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7 Top-Rated Affiliate Software

Ashish Upadhyay profile picture
By Ashish Upadhyay

Published | Updated on
12 min read
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Affiliate marketing managers often face significant hurdles in tracking and measuring performance for multiple affiliate marketing campaigns running simultaneously. Affiliate marketing software can help them. The solution facilitates communication and collaboration with your affiliate network and generates data-driven reports showcasing the effectiveness of your affiliate marketing program. 

To help you make the right choice, we’ve compiled a list of the seven top-rated affiliate software tools based on two parameters: user ratings and popularity score. Each parameter is weighed and scaled to a value between 1 and 50.

User ratings: This parameter considers the overall user ratings of each product based on reviews in the last 24 months. Users rate products on a scale of 1 (lowest) to 5 (highest). 

Popularity: This parameter considers the average monthly search volume for a standardized set of keywords for each product, as derived by a proprietary search methodology, as well as the position of the vendor’s domain on the search engine results page (SERP) for each keyword. It’s a measure of user interest and relevance used as a proxy for popularity.

During our evaluation, we identified that the featured products are distributed across two categories: dedicated affiliate/partner marketing solutions and all-in-one marketing platforms with affiliate marketing functionality.

1. TUNE

User rating: 49/50 

Popularity score: 50/50

TUNE is a partner and affiliate marketing solution that helps track affiliate activities, such as clicks, conversions, and impressions, and attribute website conversions from an affiliate campaign accurately, providing insights into the performance of individual affiliates and campaigns in your affiliate network.

The software also helps you manage affiliate commission structures, allowing customization based on specific criteria, such as performance, conversion types, and time-based incentives during promotional seasons and holidays.

Product features of interest:

  • Workflow automation: Automates workflows across your program, including affiliate payment processing, affiliate fraud prevention through IP tracking and website behavioral analysis, and website traffic monitoring.

  • Cookieless conversion tracking: Helps track user behavior and website interactions without relying on traditional web cookies. This approach provides a more seamless and accurate understanding of user behavior by capturing visitor device information and performing contextual and server-side tracking.

  • Geotargeting and geolocation tracking: Helps set up campaigns to target specific geographical locations and customize campaigns based on user locations.

Customer support options: Chat and phone support

Who should consider TUNE?

Being an aggregator of affiliate partner networks and providing cross-device affiliate marketing, TUNE is ideal for marketers looking to build agency partnerships to run their affiliate marketing campaigns. Additionally, the affiliate marketing tool offers white labeling and complete customization over setting recurring commission rates and payout structures for your affiliates.

Analysis accurate as of September 2023

Trial/Free Version

  • Free Trial
  • Free Version

Starting price

$599 per month (billed annually)

Device compatibility

2. Kartra

User rating: 48/50 

Popularity score: 37/50

Kartra is an all-in-one marketing suite with affiliate marketing management capabilities. The software provides a dashboard to view and manage all your affiliates and set percentage-based or fixed-dollar commissions for all affiliate marketing efforts.

To control commissions on a granular level, Kartra helps you set up payment milestones. For instance, you can establish rules such as a minimum number of sales to trigger affiliate payouts. You can also review and approve new affiliate marketer applications and onboard them through the dashboard.

Product features of interest:

  • Custom landing pages: Create custom landing pages for your affiliates. You can prepare multiple affiliate links redirecting your affiliate traffic to different landing page offers.

  • Multiple commission tiers: Set up different tiers in your affiliate program with specific commission structures, such as standard affiliates and VIP affiliates for those affiliate marketers bringing in more revenue.

  • Affiliate subscription plans: Create an affiliate-only mailing list and have your affiliates subscribe to it to stay connected and updated with changes in your affiliate marketing campaign or commission structure.

Customer support options: Chat, email, and phone support

Who should consider Kartra?

If controlling your affiliate's commission structures on a granular level is essential for your business, Kartra can help set up commissions according to your budget. The software also offers an affiliate program questionnaire you can use to prequalify new affiliates before onboarding them. Such a process can help select quality affiliates with experience in your industry.

