Running an affiliate program is one of the most cost-effective ways to grow a WordPress business. You only pay affiliates when they bring in a sale, you get word-of-mouth marketing from people who actually use your product, and you build a network of partners with real skin in the game.
The catch is picking the right affiliate management plugin. The WordPress affiliate plugin space is smaller than most categories, but the products inside it vary widely. Some are purpose-built for WooCommerce while others are dedicated to Easy Digital Downloads or membership sites.
There are also a handful of plugins that handle multi-level (MLM) structures, while others operate more like full SaaS platforms with a WordPress connector. The wrong choice locks you into a tool that doesn’t fit how you sell, which makes switching painful down the line.
We’ve maintained this guide since 2012, and it covers the WordPress affiliate plugins worth seriously considering today. Whether you sell digital downloads, physical products, courses, memberships, or services, there’s a strong option below.
If you’re looking for affiliate link management and cloaking plugins instead (for promoting other people’s affiliate offers on your site), see our separate guide on the best affiliate link plugins for WordPress.
These are the best WordPress affiliate plugins for 2026.
Solid Affiliate
Solid Affiliate is one of the best WordPress affiliate plugins for WooCommerce sites, as was made evident in our full Solid Affiliate review. It allows you to build, manage, and track your own affiliate program directly within your WordPress dashboard.
It offers a ton of functionality, including:
- Affiliate portal: to help empower your affiliate partners to be successful.
- Flexible configuration: whether you have a simple or complex commission structure, Solid Affiliate is built to handle it all.
- Native WooCommerce integration: no other add-ons are required, the two just work together.
- Automated payouts: automatically pay affiliate commissions directly from your WordPress dashboard by just connecting your PayPal business account.
- Email notifications: stay on top of what’s happening in your affiliate program
AffiliateWP
AffiliateWP was originally created by Pippin Williamson and is now part of Awesome Motive’s plugin portfolio. It’s the answer to all those who have been looking for a great affiliate management plugin for WordPress but always felt that something is missing in all the other solutions offered.
By signing up to AffiliateWP, you’ll get:
- Accurate affiliate tracking: the plugin tracks affiliate referrals reliably, even on servers with aggressive caching.
- Integrated payouts service: easily pay your affiliates directly to their bank accounts or debit cards.
- Real-time reporting: the plugin tracks affiliate-referred visits, referrals, earnings, and affiliate registrations in real-time, without delay.
- Unlimited affiliates: no restrictions to the number of affiliates on your affiliate program.
- Affiliate coupon tracking: easily connect coupon codes to specific affiliate accounts.
SliceWP
SliceWP is one of the most easy-to-use affiliate WordPress plugins you can find. Even if you’re not a technical person, you can get up and running with your own affiliate program in a matter of minutes. The plugin comes with a handy step-by-step setup wizard that makes it easy for you to enable the most important parts of your program, as you can see in our dedicated SliceWP review.
Besides being user-friendly, SliceWP also has a handful of powerful features that help you boost your sales and keep your affiliates happy:
- Affiliate coupons: connect affiliates to coupon codes to create special discounted promotional campaigns.
- Lifetime commissions: link customers to affiliates, so that future sales made by a customer automatically reward the linked affiliate with a commission.
- Recurring commissions: reward your affiliates with commissions for a subscription’s recurring payment.
- PayPal payouts: bulk pay your affiliates through PayPal, directly from your WordPress dashboard.
- Reports: analyze the performance of your affiliates, so you can improve your affiliate marketing strategy.
Ultimate Affiliate Pro
Ultimate Affiliate Pro has been on the market for over 10 years and is used by more than 16,000 businesses worldwide, which puts it in the same conversation as AffiliateWP when it comes to depth and stability.
What stands out about UAP is how much is included out of the box. Nearly 100 add-ons ship with the plugin, you get native multi-level (MLM) support without needing a separate extension, and there are over 40 integrations covering the most common WordPress plugins and third-party services.
With Ultimate Affiliate Pro you’ll get:
- Native MLM support: build multi-level affiliate structures directly within the plugin, without paying extra for add-ons.
- Nearly 100 add-ons included: unlock advanced functionality like coupon assignment, recurring referrals, lifetime commissions, and performance bonuses, all bundled with your license.
- 40+ integrations: works with WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, MemberPress, LearnDash, Paid Membership Pro, and most of the popular WordPress plugins you’re likely already using.
- Affiliate ranks and bonuses: motivate top performers with rank-based commission tiers, periodic bonuses, and customizable performance rewards.
- Flexible payouts and reporting: pay affiliates via PayPal, Stripe, or manually, and track everything through detailed dashboards.
Coupon Affiliates
Coupon Affiliates is a unique “Coupon Based” affiliate plugin for WooCommerce. Affiliates get their own unique coupon code to promote your store. Customers will get a discount on their purchase, and the affiliate earns a commission whenever their coupon is used.
