The Best Affiliate Management Software On The Market Right Now

Imagine your business is booming, and the key reason is your successful affiliate marketing program. Your affiliates are bringing in a flood of new customers, and while it’s great, it can quickly become overwhelming. When managing this celebration of your brand starts to feel like a logistical nightmare, what should you do? The answer is simple and elegant – you need the best affiliate marketing tools.

Even if this isn’t your current situation, and you’re just looking to attract new customers and build a loyal force to drive your business forward, you need two things:

1. An affiliate marketing program
2. Affiliate management software (or referral program software)

In both scenarios, leveraging the power of affiliates can bring a wave of new customers your way. Fantastic, right? But with great success comes great responsibility (and the potential for a spreadsheet headache).

Managing all those clicks, conversions, and commissions can quickly turn into a stressful multitasking marathon. No one needs that! That’s why we’ve reviewed 12 solutions to help you manage your affiliate marketing efforts, ranging from simple options for beginners to feature-rich tools for seasoned pros.

12 Best Affiliate Software: A Matrix of Top Solutions From Beginner to Pro 

It is well known that affiliate programs have emerged as a cornerstone strategy for businesses aiming to expand their reach, increase sales, and build lasting partnerships. However, in the spirit of full disclosure, we have to say one thing: the effectiveness of an affiliate program hinges on the tools used to track, manage and optimize it. 

While it might seem exaggerated, in reality, affiliate management can either be a breeze or take a giant chunk of your time. And the only difference here is the affiliate management platform you choose. Proper software can transform a fledgling affiliate program into a well-oiled revenue-generating machine.

Yet, the task of finding the right affiliate management platform may seem daunting (especially considering what we have just told you). Unless… You have a curated list of affiliate management software that assesses all the main aspects – interface simplicity and variety of features. What else do you need from your affiliate management software?!  

#1 Referral Factory

📺 Interface: User-friendly

🛠️ Functionality: Feature-rich and versatile

💸 Starting Price: $95 / month

Referral Factory is one of the best affiliate management software for two simple reasons: it is both beginner-friendly and full of advanced features. That’s a rather unusual combination for one platform, right? It means that this affiliate platform is perfect for beginners and seasoned professionals alike. 

If you take a look at Referral Factory’s dashboard, you’ll see that it is very easy to understand without any guidance. That’s why it’s a popular pick for both businesses that already have experience managing an affiliate program and those that are only starting out.

One huge advantage of Referral Factory is its Affiliate & Referral Program Marketplace. All potential customers (no matter what plan they choose) can list their referral or affiliate program for free. As a result, every business has a chance to increase its reach and get new affiliate partners without any extra spending. It is like your personal affiliate finder.

Another thing every marketer appreciates is its versatility. You can run multiple affiliate programs and track affiliate sales easily. And, what distinguishes this affiliate tracking software even further is that it can be used to track customer, partner or influencer referrals as well. By combining different managing and tracking tools, Referral Factory works for a variety of industries, whether it’s finance and education or SaaS companies. 

💁 What do customers say?

#2 Affiliatly

📺 Interface: Beginner-friendly

🛠️ Functionality: Basic-featured 

💸 Starting Price: $16 / month

Affiliatly is another tool for affiliate tracking. It is simple to use without any technical skills and you can set it up with a couple of clicks (almost). This affiliate marketing software has a strong focus on eCommerce brands. So, if you’re using Shopify, WooCommerce or any of the other major eCommerce platforms, this might be the right affiliate management software for you. You can track current and new affiliates by using links, QR codes, coupons, emails, product IDs, or tags. 

It is known to be very easy to use, and that’s the first thing most customer reviews mention. The support team is also highly praised for their responsiveness and willingness to implement custom requirements; any issues are very likely to be quickly resolved. 

Overall, if you are looking for beginner-friendly affiliate tracking software for your online store,  this is a good choice. Sure, the features are a little more limited, but it could be a plus if your affiliate marketing strategy doesn’t require them. 