Analysis accurate as of September 2023

3. PartnerStack

User rating: 49/50 

Popularity score: 34/50

PartnerStack is another dedicated partner and affiliate management software that helps you diversify your affiliate marketing channels by recruiting referral and reseller affiliates for your campaigns.

The affiliate platform does this by using the built-in aggregator platform to help you reach thousands of detailed partner profiles you can browse through and select the ones that best fit your requirements. Once selected, you can directly send them a templated message via PartnerStack.

Product features of interest:

  • In-app referral widget: Helps increase customer referrals by building unique trackable referral links you can embed into your website, landing pages, social media, and email campaigns.

  • Partner application dashboard: Manages all partner onboarding applications via a centralized dashboard. You can build branded application forms without needing coding knowledge and get an overview of incoming applications and their status.

  • Partner and revenue tracking: Helps track partner performance and provides a program overview dashboard to oversee the total revenue that each partner brings in. You can customize the dashboard to see monthly and lifetime revenue from partner-sourced customers. 

Customer support options: Chat, email, and phone support

Who should consider PartnerStack?

Maintaining a high-quality affiliate marketing program is crucial for marketing teams. PartnerStack’s partner ecosystem helps you find suitable candidates using filters such as industry, audience, and channels during your search for affiliates. You can create customized partner applications for different partner types and approve or reject partners based on their responses in the application.

Analysis accurate as of September 2023

/ Pro tip

Assess the customization options present in the affiliate tracking software. These should generally include the ability to customize affiliate commission payouts, campaign segments, and tracking parameters to collect specific affiliate marketing data.

4. Tapfiliate

User rating: 49/50 

Popularity score: 28/50

Similar to PartnerStack, Tapfiliate is a dedicated affiliate marketing platform that helps track and attribute partner-driven conversions. You can set up conversion goals and use an attributable real-time tracking link for each affiliate in your network. 

The software lets you set up custom triggers that activate when you send affiliate payouts or when customer information gets updated in the campaign dashboard. You can also mass-import customer and affiliate data and save them in a single repository for easy access.

Product features of interest:

  • Custom triggers: Creates automation-based custom triggers that notify you via email about important events, such as affiliate payouts, campaign approvals, and new customer acquisitions.

  • Multi-level marketing: Offers a referral code system to encourage customers to refer your products and services to their friends and family to drive sales and generate more revenue.

  • Multi-language support: Supports up to six international languages to help you recruit international affiliates and expand your business globally.

Customer support options: Chat, email, and phone support

Who should consider Tapfiliate?

If you wish to promote your affiliate programs globally and recruit international partners for promotion, Tapfiliate could be a practical choice due to its multi-language support. Additionally, its affiliate moderation dashboard lets you monitor affiliate performance and control who gets to promote your brand.

Analysis accurate as of September 2023

/ Pro tip

Check for fraud prevention measures integrated into the affiliate marketing software. These could be IP and device tracking to monitor suspicious or unauthorized website visits. Fraud prevention also uses browser fingerprinting to uniquely identify devices and detect potential fraudulent behavior.

5. UpPromote

User rating: 49/50 

Popularity score: 28/50

UpPromote is an affiliate marketing software solution dedicated to growing your Shopify businesses. The software lets you create affiliate offers and market them on your website and UpPromote's marketplace. You can customize the affiliate registration form, email templates, and affiliate account to match your brand's look.

UpPromote offers built-in chat to help you communicate with affiliates in your network. You can create detailed visualized reports that showcase data related to affiliate clicks, orders, and commissions that they have earned in a given period. Such reports also let you view the best performers in your affiliate network and incentivize them accordingly.

Product features of interest:

  • Multiple third-party integrations: Integrates with third-party payment, email marketing, and CRM platforms to help you consolidate data and centralize affiliate campaigns into one dashboard.

  • Analytics and reports: View detailed data on clicks, orders, commissions, and other metrics via reporting and visualization. Assess the best performers in your affiliate network and the most popular products and services being referred.

  • Campaign customization: Customize affiliate registration forms, email templates, and affiliate accounts to fit your brand's look. You can also make custom development requests to align the campaign with your brand style.

