“WordPress affiliate plugin” means two completely different things depending on which side of the money you’re on, and search results cheerfully mix them together. If you’re a blogger promoting other people’s products, you want a link-management tool like ThirstyAffiliates or Pretty Links. If you’re a business that wants other people promoting YOUR products, you want affiliate program software, and that’s what this guide compares.
Quick cards-on-the-table moment: Rekomi is my product, its plugin sits first in this list, and I’m not going to pretend that’s a coincidence. What I will do is earn it – every plugin below gets verified pricing from its live page, its genuine strengths, and an honest downside, and if a competitor fits you better, the scenario guide at the end will say so.
The quick picks:
Rekomi for a program that runs from wp-admin with payouts and tax forms done for you.
SliceWP for the best free starting point (10,000+ installs, 4.9/5 on wordpress.org).
Easy Affiliate if your site runs on MemberPress and you want everything from one family.
What an affiliate plugin actually does for your site
Four jobs, whatever the vendor: it gives partners a signup page and a dashboard, it tracks who referred which sale (by link, and on the better tools by coupon code too), it calculates commissions by your rules, and it gets those commissions paid. That last job is the one to interrogate hardest, because it’s where the plugins differ most – some automate PayPal, some export a file, and one on this list handles the money and the tax forms entirely.
So as you read, keep one question in front: three months from now, who’s doing the payout run, you or the software?
The comparison at a glance
| Plugin | Free core | Paid from | Works with | Payout rail |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rekomi | Plugin free, platform from $29/mo | $29/mo | WooCommerce, any site via link/coupon | Done for you (Stripe Express, PayPal) + tax forms |
| AffiliateWP | No | $149.50/yr intro | WooCommerce + 40 more | Direct Stripe/PayPal, you run it |
| SliceWP | Yes | Paid add-on plans | Woo, EDD, SureCart, memberships | Manual free; PayPal via add-on |
| Easy Affiliate | No | $99.60/yr intro | Woo, MemberPress, EDD | PayPal 1-click or mass file |
| Affiliates Manager | Yes | $39 single site | Woo, EDD, membership plugins | PayPal Mass Pay, manual |
| Solid Affiliate | No | $149.60/yr intro | WooCommerce only | One-click PayPal |
The 6 best WordPress affiliate plugins for running your own program
1. Rekomi
The short version: a hosted affiliate platform with a native WordPress plugin, so you get big-platform machinery (automated payouts, tax forms, fraud checks, first-party tracking) inside wp-admin, for a monthly price that starts lower than most annual licenses here work out to.
Rekomi‘s plugin (free in the WordPress directory) puts campaigns, affiliates, sales, payouts, and reports in your admin sidebar, and on WooCommerce stores it mints every affiliate’s code as a real Woo coupon. I spent years paying affiliates by hand across my earlier companies, and automating that exact chore is why Rekomi exists: come payout day, the money moves and the W-9s, W-8BENs, and 1099s are already collected and generated.
Pricing: $29/mo Starter, $49/mo Growth, $99/mo Pro, 14-day free trial, plus a flat 3% on affiliate payouts. No free plan.
Standouts: done-for-you payouts and tax forms; first-party tracking on your own domain (ad-blocker-proof); coupon codes as real WooCommerce coupons; one-click migration from 21 platforms; recurring commissions for subscription products.
One thing to know: your program data lives on Rekomi’s platform, not in your WordPress database. Fair trade for most, dealbreaker for self-hosting purists, and I’d rather tell you that in paragraph one than let you find out in month three.
2. AffiliateWP
The short version: the long-standing premium standard for self-hosted WordPress affiliate programs, now under the Awesome Motive umbrella, with the deepest integration catalog in the category.
AffiliateWP keeps everything in your own database and connects to just about anything a WordPress site sells through: WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, MemberPress, form plugins, 40+ in all. Their Payouts Service deserves a genuine tip of the hat: it now pays affiliates directly from your Stripe or PayPal account with no platform fee added, only your processor’s standard cut.
Pricing: annual only: $149.50 first year (renews $299/yr) up to a $349.50 Growth Bundle (renews $699/yr). No free plan or monthly billing; 14-day money-back window.
