PartnerStack affiliate software: Features, integrations and pricing

Brands like yours might have hundreds of affiliate partnerships and campaigns to manage at the same time. Affiliate tracking software lightens the load by tracking campaign performance like clicks, affiliate sales, and conversions. You can also use affiliate software to generate historical reports and gather insights to support your affiliate programs. 

PartnerStack is one of the industry’s leading affiliate marketing software. We’ll walk through the platform’s core features, including tracking and attribution, integrations, customer satisfaction reviews, and pricing. Then, we’ll introduce and compare Tapfiliate as an alternative to help you determine which can best support your affiliate marketing strategy. 

PartnerStack Affiliate Tracking

PartnerStack is an affiliate management software that serves mid-market B2B SaaS clients with affiliate programs. The company prides itself on merging its tracking, analytics, and partner recruitment services across many different platforms, including: 

• Marketing channels for affiliates and influencers
• Referral channels like agencies and existing customers
• Reseller channels to submit deals directly
• Multi-channel approaches for managing multiple campaigns across different platforms at once

The platform serves three main types of clients: brands, agencies that manage other bands’ affiliate programs, and affiliate publishers. 

PartnerStack Features

Branded assets for affiliates:

PartnerStack’s “Activate” features cover everything you need to do to set up an affiliate campaign. Here’s how the company helps you prep partners for affiliate marketing campaigns. 

• Dedicated partner portal: Provide all the resources your affiliates need in their dedicated portal page. Make announcements, customize content, and toggle individual rewards and commissions, complete with detailed reports for each affiliate. 
• Branded emails: You can breeze through affiliate communication with automated email workflows with triggers based on predetermined criteria (i.e., signups). Plus, you can include trackable referral links in every email. 
• PartnerStack’s Learning Management System (LMS): Stressing about partner onboarding with your brand’s unique values and content? You can create custom, interactive courses on PartnerStack for your affiliates with rich media content, course progress tracking, and even rewards for completion so that your onboarding process is smooth. 
• Co-branded promotional materials: Your affiliate publishers put a lot of work into their branding, too. Let them show it off with co-branded content that they can include through PartnerStack’s co-brandable PDF templates and automated social media campaigns. 

PartnerStack affiliate tracking

Partnerstack offers the following features to help you track progress on your affiliate leads and conversions: 

• Link tracking: You can create unique referral links with automated UTMS to distinguish different groupings for every affiliate. From there, you can track how much traffic is coming to your site and which affiliates are converting leads to customers. 
• Lead sharing: Something that sets PartnerStack apart from other affiliate software is its unique lead routing feature. You can assign qualified leads automatically to your affiliates, increasing your chances for conversion. The platform allows this through seamless integration with your CRM of choice. 
• “Deals” for resellers: Track the entire “deal” journey via custom forms for your resellers and updates through your CRM. 
• Integrations for data sharing: PartnerStack offers integrations with top marketing and business software, along with custom integrations via their API. 

Unique commissions and rewards:

PartnerStack helps you to reward your affiliates via: 

• Unique commission structures and rewards: Pick from flat fee or percentage-based commissions and rewards. You can even set up unique reward structures for partner groups, all automated.  
• Automated payments: PartnerStack automatically calculates rewards and commissions for each affiliate. They also enable payouts immediately for affiliates to withdraw, which fosters engagement and builds trust with your affiliate partners. 
• Fraud prevention: Notice any funny clicks in your report? Even if you don’t catch it, PartnerStack will in its automatic scans for all transactions and affiliate program applications. 

Reports and analytics:

PartnerStack’s data reports can help you to check your partner’s performance and improve your program. 

• Revenue: View each affiliate’s or partner group’s revenue performance, including lifetime revenue. 
• Leads and deals: You can view the customer journey with labels like “new lead” and “qualified lead.” Plus, PartnerStack offers filterable bar graphs to show monthly lead types. 
• ROI: Share detailed ROI reporting with your partners to help them improve their strategies.

Affiliate recruitment:

Access potential affiliate partners through PartnerStack’s recruiting features. 

• PartnerStack Marketplace: Advertise your program to over 80,000 affiliate publishers
• Filter partners: Search for partners based on audience, industry, and channels
• Application management: Auto-approve affiliates and streamline applications with branded forms

Customization

Overall, PartnerStack offers customization potential through their ability to create custom integrations through their API. However, their reporting capabilities aren’t as customizable to as many metrics as some of their competitors. Leila B, a growth strategist reflects this:

I also would really like reporting to be a bit more searchable, sortable, and customizable.

PartnerStack Integrations

Partnerstack displays 8 ready-to-go integrations on their website: 

• Slack
• Google Sheets
• Stripe
• Pipedrive
• Recurly
• Chargebee
• Salesforce

However, they also add that they integrate with the market’s most common marketing, sales, and business intelligence software. Additionally, PartnerStack offers custom integrations through their API. 