Customer support options: Chat, email, and phone support

Who should consider UpPromote?

UpPromote specializes in running affiliate marketing campaigns for Shopify businesses, and if that is your area of operation, you could opt for this solution. It also offers multiple integrations with third-party social media platforms to market your affiliate partner program.

Analysis accurate as of September 2023

/ Pro tip

Ensure the software offers blocklisting management. Such a feature allows you to maintain a blocklist of IP addresses, email addresses, or domains associated with known fraudulent activity or untrustworthy sources. Such provisions ensure accurate reporting and analytics when measuring campaign performance and effectiveness.

6. Voluum

User rating: 50/50 

Popularity score: 27/50

Voluum is an ad-tracking tool that helps you monitor and manage your affiliate campaigns from desktop and mobile. The software tracks ad campaign metrics, such as visits, clicks, costs, and profits from your affiliate campaigns.

With custom conversion tracking, you can track different types of conversions throughout your visitor's journey without using third-party CRM software. Voluum also protects your landing pages by blocking access to visitors or programs that didn't come through a campaign URL.

Product features of interest:

  • Traffic distribution AI: Analyzes campaign performance and sends more traffic to landing pages that are performing the best to increase conversions.

  • Lander scanning tool: Find errors and bugs in your landing pages and fix them before a campaign goes live. 

  • Rule-based traffic distribution: Create rules based on which traffic will get directed to different landing pages, offers, or entire paths. This helps you target your campaigns more accurately, deliver a more persuasive message to your visitors, and increase conversion rates.

Customer support options: Chat, email, and phone support

Who should consider Voluum?

Marketers running affiliate marketing campaigns across different geographies often need granular control over how campaign traffic gets targeted and retargeted. A tool like Voluum is ideal in such cases that can create rule sets to match such requirements. Businesses that face stiff competition in their industry can consider Voluum as it prevents competitors from accessing your campaigns by blocking visitors who didn’t come through a campaign URL.

Analysis accurate as of September 2023

Trial/Free Version

  • Free Trial
  • Free Version

Starting price

$179 per month (billed annually)

Device compatibility

7. Post Affiliate Pro

User rating: 47/50 

Popularity score: 27/50

Post Affiliate Pro is an affiliate marketing platform built to create and manage multiple affiliate programs. The built-in campaign manager helps you view ongoing campaigns, measure their performance, and create individual conversion reports for each affiliate partner in your network.

With its built-in affiliate network management dashboard, you can view each affiliate in your network, track their commission, and release their payments. You can also use the audit log feature to track affiliate partner activity across your network and get timestamps of all operations, procedures, events, and actions.

Product features of interest:

  • Multi-link support: Offers flexible affiliate link styles, such as anchor links, new style links, direct links, and redirect links. Such variety of links gives your affiliates more options to market your products.

  • Marketing automation: Helps automate various processes, such as IP tracking, cookie tracking, and tracking traffic from specific browsers. Such monitoring can help you assess campaign performance and optimize them further.

  • Performance rewards: Tracks affiliate performance and adds bonus commission to individual affiliates accordingly. You can also set up rule-based commissions, which increase the amount your affiliate partners get if they bring in more business. 

Customer support options: Chat, email, and phone support

Who should consider Post Affiliate Pro?

If you run multiple commission types for your affiliates and wish to have a tool that tracks multi-tier commissions, you can opt for Post Affiliate Pro. With recurring and split commissions features, you can automate affiliate payouts and distributions when multiple affiliates participate in a single campaign.

Analysis accurate as of September 2023

How much does affiliate software cost?

Pricing for affiliate software can be as low as $25 per user, per month, or increase to $750+ per month, depending on various factors—features, number of users, commission types, referral automation, and more. Most affiliate tools typically include the following subscription plans:

Free trials: No-cost plans that range from 14 to 30 days and give users access to all or limited software features. These are ideal for businesses that wish to try out a tool before purchasing it.

Free versions: Free software plans offer access to a limited number of basic features, such as triggered notifications and reporting. These are suitable for small businesses or individuals on a budget.

