Running multiple websites with dozens of affiliate links used to be a nightmare for our team.
We remember spending hours each week manually checking if links were still working, trying to remember which products we’d promoted where, and completely losing track of what was actually making money.
That’s why choosing the right plugin to manage affiliate links is crucial, as it affects your affiliate sales.
We tested multiple solutions in the market and picked the 5 most popular affiliate marketing plugins for WordPress in this article and made their detailed comparison.
We hope that it’ll help you to start getting more leads and grow your business.
Let’s dive in!
How to Choose the Right Plugin for Affiliate Marketing?
Before we get to the comparison, you should know that there are 2 common types of WordPress affiliate marketing plugins.
The first plugin type helps you manage your affiliate links. It’s your choice if you have a blog and want to increase your income by promoting affiliate links from third-party publishers.
By using this kind of affiliate marketing plugin, you should be able to:
- Shorten your affiliate links, manage and place them across your site
- Track the performance of your affiliate campaigns
- Show affiliate ads based on your audience’s geolocation
- Get advanced data from Google Analytics
The second type of WordPress affiliate marketing plugin allows you to create an affiliate marketing platform.
It’s the right fit for you if you have your own products and want other people to promote and sell them.
A good plugin for creating affiliate marketing platforms should help you:
- Accept new affiliates and manage existing ones
- Track the performance of your affiliates
- Make payouts to your affiliates
- Customize your referral rate types
Both types of affiliate marketing plugins also have common factors that you should consider:
- Ease of use: The easier it is to set up and start using the plugin, the more affiliate sales you can make.
- Customer support: If you face any issues using a plugin, it’s great if you can get quick and professional help.
- Value for money: Since most of the best WordPress plugins aren’t free, you should aim to get the most value for your money.
Now, let’s look at the best affiliate plugins for your site.
1. AffiliateWP
AffiliateWP is one of the best WordPress plugins for affiliate marketing. Using it, you can get your affiliate program up and running in minutes, even if you’re not a tech-savvy person.
This plugin comes with powerful tools and features that allow you to manage your affiliates and boost your sales.
What impressed us most during testing was how AffiliateWP handles complex tracking scenarios.
The plugin accurately tracks conversions across multiple pages, handles recurring commissions for subscription products, and provides real-time reporting that both you and your affiliates can trust.
The referral tracking works flawlessly even with caching plugins and CDNs. It also has an affiliate area where your affiliates can get their referral links and have a detailed overview of their income.
Plus, AffiliateWP has integration with popular WordPress membership plugins and email marketing services. This list includes MailChimp, GetResponse, BuddyPress, and more.
This way, you can increase the number of your affiliate sales by sending promotional email newsletters to your mailing list.
Features:
- Quick and easy setup. Launch an affiliate program on your WordPress site in minutes, regardless of your technical experience.
- Easy affiliate registration. Get more affiliates with a convenient and customizable registration form that comes with AffiliateWP.
- Real-time reports. View detailed data about your affiliates’ performance in live mode without delays.
- Affiliates management. Approve new registrations with one click, edit affiliate accounts, set referral rates, and more.
- Fast payments. Pay your affiliates to their bank accounts in 37 countries using the integrated payouts service.
- Affiliate coupon tracking. Create coupon codes so that your affiliates can get referral rewards by promoting them.
- Referral link generator. The built-in AffiliateWP referral link generator allows your affiliates to quickly create their referral links in the affiliate dashboard.
- Powerful support. World-class customer service that is always ready to help you with any questions.
Our Verdict: AffiliateWP is the clear winner if you want to create your own affiliate program. The plugin provides everything you need to recruit affiliates, track their performance, and manage payments professionally.
Cost: Starts at $149.50/year.
2. PrettyLinks
PrettyLinks is another popular WordPress plugin for affiliate link management. It has over 300,000 active installations and tons of positive reviews.
You can use it to shorten your affiliate links using your domain name. It makes them look more trustworthy to your visitors, which leads to a growth in your affiliate sales.