Standouts: full data ownership; 40+ integrations; W-9/W-8BEN collection built in; direct Stripe/PayPal payouts with no platform fee; a big ecosystem of docs and add-ons after a decade in market.
One thing to know: plan for the renewal price, not the intro price – Personal doubles from $149.50 to $299 in year two, and 1099 generation still isn’t included (W-9 collection yes, filing no).
3. SliceWP
The short version: the best free affiliate plugin on wordpress.org right now, and the one I’d install first if the budget is zero.
SliceWP‘s free core gives you unlimited affiliates and commissions, an auto-generated affiliate portal, and integrations well beyond WooCommerce (Easy Digital Downloads, SureCart, MemberPress, Paid Memberships Pro, and more). 10,000+ active installs at a 4.9/5 rating is the kind of scoreboard you can’t fake!
Pricing: free core; paid plans add automatic PayPal payouts, multi-level commissions, and recurring commissions. Their pricing page hides behind a bot check, so grab current numbers at slicewp.com directly.
Standouts: genuinely unlimited free tier; portal pages generated for you; works across Woo, EDD, SureCart, and membership stacks; the best free-version rating in the category.
One thing to know: free means manual payouts – you send the money yourself and mark it paid. Automatic PayPal payouts are a paid add-on, and that’s usually the upgrade moment.
4. Easy Affiliate
The short version: the affiliate plugin from the MemberPress family (Caseproof), which makes it the natural pick for membership and course sites already in that world.
Easy Affiliate covers WooCommerce, MemberPress, and Easy Digital Downloads on every tier, with PayPal one-click payouts built in. The Plus and Pro tiers add the interesting stuff: fraud detection and multi-level commissions.
Pricing: annual: Basic $99.60 first year (normally $249, 1 site), Plus $149.60 (3 sites), Pro $199.60 (5 sites). No free version (the “easy-affiliate” plugin on wordpress.org is an unrelated dead project, not theirs). 14-day refund window.
Standouts: MemberPress-native; PayPal one-click and mass-payment-file payouts on all tiers; fraud detection on Plus/Pro; the lowest first-year price of the premium self-hosted tools here.
One thing to know: fraud detection sits above the Basic tier, and renewals bill at roughly 2.5x the intro price, so read the “normally” number before you anchor on $99.60.
5. Affiliates Manager
The short version: the quiet veteran: a free, actively maintained core plugin with a cheap one-site upgrade, for stores that want simple and proven over shiny.
Affiliates Manager has 8,000+ active installs, was updated two weeks ago as I write this, and covers the fundamentals well: unlimited affiliates, real-time tracking, flat or percentage commissions per affiliate, and PayPal Mass Pay for batch payouts.
Pricing: free core on wordpress.org; premium is $39 for a single site or $97 for the developer license (their site doesn’t state a billing period, so confirm one-time vs annual at checkout).
Standouts: genuinely free core with unlimited affiliates; PayPal Mass Pay batch payouts; WooCommerce, EDD, and membership plugin integrations; the cheapest paid tier on this list by a wide margin.
One thing to know: it’s the smallest and plainest tool here – no fraud suite, no multi-level, community support on the free tier. That’s also exactly why it’s easy to run.
6. Solid Affiliate
The short version: a WooCommerce-only plugin whose whole personality is frictionless payouts: one click, PayPal, no added fees.
Solid Affiliate integrates with WooCommerce automatically (nothing extra to buy), tracks Woo coupons, and runs unlimited affiliates on every tier. If your site sells through WooCommerce and you want self-hosted with the least payout pain, this is the head-to-head with AffiliateWP worth running.
Pricing: Starter $149.60 first year (regularly $374/yr, 1 site) up to Pro $224.70 (10 sites). No free version; 30-day money-back guarantee. Note it moved from lifetime licenses to annual subscriptions, so older reviews quoting one-time prices are out of date.
Standouts: one-click PayPal payouts with 0% added fees; per-product, per-group, and per-affiliate commission rates; fraud prevention suite on Pro; store credit payouts.
One thing to know: WooCommerce is required, so membership or EDD sites need a different pick from this list.
