise. However, they need to contact their support team directly to schedule a demo and inquire about the pricing.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- Various useful features
- Seamlessly integrate with various CRMs, eCommerce platforms, email marketing, and payment processing software.
- Support numerous languages and currencies
- A/B Testing
- Enterprise SLA
- REST API Access
- Free coaching
- Onboarding & Technical implementation
Cons
- Custom Pricing (The software aims towards enterprise users.)
- Unknown performance marketing tracking/attribution system
Score: g2 (4.9/5.0)
7. Affise
If the above affiliate marketing software products do not fulfill the needs of your business, I suggest trying Affise. You will launch a full-fledged affiliate program within hours and have adequate tools to manage advertising campaigns effectively.
Key Features
Customizable Marketing Platform – Affise allows users to customize almost everything on the platform, including but not limited to design, alert system, legal information, languages, currencies, reports, or even system settings.
With this feature, it is effortless to create an affiliate program that perfectly reflects your company’s identity.
CPAPI – CPAPI is a core feature of Affise. This feature utilizes automation and allows you to add affiliate programs, start and stop offers, and synchronize your data with ease.
You can also create test new offers with some of your partners to determine which one generates the highest revenue, maximizing KPIs in the process.
Marketplace – Affise provides a marketplace where you can freely add a stack of services to your affiliate program to smoothen the workflow, such as billing, workflow automation, and many more.
Affise Reach – You can connect with premium affiliate partners, marketing agencies, and networks to expand your partnerships and revenue growth.
Fraud Protection – Affise includes a built-in fraud protection system that protects your marketing campaigns from several types of fraud.
Reports & Analytics – Affise’s analytics has as many as 50 data breakdowns that you can use to analyze the performance of your program.
DataFusion – You can transfer your data conveniently in real-time from your affiliate program to AWS, Google Cloud, or AlibabaCloud accounts to conduct data analysis.
SmartLinks – Utilizing Machine Learning, Affise will only provide your affiliates with a single link. AI will be responsible for choosing and redirecting a website visitor to the most suitable offer when they click on the link.
Pricing
Affise has two pricing plans as follows:
- Scale – $499 per month
- Custom – Custom pricing
The Scale plan will have essential features such as partner management, Smartlinks, and performance automation tools. However, it lacks panel customization and white-labeling, which you will need to create a tailor-made affiliate or referral program.
Affise has a resource limit for each plan, and it will cost more per month if you use more than allocated resources on your chosen plan.
Unfortunately, Affise does not provide this information on their website. If you are interested in their software, I suggest inquiring them about it before deciding.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- Fully customizable affiliate marketing platforms
- Advanced and highly-detailed analytics
- Transfer data to business intelligence tools in real-time
- Automation to optimize workflows
- Excellent marketplace to add billing and other crucial services to the program
- Fraud Prevention
- Excellent performance optimization tools
- Various robust affiliate tracking systems to choose from
- All plans have an account manager.
Cons
- Expensive (Best for large enterprises)
- Steep learning curve
Score: g2 (4.9/5.0), Capterra (4.3/5.0)
Try Affise free for 30 days
Other Best Affiliate Marketing Software?
Below are other leading affiliate marketing software products you may want to consider.
I did not include them in the above list for one or more of these reasons: poor or decent customer support, excessively pricey (not provide good value for money), receive a poor score on top review platforms (with at least 20 reviews.)
Impact – Impact provides complete affiliate management software for thousands of online businesses and enterprises. Their platform has many features. As an affiliate, I have used it for more than a year. Unfortunately, their customer support is relatively slow.
Saasquatch – Saasquatch is another affiliate software built for large enterprises. However, at a starting price of $1,250 per month, Saasquatch still limits the numbers of affiliates or members to 200,000, while others have no limits on those.
ClickInc – ClickInc is another provider of inexpensive affiliate software in which some marketers are interested.
However, I’m not too fond of their user interface that looks like websites from the ’90. Though their pricing is super affordable ($25 per month), I think Rewardful is a better alternative on all fronts.