What we appreciate most about PrettyLinks is its reliability. The plugin handles redirects quickly and accurately, which is crucial for maintaining good user experience and SEO rankings.
We’ve never experienced issues with broken redirects or lost tracking data, even during high-traffic periods.
In addition, this plugin intelligently places your affiliate links throughout the content of your website.
Due to that, you can be sure that you won’t lose any opportunities to promote your links and increase affiliate profits.
Features:
- Custom link shortener. Turn your long default affiliate links into short and attractive ones to increase their click-through rate and start getting more leads.
- Intuitive interface. View and sort data on your affiliate links’ performance in a clean and user-friendly plugin interface.
- Branded links. Brand your short links to make them more credible to visitors and increase the number of clicks on them.
- Automatic link placement. PrettyLinks automatically places your affiliate links throughout your site, so you can save more time.
Our Verdict: Pretty Links is perfect for affiliate marketers who want clean, trackable links without complexity. It handles the essentials extremely well and has proven reliable across years of heavy use. If you’re promoting other people’s products and need better link management, this is an excellent choice.
Cost: Free to download, and paid plans start at $99.60/year.
3. MonsterInsights
MonsterInsights is the #1 WordPress analytics plugin on the market, trusted by over 3 million users worldwide.
It allows you to integrate Google Analytics with your site in a few clicks without editing your site’s code. Plus, MonsterInsights shows you actionable insights on how your visitors use your site.
You can better understand your audience and attract more traffic from search engines using this information.
While reviewing and testing, we found that MonsterInsights makes it easy to set up affiliate link tracking without touching any code.
The plugin automatically detects outbound links and can classify them as affiliate links based on domains you specify. This automated tracking ensures we capture data on all affiliate interactions without manually tagging every single link.
Besides that, the enhanced eCommerce tracking feature is particularly valuable when combined with affiliate marketing. We can see the complete customer journey from initial blog post visit to affiliate purchase, helping us identify the most effective content for driving conversions.
This data has helped us focus our efforts on high-converting topics and optimize underperforming pages.
Features:
- Affiliate links tracking. MonsterInsights collects comprehensive data on clicks on your affiliate links and ads placed on your site.
- Advanced Google Analytics integration. Get detailed Google Analytics reports right in your WordPress dashboard without leaving your site.
- Page-level analytics. Find out which posts and pages on your sites are most popular with your audience and adjust your content strategy.
- Real-time statistics. Learn who is online on your site, what they’re doing, and where they came to your site from.
Our Verdict: MonsterInsights is essential if you want to understand the bigger picture of your affiliate marketing performance. The analytics insights will help boost affiliate revenue. Plus, it’s not a complete affiliate management solution, but the tracking and reporting capabilities are unmatched.
Cost: Free to download, and paid plans start at $99.50/year.
4. ThirstyAffiliates
ThirstyAffiliates is one of the most powerful WordPress plugins for affiliate link management.
The standout feature that sets Thirsty Affiliates apart is its automatic link localization capability. When we set up affiliate links for international programs like Amazon Associates, the plugin can automatically redirect visitors to their local Amazon store while maintaining our affiliate tracking.
This geographic targeting has increased our conversion rates significantly in international markets.
Using this plugin, you can also shorten your affiliate links, insert them into blog posts on your site, and check how many clicks they get.
It also comes with plenty of useful features like smart uncloaking, third-party link importing, and many more.
Over 400,000 site owners already use ThirstyAffiliates to promote their affiliate links and boost their affiliate sales.
Features:
- Autolink keywords. Specify keywords you want to replace with your affiliate links in your content, and Thirsty Affiliates will do that.
- Performance reports. Get detailed statistics about the number of clicks on your referral links, their CTR, and other helpful affiliate data.
- Geolocation targeting. Show different affiliate links depending on the visitor’s location to boost your sales.
- Link fixer. Stop leaving money on the table with the built-in link fixer that ensures there are no broken links on your site.
