Impact Review: Features, Pricing, Pros & Cons

If you are a B2B SaaS company, stay away from Impact. Let me explain: Impact was initially built specifically for large B2C eCommerce brands like GAP and coupon sites like Honey (does that sound like you?).

That said, they've saturated that market and saw the B2B SaaS space as another market to go after. Because of that, they updated their branding to include the SaaS space (largely due to getting a few big-name SaaS companies like HubSpot and ClickUp but don't let that fool you).

There's a reason why the leading B2B SaaS affiliate & referral tracking companies only work with B2B SaaS. Managing affiliates for physical product purchases from an eCommerce store and managing store coupons is a completely different beast than the recurring revenue model of SaaS.

An analogy would be someone that wants to build a web app using a tool like Shopify, all with absolutely no use for an eCommerce store. Shopify has mastered eCommerce. The software that even integrates with Shopify is eCommerce solution-focused. Using Impact for your B2B SaaS affiliate program is using the wrong tool for the wrong job.

User Experience

The part that is most baffling to me is that on one hand, B2B SaaS companies care an extreme amount about their own UI/UX and customer experience, yet all of that goes out the window when it comes to the UI/UX that the referral/partner will be experiencing on their end.

What do I mean? Well from an actual affiliate perspective, Impact is the single-most platform that we hate working with most. It's so incredibly confusing to just get a straight answer on "how many people clicked links, how many are in trial, and how many subscribed? There's so many filters and toggles and junk that was obviously added for the crazy complex campaigns required for gigantic eCommerce sites:

Competition

We've also seen countless SaaS companies go through the grueling process of integrating with them (like into their payment/accounting software for payouts and everything), only to migrate off them and onto something like PartnerStack as soon as their contract is up, after realizing that this tool wasn't built for the SaaS market, but rather retrofitted to "make it work".

Link clicking and cookie tracking is good at best—it just wasn't built to understand the complexity of SaaS which includes free trials and extended trials. Something totally foreign to the eCommerce world.

Pricing

This is also the crazy thing... Impact is one of the most expensive solutions on the market! Again, it's priced for the enterprise B2C eCommerce world. If your a small SaaS company, you're still going to pay somewhere around $10–30k/yr for Impact.

The baffling part here is that you can pay less on average and get a fully equipped Partner ecosystem platform like PartnerStack (they even offer discounts if you're early on and haven't raised much yet). Or a simple affiliate tracking solution like FirstPromoter for mid–high 4-figures per year. It just makes no sense on any front to go with Impact.

Final Thoughts

My guess as to why B2B SaaS companies are even considering Impact is because most partner managers (or operations/growth people that are thrown into and affiliate/referral marketing strategy) are just so overwhelmed by all the solutions out there, and don't quite know the distinction between each solution (P.S. we explained the differences in more detail here because it is super confusing until you understand all the terminology).

At the end of the day, if I love your software enough to want to promote it and you send me over to your affiliate program and it happens to be Impact, I'm sorry but you're just not going to get much from us or other larger affiliates/partners. It's just a pain in the ass to deal with, and we just don't trust the affiliate tracking capabilities of it at the end of they day. That's what happens when your foundation wasn't built for SaaS companies.