If you’re looking to start your affiliate program, you’ve probably heard of Rewardful. It’s affordable, easy to set up, and provides the basic features you need to run affiliate marketing. But for companies aiming to scale and focus on growth rather than administrative affiliate operations, Rewardful often isn’t enough. That’s when Dub Partners might be a better option.
In this article, we will review both platforms based on their features and pricing, so you can choose the best affiliate tracking platform for your needs.
If you are short on time, check out this summary table instead.
Partner payouts
Both Dub Partners and Rewardful support global payouts, which is a crucial feature for growing your affiliate network and retaining the best affiliates.
Rewardful
With Rewardful, you can pay up to 5,000 affiliates via PayPal and Wise. This bulk payout feature is only available for companies who have a verified PayPal Business and Wise Business accounts. If you don’t have verified business accounts, you need to plan accordingly as it might take some time to get verified on these platforms.
Payouts are completed with 4 steps:
- Go to Rewardful, download the CSV file of payouts that are due.
- Upload that CSV into PayPal or Wise. Then follow the platform’s instruction to make a payment. If you utilize both PayPal and Wise, you’ll have to repeat these steps for each platform.
- Check if all payouts are successfully processed. If some fail, retry them until they succeed.
- Go to Rewardful, mark payouts as paid.
Do I need to worry about payout failures? Unfortunately, yes, they’re common with bulk payments on PayPal and Wise. They can fail if affiliates’ PayPal/Wise accounts aren’t verified or if large payout volumes trigger fraud checks. Companies then have to contact Wise/PayPal support, follow up with affiliates, and retry payments.
Perhaps for these reasons, Rewardful doesn’t use its own payout feature for its affiliate program. Instead, it manages payouts through Tipalti, a third-party payment platform.
Dub Partners
Dub Partners processes payouts through Stripe Express (and PayPal where Stripe isn’t supported).
Payouts are completed with 2 steps:
- Connect a bank account to send payouts (once, during onboarding).
- When there are pending eligible payouts, click
Confirm Payouts, and you are done!
Payouts are fully automated, so there is no need for companies to create Stripe/PayPal business accounts or screen for payout failures.
Tax compliance
Tax compliance can be quite time-consuming as you start scaling your affiliate network.
Rewardful
Rewardful does not provide any tax assistance. Companies usually opt-in for a third-party tax provider to help with collecting W-9 forms from their US-based affiliates and preparing 1099-NEC forms.
Dub Partners
Dub Partners automates tax compliance for all U.S. affiliates. It supports:
- Collecting W-9 forms for each U.S. affiliate earning more than $600.
- Preparing 1099-NEC forms for those U.S. affiliates.
- Collecting W-8 forms from non-U.S. affiliates to confirm they are not US residents for tax purposes.
Analytics
Both Dub Partners and Rewardful provide dashboards with key insights, but there is a difference in the depth of their reporting.
Rewardful
Rewardful offers Stripe-integrated revenue tracking. If a customer cancels, downgrades, or upgrades their subscription, affiliate commissions will be automatically updated. The dashboard is quite simple and intuitive, so there is no learning curve when you are just starting out.
Dub Partners
Dub Partners provides you with everything you need to know about your affiliates – top affiliates, countries, traffic sources, conversion events, and more.
It also offers a real-time events stream, so you can see when clicks and conversions are happening in real time and export the data for further analysis if needed.
You can also filter data by partner, country, city, device, and more, or you can use the “Ask AI” feature, which automatically selects the right filters based on your question.
You also don’t have to worry about tracking inaccuracies. Dub Partners uses server-side tracking to accurately record all conversion events. With client-side tracking, lead/sales events might be duplicated, leading to affiliates being double-paid.
This is one of the reasons why Tella switched from Rewardful to Dub Partners, and saved ~40 hours in admin work that was previously spent on identifying tracking inaccuracies and paying affiliates.