The payout-day math nobody shows you
Here’s the thinking behind my “who runs the payouts” obsession, and I love this corner of the topic because the numbers are so concrete. Say your program grows to 30 affiliates earning $1,500/mo between them:
- Fully manual (any free tier): 30 individual PayPal sends at 3 to 4 minutes each, plus reconciling the amounts, is roughly 2 hours a month. Every month. Forever.
- Mass-pay file or one-click payouts (Easy Affiliate, Solid Affiliate, AffiliateWP): the sends collapse into one action, maybe 20 to 30 minutes with review. The January tax scramble (collecting 30 W-9s, generating 1099s for everyone over $600) is still yours.
- Done for you (Rekomi): the run happens on schedule, and the tax forms were collected at affiliate signup, so January is a non-event.
None of these is wrong. But multiply your version by 12 months before you decide, because “I’ll just do payouts by hand” is a promise almost every store owner breaks by month four – I certainly did, twice, before I automated it.
Hosted platform or self-hosted plugin?
This is the real fork in the road, so let’s make it plain. Self-hosted (AffiliateWP, Solid Affiliate, SliceWP, and friends) means the data sits in your database, there’s no ongoing platform between you and your program, and the trade is that you operate everything: payout runs, tax collection, fraud review, uptime of the tracking itself.
Hosted (Rekomi) flips the trade: the platform operates the machinery, which is how payouts, 1099s, and ad-blocker-proof first-party tracking can be included instead of being your Saturday. You give up on-server data ownership to get that. Neither answer is wrong; it’s a question about which job you want. I obviously picked a side when I built one of these, but the fork itself is honest, and plenty of stores are correctly on the other path.
Which one should you pick?
- You want the program to run itself: Rekomi. Payouts, tax forms, and tracking are the platform’s job, and the plugin keeps the whole thing inside wp-admin.
- Budget is $0: SliceWP free, then Affiliates Manager if you want the cheapest paid step-up.
- Self-hosted, maximum ecosystem: AffiliateWP.
- Membership or course site on MemberPress: Easy Affiliate.
- WooCommerce store, self-hosted, payouts are your pain point: Solid Affiliate. (Running Woo? The WooCommerce-specific version of this list goes deeper.)
FAQ
What’s the difference between an affiliate program plugin and a plugin like ThirstyAffiliates?
Direction of money. ThirstyAffiliates and Pretty Links manage affiliate links you promote as a publisher (cloaking, branding, click tracking) – they can’t run a program where partners promote you. Everything in this list is the other kind: software for running your own program.
Is there a good free affiliate plugin for WordPress?
Yes. SliceWP is the standout (unlimited affiliates and commissions free, 4.9/5 on wordpress.org), with Affiliates Manager as a solid simpler option. The consistent free-tier limit is payouts: expect to send money manually until you pay for automation.
Do I need WooCommerce to run an affiliate program on WordPress?
No. Solid Affiliate requires it, but the rest work with other setups: SliceWP and Easy Affiliate cover EDD and membership plugins, AffiliateWP connects to 40+ tools, and Rekomi can track any site via links and coupon codes, with the deepest features on Woo.
How do affiliate plugins track referrals?
A referral link drops a first-party cookie, and the sale that follows gets attributed to that affiliate; better tools add coupon-code attribution so a spoken code converts with no click at all. One detail worth caring about: tracking that loads from your own domain (rather than a third-party script) survives ad blockers, which quietly eat a meaningful slice of affiliate traffic otherwise.
What commission rate should I set?
Physical products commonly run 5% to 15%; digital products and SaaS run 20% to 30%, often recurring. Start at the generous end of your margin’s comfort zone – a rate that excites nobody saves you money on a program nobody promotes.
Your next 15 minutes
Pick the one line in the scenario list that sounds like you, install that plugin, and create a test affiliate account for yourself. Click your own link, buy something small, and watch the referral land in the dashboard. Once you’ve seen your first tracked sale, even a fake one, the rest of the program is just turning dials!
If the done-for-you fork sounds like your side, Rekomi’s 14-day trial plus the plugin gets you a live program inside wp-admin today.
