Best Impact Alternatives in 2025

PartnerStack has long been considered one of the leaders in the partnership platform space, offering more than just basic affiliate link tracking and payouts. While they aim to aid with the full partnership go-to-market (GTM) strategies, the competition has caught up fast. And not by who you might think. When compared to newer players like Dub Partners who has building in stealth with some of the most impressive SaaS companies by their side, like Framer, Superhuman, and Granola (as design partners), PartnerStack gets harder and harder to justify.

Dub Partners offers more competitive pricing, a much more modern user-experience, and incredibly deep link-tracking capabilities (because Dub is a link tracking software at the core). And this ultimately leads to much better analytics for you, and your affiliate partners (e.g. what content is leading to the most revenue? Easily answered with Dub Partners, not PartnerStack).

We've tested nearly every major platform out there, from Rewardful, to FirstPromoter, to Impact, and more, and many of these are solid for simple affiliate link tracking, but don't actually give the best experience for the affiliate partner (us), which is also important. PartnerStack has set the gold standard for SaaS-focused partnership platforms (and still has one of the better UI/UX experiences), but Dub Partners has raised the standard when it comes to analytics, usability, and just overall value.

FirstPromoter suffers from the same exact core flaws we called out in the Rewardful review. Affiliates, especially your most impactful ones, will literally avoid logging into your program because they are juggling 20 separate FirstPromoter logins (one for each program they join).

Because of that, you will be stuck in a mess of admin work, from chasing invoices, manually sending payments out one by one, collecting W-9s, issuing 1099s (or W-8BENs), for every partner. And after all that, you still won't even have the tracking needed to understand what content is actually converting for your content partners. Thus, everyone is creating totally blind, not learning from prior content, and all it'll lead to is your affiliates not creating content for your software.

That mess, compared to modern affiliate platforms like Dub Partners, who are disrupting the space with unified logins (seriously, this should be table-stakes now-a-days), automated global payouts, and deep tracking. When looking at Dub Partners vs FirstPromoter, FirstPromoter feels incredibly dated and just inconvenient for both sides. When we see a company using FirstPromoter, it just tells us that they aren't actually taking their affiliate program seriously.

Cello's affiliate tools are secondary to its real purpose: enabling a peer-to-peer referral program inside your product.

If you're trying to run a serious affiliate program for creators, publishers, or influencers, Cello's barebones setup won’t meet expectations for your partners.

If you’re looking at Tapfiliate and feeling underwhelmed, you're not alone. While it technically gives you the basics to launch an affiliate program, the experience breaks down quickly, especially for SaaS companies and creators who rely on engaged, data-driven partners. Affiliates don’t want another isolated dashboard to remember, they don’t want to manually track payouts, and they definitely don't want to operate blind with no insight into which of their content is converting.

Because of that, most teams end up exploring better alternatives like Dub Partners that offer consolidated partner dashboards, automated payouts, accurate recurring revenue tracking, and analytics that actually help creators optimize their content. The right platform should make your partners excited to promote you and Tapfiliate fails at that.