I have never wanted to switch from an existing tool to a new one as much as I did when I first tried Dub. They checked every box our affiliate program required across attribution, payment processing, and analytics. Dub is so well designed & built too — it’s a joy to use every day.
Grant Shaddick
Co-founder
Reward structures
Since each affiliate program is different, having flexible reward structures is key.
Rewardful
With Rewardful, you can set two types of rewards: percentage of sale or a flat fee reward. You also have the option to make commissions recurring, one-time, or limited.
Dub Partners
With Dub Partners, you can reward affiliates based on:
| Reward type | Description |
|---|---|
| Clicks (pay-per-click) | Rewarding partners for driving clicks to your product. |
| Leads (pay-per-lead) | A more effective alternative to pay-per-click, where you reward partners for leads (e.g. demo requests). |
| Sales (pay-per-sale) | This is the most common reward type, where you reward partners for driving sales to your product. |
Depending on the reward type, you can choose between a flat fee and a percentage-based commission, applied as a one-time reward, for a set period (between 3 months to 3 years), or for the customer’s lifetime.
But what truly sets Dub Partners apart is the ability to add reward conditions. With reward conditions, you can customize affiliate commissions based on specific requirements.
Imagine you offer your affiliates $10 per sale. But what if you’d like to offer a higher reward for customers based in the U.S. vs other countries? You can add this condition (and others, if needed), and adjust it anytime.
Partner network
A high-quality affiliate network can sometimes be all you need to set up your affiliate program for success.
Rewardful
Rewardful does not have an affiliate network, so companies have to recruit and onboard their affiliates on their own. If your brand already has loyal affiliates, a viral product, and a solid social media traction, the lack of a built-in partner network might not be that big of an issue.
Dub Partners
Whether you’re starting a new affiliate program or scaling an existing one, a built-in partner network grows your affiliate revenue while saving you the time and effort of recruiting affiliates yourself. With Dub Partners, you get access to more than 4,000 active affiliates that can apply to your affiliate program in just one click, without the need to create a separate account.
White labeling
Both Rewardful and Dub Partners offer a white-labeling feature, which delivers a better onboarding experience for your affiliates.
Rewardful
Rewardful provides an API that you can use to build your white-labeled program from scratch. It usually takes 2-3 months of engineering work to have everything up and running.
Dub Partners
With Dub Partners, you can set up a white-labeled referral dashboard in less than 30 minutes, using Dub’s pre-built components. Your users will be automatically enrolled in your partner program without the need to leave your app and sign up on a third-party platform. Check out this open-source example app to see how it works.
View example app ↗
Affiliate experience
Affiliates are ultimately your growth drivers, so their experience matters as well.
Rewardful
With Rewardful, each affiliate incurs withdrawal fees on their earnings. Those fees can range from $1 to $15. If the payment currency differs between affiliates and companies, there is also an exchange rate fee – between 1.9% and 3%.
Rewardful also doesn’t offer a unified affiliate dashboard, so affiliates will need separate logins if they are a part of different affiliate programs. For power affiliates working with 20+ companies (who will also most likely generate the most revenue for you), this friction might reduce their incentive to actively promote your product.
Dub Partners
With Dub Partners, affiliates don’t have to withdraw their earnings. Once their balance reaches $100, the payouts are automatically deposited without any fees into their connected bank accounts. If affiliates don’t want to wait until their payouts reach $100, they can set a custom withdrawal amount ($10, $25, $50, or $75), which comes with a $2 withdrawal fee.
Affiliates can also see all their affiliate programs under one dashboard, so it’s easy to monitor earnings and track conversion events. By having access to this data, affiliates can analyze which channels and campaigns perform best and leverage these insights for their future promotional strategies.
Pricing
Both Rewardful and Dub Partners offer competitive pricing compared to other solutions on the market.
Rewardful
Rewardful is arguably one of the most affordable affiliate management platforms. It also offers a 14-day free trial, so you can check out the platform to see if it’s right for you.