Our Verdict: ThirstyAffiliates is perfect for content creators who manage large volumes of affiliate content. The automation features are genuine time-savers, and the geographic targeting has proven valuable for international affiliate programs. If you want to streamline affiliate link management across lots of content, this plugin delivers excellent results.
Cost: Starts at $99.60/year.
5. Easy Affiliate
Easy Affiliate is another WordPress plugin designed to help you run an affiliate program on your site.
It’s a great choice if you sell products online and want other people to make money with you by promoting them.
We set up a test program for a digital product launch and found the plugin tracked conversions accurately and provided clear reporting for both merchants and affiliates.
Like AffiliateWP, this plugin allows you to manage your affiliates, track their performance, and more.
Easy Affiliate comes with built-in PayPal integration to help you pay your affiliates in a few clicks.
Features:
- Third-party integrations. Like AffiliateWP, Easy Affiliate has seamless integration with various WordPress eCommerce plugins.
- Fraud detection. Get alerts on any suspicious affiliate activity with an advanced fraud detection system.
- Live stats. As with AffiliateWP, you can get real-time reports on your affiliates’ performance metrics using this plugin.
- Affiliate dashboard. EasyAffiliate has a user-friendly dashboard where your affiliates can access metrics and creative assets.
Our Verdict: Easy Affiliate serves its purpose as a budget-friendly affiliate management solution. While it lacks the advanced features of premium plugins, it handles basic affiliate program needs reliably. For small businesses or those testing affiliate marketing for the first time, it provides good value and room to grow.
Cost: Starts at $99.60/year.
Bonus Plugin: SearchWP
SearchWP is the #1 WordPress search plugin on the market. It comes with many useful features that’ll help you improve search on your site and increase the number of affiliate sales.
Using this plugin, you can make custom fields, taxonomies, shortcodes, and other valuable data searchable.
It allows you to deliver more relevant search results to your visitors, making them spend more time on your site.
The more time they spend exploring your content, the more likely they will click on one of your affiliate links.
SearchWP also gives you complete control over your site search results.
For example, you can easily exclude any page from search or put your best selling affiliate products at the top of the search results.
Features:
- Full search customization. Customize your site’s search to suit your needs in minutes without writing a single line of code.
- eCommerce plugin integrations. Make WordPress consider product attributes when performing a search to boost your affiliate sales.
- Track your visitors’ searches. Get valuable insights into what visitors are searching for on your site so you can develop new products or content ideas.
- Enhanced media files search. With SearchWP, you can include PDF files and Office documents into search results on your site.
Cost: Starts at $99/year.
Which WordPress Plugin for Affiliate Marketing is the Best?
As we mentioned at the beginning of this article, there are 2 common types of WordPress affiliate marketing plugins.
We’ll also have 2 winners, one plugin of each type.
After comparing the top WordPress plugins for creating an affiliate platform, we believe AffiliateWP is the best option.
That’s the most comprehensive and easy-to-use solution you can use to launch your affiliate platform in minutes.
With AffiliateWP, you can easily accept and manage affiliates, get real-time reports, and make payouts with just a few clicks.
This plugin also seamlessly integrates with the most popular WordPress eCommerce and membership plugins, so you can give your affiliates more ways to sell and promote your products.
In addition, using AffiliateWP, you can always get help from the professional support team. There is also an extensive knowledge base for advanced users who prefer to learn how the plugin works on their own.
As for the best WordPress plugin for managing affiliate links, our top pick is ThirstyAffiliates.
That’s not only a link management plugin but also a tool that allows you to start getting more leads.
Thirsty Affiliates automatically places your affiliate links across your site. This way, you can maximize the number of clicks on them and save a lot of time while doing affiliate marketing.
We hope that this article helped you find the best affiliate marketing plugin for your WordPress website. You may also want to see our list of 5 best WordPress eCommerce plugins for digital downloads and 7 best WordPress search plugins to boost your site search.
If you’re ready to launch your affiliate program using the most powerful WordPress plugin, you can get started with AffiliateWP here.
And if you want to improve your WordPress search, then get started with SearchWP here.