PartnerStack pricing

PartnerStack doesn’t display set pricing on their website. Instead, they invite interested brands to contact them for a consultation to discuss a pricing plan tailored to their unique business needs. You’ll need to include your number of employees, business details, and the type of service you’re looking for. The three options given are: 

• You’re a brand that wants to manage your own affiliate program. 
• You’re an agency that manages affiliate and partner programs for multiple brands. 
• You’re an affiliate marketer looking for affiliate programs to join. 

Still, PartnerStack highlights that all customers benefit from: 

• Access to PartnerStack Marketplace: You can promote their affiliate program to PartnerStack’s roster of over 80,000 B2B-focused publishers.
• Automated payments: Toggle automatic payments to your partners each month with your desired billing method. 
• Partner journey automation: Scale your affiliate program to unlimited affiliates via automated onboarding materials.
• Reports and analytics: Track individual affiliate performance or merge data to track groups of affiliates in PartnerStack’s analytics suite. 

It’s worth noting that customer reviews say PartnerStack’s pricing is expensive compared to other providers.

PartnerStack Customers

PartnerStack serves over 500 mid-market B2B SaaS companies with affiliate and referral programs. Additionally, they also service individual affiliate publishers. The platform’s SaaS clients range in niches from call center tech like Aircall and CallRail to project management software like monday.com. 

Other notable clients include landing-page builder Unbounce, email marketing automation platform Omnisend, and customer service platform Gorgias. 

PartnerStack Reviews

PartnerStack averages a 4.8-star rating on Capterra. Reviewers on Capterra speak highly of PartnerStack’s seamless integrations, accessible customer support, and comprehensive management features for the entire affiliate funnel. Negative reviews touch upon the difficulties clients face in exporting report data, as well as long loading times, limited currency options, basic mobile displays, and even an instance of fraudulent clicks from one brand client. 

G2 shows a similar trend of positive reviews for PartnerStack with an average 4.7-star rating. Positive reviews cover a robust incentive and rewards program for affiliates, specialty knowledge for B2B SaaS clients, quick payments, and a clean UI and UX. Negative reviews feel quite specific and subjective to different clients, like an agency craving more user permission capabilities for security, or limited payment methods for affiliates. More common issues included clunky trigger capabilities, occasional errors and glitches, and limited customization and filtration for reports. 

The Ultimate Guide to Choosing an Affiliate Tracking Software

Step 1: Define Your Needs and Objectives

You won’t pick the right affiliate software until you understand why you need it. Be specific — what do you hope to achieve with an affiliate marketing solution? 

Are you mainly looking for a place to discover and recruit new affiliates? Do you need a platform that helps you identify affiliate transaction trends over time with digestible, insight-rich reports? Or maybe your existing affiliate program has flatlined, and you’re looking to scale. 

Remember, don’t just pigeonhole your objectives to your budget and revenue goals. Consider what kind of features would make life easier for you and your team members, too. 

Step 2: Dive into Research Mode

Roll up your sleeves and get deep into Google’s SERPs. Look for affiliate marketing software for your brand’s specific vertical or niche. If you notice any, stick them to the top of your list because that specialized knowledge isn’t easy to find. But most affiliate software companies will have experience across many different niches. 

Look at company websites and social media profiles, testimonials, review sites, and alternatives for a balanced review. Up next? The most important part of your research: features. 

Step 3: Complete a Thorough Feature Comparison

Most affiliate marketing platforms offer similar features at first glance. At the very least, a mechanism for affiliate tracking, specifically links or cookies to capture conversions. On top of that, you’ll usually see features for affiliate management, performance incentives, integrations with other SaaS tools, and reporting features. 

But one software might offer expanded capabilities for a specific feature. For example, Tapfiliate offers custom integrations via the Rest API, helping you integrate your brand’s entire tech stack with our affiliate platform for the most seamless and efficient experience. 

Write down your highest-priority features and capabilities and compare price points for the software that offer them. Make sure to cross-reference those features with reviews to ensure they work well in practice. 

Step 4: Put Your User Experience First

“Drives revenue” and “engages affiliates” won’t mean much to your brand if nobody knows how to use the software. Are the web elements intuitive? Do the features feel clunky? A strong UI/UX is a non-negotiable for affiliate software. 

Step 5: Check Compatibility for Integration

Let’s say your leading contender for affiliate software boasts 100 integrations. Only problem? None of those include any of the SaaS tools in your tech stack. For example, a Teachable integration doesn’t mean much if you don’t sell courses. Similarly, not having a MailChimp integration might mess up your email marketing productivity if you use it a lot for your affiliate program. 