💁 What do customers say?

#3 PartnerStack

📺 Interface: User-friendly

🛠️ Functionality: Feature-rich

💸 Starting Price: Custom pricing

PartnerStack is a comprehensive affiliate management platform that goes beyond managing and tracking affiliates. It offers a range of tools for campaign and lead management, as well as an email marketing campaign editor. As a result, you can create diverse partner programs and track sales easily. 

It is one platform that has pretty much anything you need for your affiliate management, from a transparent affiliate payout system to an easy user interface. It’s a decent tool for both affiliates and businesses. However, PartnerStack does have some drawbacks. It is not mobile-friendly, which can be a limitation for users who need to manage their affiliate programs on the go. It also tends to be on the expensive side!

💁 What do customers say?

#4 Refersion

📺 Interface: Easy to use

🛠️ Functionality: Mid-level features

💸 Starting Price: $99 / month (billed annually)

Refersion is an affiliate management platform that offers advanced features for both affiliates and brands. Who can benefit from this affiliate software? Different businesses, from local service companies to major eCommerce platforms, can use it to manage and pay affiliates.

This option is also a good tool for influencer marketing, as it allows you to attract potential affiliates with well-structured paying commissions. Plus, on their Refersion marketplace, you can find over 5000 affiliate partnerships with bloggers, influencers, or content creators. 

Refersion enhances affiliate relationships through personalized affiliate portals. Affiliates can easily access their results using the Refersion app. While it features an analytics performance dashboard, it also has fraud detection that allows you to use multi-level marketing safely. 

💁 What do customers say? 

#5 Levanta

📺 Interface: Beginner-friendly

🛠️ Functionality: Limited

💸 Starting Price: $150 / month (plus 5% of affiliate sales revenue)

The success of your affiliate program will depend on your affiliate network, affiliate partners, and overall marketing strategies. Yet, another thing that always matters is your business goals. Levanta is good affiliate software for a specific niche – Amazon sellers. So, this tool mainly helps to facilitate communication and overall collaboration between sellers and creators. 

For obvious reasons, the functionality is not that rich in features. Still, Levanta acts as an all-in-one Amazon affiliate dashboard, streamlining the management of affiliate links. But you have to keep in mind that if your brand isn’t “Amazon-based,” don’t expect it to be equally good for the same kind of affiliate management as other platforms. 

While it’s perfect for keeping track of Amazon affiliate links, organizing them, and ensuring you’re up to date with performance metrics, it doesn’t offer the same level of support for affiliates from other platforms.

However, what it lacks in versatility, it makes up for in specialization. The tool is specifically designed to cater to Amazon’s unique structure, making it a powerful ally if Amazon is your primary affiliate network. You’ll find features like automatic link updates, affiliate performance tracking, and centralized reporting incredibly useful.

One of the main cons is that creating custom landing pages will be more difficult with Levanta. Also, some users say there are no features that allow you to see the impact of each affiliate. 

💁 What do customers say?

#6 Post Affiliate Pro

📺 Interface: Requires training

🛠️ Functionality: Feature-rich

💸 Starting Price: $129 / month (billed annually)

Post Affiliate Pro is a well-developed affiliate management software that is good for handling a big affiliate network, as well as attracting affiliate partners. With its advanced affiliate fraud detection, Post Affiliate Pro offers a powerful marketing tool not only for accurate tracking but also for attracting high-performing affiliates. 

Is it a good choice for beginners? No, unfortunately not. Despite being extremely useful and full of advanced features, Post Affiliate Pro is really for the pros. Many users have mentioned that Post Affiliate Pro can be somewhat difficult for beginners to navigate and understand. That’s why if you are just starting out in affiliate marketing, it might not be the best option for you. 

💁 What do customers say?