Dub Partners
Dub doesn’t lock you into expensive yearly contracts. You can start on a self-serve plan depending on your usage, and upgrade to Enterprise when your affiliate program is successful and you handle large payout volumes. Dub does not offer a free trial, but there is a 30-day money-back guarantee if you are not happy with the product.
Dub Partners vs Rewardful
| Pricing | Dub Partners | Rewardful |
|---|---|---|
| Price + Usage | ✦ Business: $90/mo, up to $2.5K partner payouts/mo ✦ Advanced: $300/mo, up to $15K partner payouts/mo ✦ Enterprise: custom $, unlimited partner payouts | ✦ Starter: $49/mo, up to $7,500/mo in affiliate revenue ✦ Growth: $99/mo, up to $15,000 in affiliate revenue ✦ Enterprise: $149+/mo, over $15,000 in affiliate revenue |
| Fees | ✦ 3-5% in payout fees ✦ no fees for affiliates | ✦ 3% on affiliate payouts if you use the Managed Payouts feature ✦ your affiliates pay withdrawal fees |
| Free Trial | No | Yes |
| Refund Policy | 30 days | 30 days |
| Discounts | ✦ 2 months free with a yearly subscription ✦ 25% discount for non-profits and open-source projects | 2 months free with a yearly subscription |
| Notes | ✦ No third-party tools required, everything’s built in ✦ All plans include a Dub Links subscription | Might need additional third-party providers for automated global payouts, tax compliance, detailed conversion tracking analytics |
Final thoughts
Whether you choose Rewardful or Dub Partners for your affiliate management depends on your company’s goals and needs.
Rewardful might be best if you are just starting your affiliate program. It’s affordable, easy to use, and provides essential features, such as coupon code tracking, customizable commissions, and double-sided incentives.
Dub Partners is better suited for companies that want to scale their affiliate program and care about real-time attribution data to understand what drives revenue from the first click to conversion. Any feature you need lives on Dub Partners – one-click global payouts, flexible reward structures, dual-sided incentives, white-labeling functionality, AI landing page generator, and more!
If you’d like to migrate from Rewardful, you can follow our migration guide that transfers all your historical data, so you can jump right in without the hassle of starting everything from scratch.
Try Dub Partners today and join amazing companies like Vercel, Perplexity, Framer, and Tella that are already powering their affiliate programs with Dub Partners.
Summary table
| Category | Dub Partners | Rewardful |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Subscription: ✦ Business: $90/mo, up to $2.5K partner payouts/mo ✦ Advanced: $300/mo, up to $15K partner payouts/mo ✦ Enterprise: custom $, unlimited partner payouts Payout fees: 3-5% | Subscription: ✦ Starter: $49/mo, up to $7,500/mo in affiliate revenue ✦ Growth: $99/mo, up to $15,000 in affiliate revenue ✦ Enterprise: $149+/mo, over $15,000 in affiliate revenue Payout fees: 3% if you use the Managed Payouts feature |
| Payouts | ✦ One-click global payouts ✦ Built-in tax compliance | ✦ Manual payouts or bulk CVS uploads to Wise/PayPal ✦ No tax compliance |
| Analytics | Comprehensive analytics from the first click to the final conversion event | Basic analytics |
| Reward Structures | ✦ rewards based on clicks, leads, sales ✦ a flat fee or percentage-based commission ✦ one-time, recurring, or lifetime commissions ✦ create reward conditions to customize your rewards based on different parameters (e.g., customer country, partner performance, etc.) | ✦ a flat fee or percentage-based commission ✦ one-time, recurring, or limited commissions |
| Partner Network | 4,000+ active affiliates | No partner network |
| White Labeling | Yes, takes less than 30 minutes to set up with pre-built components | Yes, takes 2-3 months to set up with API |
| Affiliate Experience | ✦ No withdrawal fees ✦ Enroll once, get access to all affiliate programs without the need for a new login ✦ Detailed analytics to see conversion events | ✦ Withdrawal fees ✦ No unified dashboard: affiliates have to sign up with a new login for each affiliate program ✦ Basic analytics |