Step 6: Complete a Price Evaluation and Value Assessment

Most affiliate platforms offer subscription tiers, with pricier ones including more features. Go through each tier’s features with a fine-toothed comb and assess their potential value for your business. You can also peruse through reviews for any comments about tier value and pricing. 

Step 7: Test Drive for a Confident Purchase

See any free trials among your affiliate software contenders? You might spend anywhere from $100 to $5,000 per month on an affiliate program, so this is a great opportunity to test out your potential investment. 

Try out a few and compare how things feel, which features feel most valuable and assess pricing against your experience, too. 

Step 8: Secure Your Affiliate Pperations

Did you know legitimate traffic is no longer a given in the affiliate marketing world? Unfortunately, not all affiliates are honest about their traffic sources. 

But a solid affiliate marketing solution should have mechanisms in place to detect fraudulent clicks and prevent fraud in general. On top of that, check your affiliate software’s website for any information about security measures, including data encryption and GDPR compliance. If you don’t see anything on their site, make sure you inquire. 

Step 9: Check for Reliable Customer Support

Say you have an affiliate who hasn’t received their payment, but everything looks good on your end. So you contact customer support, only to be left hanging for a couple of days. That’s not a good look for your brand rep and could sacrifice affiliate trust. Or what if you can’t access an important report for a meeting? Maybe it’s just a bug, but there should be a responsive point of contact that you can rely on to fix it. 

These are just one of the many reasons why solid customer support is essential for any affiliate tracking software that you pick. 

Look at each software’s customer support options. Do they have a 24/7 hotline or live chat? Plus, look carefully at reviews to identify any snags in the platform’s customer service. 

Tapfiliate: A Versatile Alternative to PartnerStack for Affiliate Tracking

PartnerStack succeeds in delivering a smooth experience for most of their customers. However, you might crave more flexibility when it comes to report filters, currency types for payouts, and affordable pricing. Plus, you might want to work with affiliate software that has a wider customer base than just established B2B SaaS brands. Maybe you’re a small business and your vertical is ecommerce. 

Tapfiliate meets these needs where PartnerStack falls short, serving a roster of large and small businesses across many niches, as well as both B2B and B2C brands. 

Tapfiliate is a versatile substitute to PartnerStack, and is a solution for handling all aspects of your affiliate programs whether they are SAAS, Ecommerce, or anything in between.

Reporting in Real-Time: Tracking and Attribution

Tapfiliate tracks affiliate performance from every angle. You can track customer behavior via click tracking or affiliate performance through link and coupon code tracking. Plus, our reporting analytics help you assess tracking data by country, product, date, and individual partners or partner groups. 

The best part? You can see all this data in real-time. We also help brands improve performance by letting them plug-in conversion goals to compare with real-time results. 

Integrations

Tapfiliate offers over 35 super-simple integrations that you can enjoy in just a couple of clicks! These include payment gateways like Stripe and PayPal, educational platforms like Campwire and Teachable, and ecommerce platforms like Wix and SquareSpace. 

If you don’t see your favorite tools on our integration list, don’t worry. You can usually create a custom integration via our Generic JavaScript Integration Guide or REST API Integration guide.

Affiliate Recruitment:

Think of your returning customers — they’re happy with your products and continue to support your brand. Tapfiliate recognizes that these are your best advocates, presenting a fabulous opportunity for referral marketing. 

That’s why we introduced our Referral Program, which lets you tap into the genuine satisfaction of your customers as a marketing technique. Our platform lets you automate invitations to existing customers to turn them into your affiliates!

Access to a Partner Network

No matter which subscription plan you choose, you’ll have access to the Admitad Partner Network if you sign on with Tapfiliate. This helps you put your brand on the radar of 100,000 potential affiliates, who can begin promoting your products immediately.

Flexible Commissions

Your affiliates won’t care much for a gift basket of fancy chocolates. Or at least, you can add that only after your affiliates feel well compensated for their hard work. Tapfiliate’s method? Flexible commissions (recurring, lifetime, or percentage-based commissions) and performance bonuses. Lifetime commissions give affiliates commissions for all subsequent purchases made from their original lead. 

Set up varying commission rates for different partners, and automate rate increases to match performance goals. You can also use similar goal-setting to enable automated rewards. 

✅ Lifetime commissions

✅ Recurring commissions

✅ Fixed or percentage-based commissions

✅ SKU-specific commission rates

Automation

New customer or conversion? Increased commission rate? Affiliate accepted to your program? These are all common events in an affiliate program — but confirming your approval and notifying everyone gets exhausting and repetitive. Tapfiliate helps you automate affiliate approval, notifications, and emails with preset triggers and webhooks to streamline your workflow. 