#7 Affise

📺 Interface: Requires learning

🛠️ Functionality: Feature-rich

💸 Starting Price: Custom pricing

This affiliate marketing software offers an ecosystem that helps you manage affiliates and scale your affiliate program. Despite its cost efficiency compared to other tracking platforms, Affise has a learning curve that many users find challenging. 

While its rich feature set is praised, areas for improvement include customer support responsiveness, pricing plans, and integrations with other sales and marketing tools. Yet, you can rest assured that your affiliate campaigns will be safe with decent fraud detection. 

Is it beginner-friendly? Definitely not. It is clear that you should use this tool only if you have an experienced technical marketer on your team. 

💁 What do customers say?

#8 Tapfiliate

📺 Interface: Requires learning

🛠️ Functionality: Basic-featured

💸 Starting Price: $89 / month

Tapfiliate is a cloud-based affiliate software designed for e-Commerce, SaaS, B2B, and B2C brands looking to create, track, and optimize their affiliate marketing programs. While there may be a slight learning curve for those new to setting up affiliate programs, the platform strikes a balance by offering sufficient features without being overwhelmingly complex. 

Users appreciate the quick and friendly customer support, which helps ease the initial setup process and ensures smooth ongoing operations. With their branded dashboard, it should be easy to set up online payments and invite affiliates to grow your affiliate network. Yet, some users report they find the previous dashboard better. Running affiliate marketing campaigns with this software is safe due to good fraud detection. 

💁 What do customers say?

#9 HitPath

📺 Interface: Requires training

🛠️ Functionality: Basic-featured

💸 Starting Price: $1500 / month

HitPath marketing tracking software is both flexible and scalable. Its interface, while seemingly simple, does require some training to fully utilize its capabilities. Still, once users are accustomed to this affiliate management system, they find that it offers a comprehensive solution for tracking and analyzing your campaign’s performance.

HitPath is good for anyone running online marketing campaigns. It also allows you to monitor the performance of your affiliate program participants to understand who your best affiliates are relatively easily. However, it tends to be on the pricey side.

💁 What do customers say?

#10 Affiliate WP

📺 Interface: Beginner-friendly

🛠️ Functionality: Basic-featured

💸 Starting Price: $374 / year

AffiliateWP provides businesses with a reliable and easy-to-use affiliate marketing solution. Yet, this affiliate marketing tool is different from the rest we have already reviewed for one simple reason – it is a plugin designed specifically for affiliate management on WordPress sites. 

Naturally, this tool does not offer you a bunch of features. It should be easy for people who are working with WordPress and nonetheless some reviewers say that a small learning curve is needed. Anyway, if your website is based on WP, it could be a reliable choice because of its full remote API access and many integrations. 

💁 What do customers say?

#11 Everflow

📺 Interface: User-friendly

🛠️ Functionality: Feature-rich

💸 Starting Price: Custom pricing

This partner marketing platform allows you to manage and reward affiliates. With its affiliate dashboard and multiple payment options, it is quite easy to work with affiliates of different levels. It is not exactly an all-in-one solution, but it is still one of the decent affiliate marketing software choices for businesses looking to track their affiliates. 

While Everflow has a straightforward interface, it is hard to say that it is suitable for beginners. A giant flaw many people report is the fact that you have to add HTML code for your creatives. 

💁 What do customers say?

#12 Voluum

📺 Interface: Requires learning

🛠️ Functionality: Basic-featured

💸 Starting Price: $149 / month (billed annually)

Voluum is a cloud-based tool for tracking affiliate performance that also plugs right into your ads software. Despite being one of the tools that is often reviewed, it is not easy to use without training. It requires new users to go through quite a steep learning curve before actually creating your first affiliate program. 

Nonetheless, this affiliate marketing platform offers AI-powered tools that automatically optimize campaigns and distribute traffic. Additional features include social promotion, attribution modeling, conversion tracking, ROI tracking, and fraud detection.

While it is not the best choice for beginners, it still works for many businesses and marketers. If you happen to choose this tool, just make sure to request a tutorial or ask customer support for training. 