Entry-level plans: Start at $25 per user, per month, and offer limited features. They are suitable for small businesses or teams with basic referral marketing, partner tracking, incentive tracking, and general social sharing functionality. 

Mid-tier plans: Range from $74 to $549 per month and offer features such as unlimited referral customizations, multi-language support, and social media tools. These are ideal for businesses that have outgrown basic affiliate marketing solutions but don’t require the full range of functionality offered by enterprise-level tools.

High-end plans: Advanced affiliate tools can cost more than $750 monthly and offer advanced affiliate marketing features, AI-based tracking and referral, unlimited affiliates, 24/7 customer support, an affiliate social network, and more. These are ideal for cross-functional businesses with multiple teams and departments that need a customizable referral marketing solution.

Hidden costs associated with affiliate software

Besides the software license price, additional costs associated with affiliate software include: 

  • Implementation and setup: Configuring the affiliate solution to align with your business's specific needs may require professional services, including initial setup, data migration, and customization.

  • Custom development: If you require specialized features or functionality unavailable in your subscription plan, you might need custom development, including coding, design, or other technical work.

  • Hidden transaction volume fees: Some software providers might have pricing tiers based on the volume of transactions or affiliate activities. Exceeding a threshold could lead to higher fees.

Frequently asked questions when selecting affiliate software

Does the software offer cross-platform tracking and attribution?

Check if the software can accurately track your affiliate referral program across various social media platforms, third-party websites, and physical devices for comprehensive attribution. This functionality is crucial due to the diverse ways consumers interact with your content and make purchases.

Can the software segment and target affiliates for campaigns?

Check if the software allows for affiliate segmentation based on various criteria; for example, geography and marketing sectors, such as technology, health and wellness, or finance. This segmentation helps create tailored campaigns and measure individual affiliate performance accurately.

How does the software assist in recruiting and onboarding affiliates?

Inquire about the tool's recruiting and onboarding features, such as customizable registration forms, automated welcome emails, and a personalized onboarding dashboard to make the affiliate partnership creation process user-friendly.


Methodology

To be considered for this list, products must meet the following criteria:

  • Have at least 20 unique product reviews published on Capterra within the past two years, with an average rating of 3.0 or higher (as of Sep. 27, 2023).

  • Show evidence of offering affiliate functionality as demonstrated by publicly available sources, such as the vendor’s website.

  • Serve North American users, as demonstrated by the product reviews submitted from that region.

  • Be relevant to software buyers across industries or sectors—in other words, no “niche” solutions that cater exclusively to one specific type of user—as determined by our analysis of user reviews and/or market research.

  • Achieve a minimum normalized overall user rating after normalizing and weighing review recency. See the description under the “scoring” section.

  • Achieve a minimum popularity score.

Scoring

To arrive at a final score for each product:

  • Scores are calculated for the user ratings dimension based on the overall average user ratings. Average product ratings are normalized for recency and volume of reviews.

  • The popularity score is calculated by analyzing the search volume for each product and scaling the findings to a score between 0 to 50. 

  • Scores for each dimension are scaled to a maximum of 50.

  • The final score is a combination of popularity and user ratings scores.

Read more about our editorial independence.

Products evaluated for the pricing calculation were taken from Capterra’s affiliate software directory. The pricing ranges exclude freemium versions of the products. The features highlighted were identified based on their relevance and the percentage of products in the Capterra directory that offer them. Only products with publicly available pricing information, as of Sep. 27, 2023, were considered for pricing calculation.


Looking for Marketing Automation software? Check out Capterra's list of the best Marketing Automation software solutions.

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About the Author

Ashish Upadhyay profile picture

Ashish Upadhyay is a content writer at Capterra, helping small businesses identify the right software for their business needs by analyzing user reviews data for the highest rated products in relevant software categories. Prior to joining Capterra, he worked in insurtech, fintech, and real estate. Specializing in marketing, project, and IT management, Ashish’s works have been featured in MAST magazine and Medium. In his free time, he enjoys working out and playing video games.

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