And if you have a certain task or process that can’t be completed with a custom trigger? Tapfiliate offers a Zapier integration to help you customize your workflow automation to the max. 

✅ Auto-approved affiliates

✅ Custom triggers

✅ Automated refund and dispute handling

✅ Zapier integration

Pricing:

• Essentials: $89/month. This affordable plan gives you everything you need to launch and manage a fruitful affiliate program. 
• Pro: $149/month. Add more sophisticated features and capabilities to expand your affiliate network and scale your program. 
• Enterprise: Custom pricing for every brand’s visionary needs, including unlimited tracking, premium support, and custom verbiage 

Try Tapfiliate out for yourself with a 👉 free 14-day trial.

Customer Support

Even marketing experts need support navigating new tech. That’s why Tapfiliate prioritizes the human element in our software, which means impeccable customer service to support our clients’ goals. 

Our commitment to customer satisfaction shines through in our 92% user rating score on Intercom, average 4.5-star rating on Capterra, and numerous positive reviews on other review sites. 

We offer a knowledge base with helpful articles to help your brand marketing team solve issues independently. Additionally, our live chat function and 24/7 customer service team of skilled experts offer support for more in-depth inquiries. 

Tapfiliate vs PartnerStack

Pricing

Tapfiliate’s pricing is more transparent than PartnerStack and offers a more affordable option for newer businesses just dipping their toes into the affiliate game via the basic plan. 

PartnerStack doesn’t publicize pricing, but reviews imply that their plans are generally more expensive than Tapfiliate’s and other affiliate software on the market. 

Tracking:

Tapfiliate offers real-time tracking for affiliate links, coupon codes, and cookies for clicks. PartnerStack doesn’t mention real-time tracking capabilities on its site, though they stand out with their qualified lead tracking. 

Affiliate Program Management

Tapfiliate offers more customization options than PartnerStack to manage your affiliate program. While both platforms offer custom integrations to support businesses, Tapfiliate’s reporting features get more granular. 

PartnerStack does mention “filterable” data in their leads report section, but they don’t go into much detail about the types of filters. Meanwhile, Tapfiliate offers real-time reporting in a user-friendly dashboard that you can filter and customize to your heart’s content. Assess commissions, clicks, and revenue for one-off sales, batch orders, or coupon orders. Plus, you can produce appealing visualizations for all those items filtered by date, country, asset types, partner, and more. 

Support

Both Tapfiliate and Partnerstack have positive reviews and demonstrated customer satisfaction when it comes to support and responsiveness. You can access customer service on both platforms relatively easily through live chat functions, social media, and knowledge-rich articles on their websites.  

Reviews

Reviews for PartnerStack and Tapfiliate are both positive, though PartnerStack has a slightly higher average rating on Capterra. 

PartnerStack Affiliate Tracking Software FAQs

What is PartnerStack?

PartnerStack is an affiliate tracking software that primarily serves mid-market B2B SaaS businesses. The platform stands out with its unique lead routing features, and also includes partner recruitment capabilities through the PartnerStack Marketplace. 

What are the Limitations of PartnerStack?

PartnerStack is limited by its expensive pricing and limited customization features. Moreover, some B2C clients in different niches might not feel like PartnerStack’s ideal client, since the platform specializes in helping B2B SaaS businesses. 

Who are PartnerStack’s Competitors?

PartnerStack is an affiliate marketing software with a special focus on SaaS clients. Their competitors include Tapfiliate, Refersion, Post Affiliate Pro, Brandbassador, and UpPromote. 

1. Tapfiliate: Breeze through your affiliate marketing management tasks with Tapfiliate’s wide range of features to drive your revenue. This cloud-based tool offers flexible commissions, real-time sales and conversion tracking, custom integrations, automated workflows, and detailed reports by affiliate, location, product, and more to improve your strategy. 
2. Refersion: This affiliate software helps you discover new affiliate partnerships, track campaign performance, toggle commissions, and streamline affiliate marketing tasks with integrations. 
3. Post Affiliate Pro: This affiliate tracking tool offers a cloud-based solution to track affiliate
   performance, generate trend reports, and smooth out affiliate operations with ample plug-ins and integrations. 
4. Brandbassador: This affiliate management software is especially aimed at ecommerce businesses with influencer affiliates and content creators. It includes affiliate engagement via gamification, detailed reporting, link, and coupon tracking. 
5. UpPromote: Track links, coupon codes, and customer actions in real time with UpPromote’s affiliate solution. This company also offers flexible payments, customizable campaign templates, and a referral program. 

Looking for an alternative to PartnerStack? Check out our alternatives page.

Start tracking affiliate sales today with Tapfiliate’s 👉 free 14-day trial