💁 What do customers say?

What Users Value the Most in Affiliate Management Software?

Now that you’re familiar with the different types of affiliate management software available, let’s tap into the wisdom of the crowd. In other words, let’s see what experienced users value the most in affiliate software:

How Future Trends Can Influence Your Choice of Affiliate Marketing Platform? 

When choosing affiliate marketing software, you have to assess many things, from its interface and usability to the quality of fraud detection. However, it’s rarely said that you need more than that. We say that you do need more. 

Today, marketing tendencies are moving like they are on a high-speed train, and changes can make your strategy a relic in no time. That’s why you have to keep an eye on trends. Yes, there are some in affiliate marketing software, too! Here are the 3 main trends to consider: 

Trend #1: The Rise of AI and Automation

Artificial intelligence and automation (which are also impacting each other) are transforming the affiliate marketing landscape. Why? AI-powered platforms can analyze vast amounts of data to predict trends, optimize campaigns, and personalize content for individual users. Businesses can use this to make informed decisions when starting their marketing campaigns to increase affiliate sales and build more efficient affiliate networks. 

This means that your choice of platform should include robust AI capabilities if you want to catch up with the trends. Automation tools are good for optimizing processes, whether you simply want to track virtually unlimited affiliates, generate reports, or pay affiliates. It is not only a matter of saving time but also of more effective affiliate program management.

Trend #2: Blurring the Lines Between Advertisers and Affiliates

One of the most significant trends is that the lines between advertisers and affiliates are beginning to get rather blurry. Traditionally, advertisers create products and services while affiliates promote them for a commission. 

However, this distinction is becoming less clear as both parties increasingly take on overlapping roles. Affiliates are now creating their own products, and advertisers are engaging in more direct sales efforts through influencer partnerships and content marketing.

As a result, it’s essential to choose affiliate management software that adapts to these evolving roles. Look for flexible, customizable software with comprehensive tracking, seamless integration with content marketing and influencer tools, multi-channel support, and collaboration features. These capabilities will ensure you stay ahead in the dynamic world of affiliate marketing.

Trend #3: Growth of Mobile and Voice Search

Mobile devices and voice search are revolutionizing how consumers discover and interact with content. Future-proof affiliate marketing platforms need to be optimized for mobile users and support voice search capabilities. 

Bonus: When You Don’t Need Affiliate Management Software

While affiliate marketing software offers numerous advantages, it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. It is not always practical for businesses to use affiliate software, and it is important to understand when you might consider holding off:

• Small-scale affiliate program: If you’re just starting out with a handful of affiliates, manual affiliate management might be sufficient. Software can become an unnecessary cost at this stage. 
• When your main goal is SEO: If your affiliates have high ranking websites on Google and all you want from them is some sturdy backlinking, then you probably don’t need complex affiliate software. That’s because you ideally don’t want to partner with more than four or five affiliates.
• Focus on in-house marketing: If your primary marketing focus is on building your own brand and customer base organically, then affiliate marketing itself might not be a top priority. Software would be an unnecessary expense in this case, and you might want to wait with it. 
• Low-value products: For products with low-profit margins, the commission payouts to affiliates might not justify the cost of the software. Carefully evaluate the cost-benefit ratio before investing in any tool. 
• Niche market with limited reach: If your target audience is highly specific and has limited online reach, affiliate marketing might not be the most effective strategy. The software won’t be that helpful if you struggle to find relevant affiliates. 

Conclusion 

Affiliate marketing is expanding and evolving, and businesses of all sizes need more sophisticated yet straightforward affiliate management software. And it’s not that easy to find such options. However, if you carefully look at your business needs and evaluate properly the specific affiliates you require, it will be much easier to understand what kind of affiliate marketing software you should choose. Go through our list once again, and make sure to choose the option that offers an easy-to-use interface and proper features to attract the best affiliates. Good luck!