It is a complete affiliate marketing solution. It comes with a user-friendly dashboard where your affiliates can check detailed usage statistics, track their commission, request payouts, generate referral URLs, view click history, and more.
With this plugin, you can easily add an affiliate registration form on your page using shortcode. You’ll get a notification when a user joins the affiliate program and you can easily manage the application in the backend.
To sum up, with Coupon Affiliates you’ll get:
- A nice, feature-rich affiliate dashboard.
- One-click PayPal or Stripe Payouts Option
- Affiliate Registration System
- Referral URLs and Click Tracking
- Fraud Prevention Features
- Multi-Currency Support
- Detailed Reports and Analytics
Post Affiliate Pro
Post Affiliate Pro is an affiliate software designed to empower your affiliate program. It makes it easy to manage campaigns and to track affiliate referrals and sales.
Post Affiliate Pro runs your entire affiliate program from top to bottom, with the exception of processing the financial transactions. However, most payment processors and shopping carts can be fully integrated with Post Affiliate Pro.
It’s intuitive, fast, effective, and infinitely expandable affiliate software – it will grow with you. It is a great tool to recruit and manage your affiliates as it will track your affiliate’s referrals, clicks, commissions, record payouts, and much more.
If you want to experience Post Affiliate Pro from your affiliate’s point of view and see how easy is to manage and maintain your affiliate program, you can go ahead and check out their demo.
EasyAffiliate
EasyAffiliate is a complete affiliate program plugin for WordPress. Use it to start an affiliate program for your products to dramatically increase traffic, attention and sales.
Once you launch your affiliate program with Affiliate Royale you’ll be able to easily track your affiliates to see how they’re doing. You’ll see how many clicks they’re driving, sales they’re making and how much to pay them at the end of each month.
Even better, your affiliates won’t have to go anywhere but your site (with your look & feel) to login to their Affiliate Dashboard, because it will be seamlessly integrated into your website.
With Affiliate Royale you’ll:
- Launch your affiliate program in a matter of minutes
- Monitor affiliates’ clicks, sales and payments
- Maintain your brand with your own Banners and Links
- Drive more traffic to your site from your Affiliates
- Increase revenue with more sales!
Which WordPress affiliate plugin should you choose?
There’s no single right answer. The best plugin depends on what you’re selling, who you’re recruiting, and how complex your commission structure needs to be. A quick breakdown:
- Best for WooCommerce stores: Solid Affiliate.
- Native WooCommerce integration, modern interface, and the easiest setup for a store owner who wants something that just works.
- Best established all-rounder: AffiliateWP.
- The most widely-used option in the WordPress ecosystem, with the deepest add-on library and an active team behind it at Awesome Motive.
- Best for ease of use: SliceWP.
- The friendliest option for non-technical users, with a step-by-step setup wizard and a clean affiliate dashboard.
- Best for MLM and multi-level programs: Ultimate Affiliate Pro.
- Native multi-level support is built in rather than tacked on through paid add-ons, and the included add-on library is enormous.
- Best for coupon-based programs: Coupon Affiliates.
- Built specifically around assigning unique coupon codes to affiliates, which works well for influencer-style partnerships.
- Best SaaS-style platform: Post Affiliate Pro.
- Not a native WordPress plugin in the same sense as the others, but a powerful platform with a WordPress connector for enterprise-grade tracking and reporting.
If you’re starting fresh and selling through WooCommerce, Solid Affiliate or SliceWP are the easiest paths forward. If you need depth, scale, or multi-level capabilities, AffiliateWP and Ultimate Affiliate Pro are the two heavyweights worth comparing side by side.
Whichever you pick, set your commission structure and cookie duration before you start recruiting, then build solid relationships with your partners.
28 Responses
Great product!
please can i dont know which wordpress plugin that will be good to build and manage downlines and a refferal link or that can generate a code ? please any idea help
I’ve read through this string and looking for a plug in also.
I had a partner who did all my programming and is no longer with me. She is growing a family now. I have decided to take all my work on myself using WP.
What you are all talking about is an affiliate system that’s one tier. What I am looking for is multi tier kinda of downline builder? Something that can be used for an existing MLM team. A team site with capture pages and a membership area with training and more. Something that can be connected to a commerce site or not and perhaps connected to a merchant account like paypal?
For example
1) John joins your site
2) John fills out profile with (say) a username he’d like to use and get’s his own subdomain of the main site like xyz.com/username
3) John refers Adam
4) When Adam logs in, he sees affiliate link to some xyz third party product or tool set up by the admin, which would be connected to his referrer John or the next available upline user or admin.
5) Adam fills out his profile with his own username
6) Adam refers Jill
7) When Jill logs in, she sees affiliate link to same third party product or tool, this is connected with Adam’s username.
Is there anything out there like this? Or do you all think custom programming?
Wow~
Great Post Jean,
I would also suggest you use ThirstyAffiliates Plugin because it has something very amazing for Affiliate Marketers.
I’ve been using it personally on my blog for the last few years and much like it.
#Yasar
Hey Doug, 2012 is when it was first posted. 2016 is when it was last updated, so it is mostly up-to-date right now, hence the discrepancy.
How can this post be dated December 1st, 2016 and have comments from 2012?
Could make one lose faith in WPMayor…and I would image…this list is out of date.
Hi Gaurav,
Could you clarify your request? I’m not sure what an aweber list is.
We want to give our affiliates Lead capture pages so that they save their aweber list name or detail in their affiliate panel. they promote those pages and leads got added to their aweber list. But same time they should also got added to our aweber list. Which plugin will work for this and how it is possible. Please share some detail. We are making membership based platform.
Waiting For Reply
Great article, thanks!
Have you tried our new plugin for creating and managing affiliate links –
You’re not the first one to comment about the pricing structure of AffiliateWP. I still think it’s the best plugin out there and worth the price if you’re making money from affiliates. Glad you got sorted with Affiliate Royale though.
Try AffiliateWP.
Welcome Tara, what made you skip over AffiliateWP?
I appreciated the review. You brought up programs I have not even found on the internet and I consider myself an avid researcher. I was trying to decide between WP Affiliate and Post Affiliate Pro for this new site I am launching.
The pricing on Post Affiliate Pro is quite a bit higher and so I thought it might be better and they have a long list on their site of all the benefits but I installed WP Affiliate on a clients site with their Restrict Content Pro and thought it worked very well.
Thanks for taking the time to do this review. I am going to go with WP Affiliate, one thing for sure is there website is more modern and appears more professional.
Tara
Great selection of plugins here, thank you!
Unfortunately, many of these plugins don’t cater to the shop owner who has a sales force (or multiple sales forces) out on the street selling their product in person. Earlier this year, I decided to do something about this.
I just released the WP Sales Tracking plugin on CodeCanyon. You can check it out here.
I was frustrated with not being able to easily track sales so I could pay sales reps’ commission. The only solutions available were affiliate plugins like these that created a unique URL for each sales rep. For my customers, it was asking too much to require each of them to shop through a unique URL just so the sales rep would get credit. Many are not very tech-savvy.
So, I created this plugin to make it super simple. The admin assigns sales reps to customers on the back-end, and customers can simply shop from the normal URL.
In addition, the WP Sales Tracking plugin allows for entire sales organizations to track their revenue.
There’s a beautiful front-end dashboard that provides a view into each representative’s revenue for a particular time-frame. The plugin uses order data from the WooCommerce plugin.
I really hope this helps those of you who have run into this problem. Please check it out and let me know feedback!
Affiliate WP is a great plugin with great support… HOWEVER!!! I wanted tier commission capability, they offer and add on for it for $150! You are forced to buy the ultimate license for multiple sites and multiple add ons even if you want just one add on for one site. Ridiculous! Went with Affiliate Royal, works fantastic, got all the features for half the price of Affiliate WP
Hello
I install in my wordpress this theme : Microjobs
I sell amelioration for listing
and membership packages
I want know if you know plugin affiliation can good with my theme
because i want this function (affiliate)
Regards
Cyril
(French people)
Hi Jean,
I did a little checking into AffiliateWP. From what I can tell it’s $199 per year for a simple system. I didn’t notice any discount for year two and beyond, but it might be there.
Drew may be right on how costs escalate. It looked to be about $600-700 per year for a system with add-ons.
My needs are pretty simple at present and a decent plugin that didn’t drag down on the system resources would be fine. One thing that is an issue, is automatic refunding. Some of the lower-priced plugins don’t offer it. In a product launch that generates say, 1,000 sales, a 1% refund rate is 10 manual refunds. That’s a chunk of time.
If you dig into this again, looking at critical features like that versus costs would be great.
Thanks.
I’d love to know how you arrived at the $600 figure and whether you have found any better alternatives Drew.
Affiliate WP is not the way to go for a multi tier system. With the appropriate add-ons needed ur in for over 600$…
Right now it’s Affiliate WP, that’s what I’m using myself.
Hello. Can I ask what’s the best Affiliate Plugin for you? I’m confused which one should I purchase, Affiliates Pro or Affliate WP?
Thank you for the good review. By the way, Magic Affiliate plugin is integrated with WooCommerce.
As I mentioned in the conclusion, I would go for AffiliateWP
Hello, seeing there’s so many options, can anyone tell me which is the clear winner??? Thanks.
Thanks Nick, have you tried AffiliateWP? It’s probably the leading plugin at the moment.
Hello Jean, love the site and great write-up here. I am hunting for an affiliate software/plugin right now. I currently am a paying subscriber of the WPMUDEV site and they have some great plugins and themes. I just wanted to let you and your readers know that they do not currently offer multi-tier capability to their affiliates plugin and for me and the project I am currently working on, this is a showstopper.
Cheers,
Nick
Welcome and good luck!
Thank you , this is just the information I was looking for. I have been looking for an easy integration for my wordpress sites and this was a clear and concise article.
many thanks. Now to figure which one and start getting some affiiates 🙂