AffiliateWP vs. Affiliate Royale – Full Comparison

If you have entered this post, I assume that you are interested in getting a feedback on AffiliateWP and Affiliate Royale.

Though this website contains information mostly about Wishlist Member membership plugin, this review is not specific to Wishlist Member users only, and I highly recommend that you read it.

I’m sure you will find this review helpful as I have written it from our own personal experience as being both an affiliate for myself and also as a vendor with dozens of affiliates promoting our products through the years.

Anyway, if you are a Wishlist Member user, you should know that both AffiliateWP and Affiliate Royale integrate with Wishlist Member plugin.

Important Update from May 2018 about GDPR Regulation:

The AffiliateWP team had announced that AffiliateWP now comply with the Eueropean GDPR regulation (General Data Protection Regulation). You can read more about it in their blog post.

We haven’t found any information regarding Affiliate Royale and GDPR regulation.

Quick Navigation Links:

You can use the quick navigation links below to get to the features you are interested in:

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Affiliate Royale

AffiliateWP

Administrator Features

The administrator features are important as a large variety of features will allow you to provide a more flexible affiliate program with a lot more options to your affiliates, and the more options you give your affiliates, the grater the chances of them to promote your products and services.

AffiliateWP offers more admin features and options than Affiliate Royale.

These are the administrator features that you will get with both AffiliateWP and Affiliate Royale:

• Ability to have unlimited number of affiliates
• Manually approve affiliates
• Set per-affiliate commission rate
• Set recurring referrals (In AffiliateWP it is included in the Professional plan)
• Set tiered affiliate rates (In AffiliateWP it is included in the Professional plan)
• Export payments to a CSV file
• Execute a mass PayPal payment
• Send email notifications to affiliates
• Ability to upload banners and promotions tools for your affiliates
• Get real-time reporting about your affiliates and their statistics
• Make refunds to affiliates

These are the administrator features you will get with AffiliateWP plugin only:

• Set a per-product commission rate – Great if you want to boost your earning to a certain product and you want to “push” your affiliates to promote it, that way you can give a really tempting commission
• Give your affiliates a sign up bonus – Great as an incentive to attract new affiliates (Free Add-On)
• Export and import affiliates – Can save you a tremendous amount of valuable time
• Grant lifetime commissions to affiliates (In the Professional plan)
• Give your affiliates the ability to create coupons – Excellent feature that can help your affiliates to increase sales
• Smart shortcodes you can copy-paste into the relevant pages to display different information to your affiliates, such as: Showing content only to affiliates / non-affiliates, showing the affiliate dashboard, showing creatives etc.
• Import affiliates – AffiliateWP allows you to import affiliates from both eJunkie and Affiliate Pro

Affiliates Features

When choosing an affiliate platform it’s also important to find out which platform will give you the option to provide your affiliates with advanced tools and resources, so they would want to promote your products, but also, that it would be easy for them to do so.

Here are the main affiliate features you will find in both AffiliateWP and Affiliate Royale platforms:

• Affiliates notifications for application approval, sales, refunds etc. – For starting affiliates who only promote few affiliate programs, it is a nice feature, but for more advanced affiliates who have plenty of affiliate programs in different platforms to promote, this feature become significant and highly important, as it becomes very difficult to track all the affiliate commissions from the different resources, and helps your affiliates to get motivated when they see a new sale and keep their focus on promoting your products.
• Affiliate dashboard – So your affiliates will be able to easily see important information such as: how much money they have earned, pending payments etc.

These are some important affiliate features you will get with AffiliateWP plugin only:

• Advanced affiliates tracking – Highly important feature for affiliates that will allow them to track their conversions, monetize and maximize them.
• Links to specific pages – Having the ability to create affiliate links for inner pages is very important, maybe not to all affiliates, but to smart affiliates who want to maximize their revenues it is definitely important. As an affiliate myself, I can tell you that not being able to setup affiliate links to inner pages is a major downside for me.

Go to AffiliateWP Product Page or Affiliate Royale Product Page

Payout Methods

The payout options are obviously important to both you and your affiliates. From affiliates perspective, they need to be sure you as a vendor will pay them in a fast and easy way (and, of course, on time) and from a vendor perspective, you want to be able to send your affiliates commissions quickly, preferred in bulk (when looking at the long run – for when you have many affiliates).

Both AffiliateWP and Affiliate Royale allow you download PayPal Mass Payment file for paying your affiliates commissions.

Mass payments allow you to send your affiliates their commissions quickly in literally 1-click (important to keep our affiliates happy) and you can track your payments.

With AffiliateWP you can also send payouts through PayPal or Stripe for individual referrals or in bulk in order to process many referrals at once.

Paying Affiliates with AffiliateWP:

AffiliateWP Payout File

With Affiliate Royale you can purchase the “Buy Now for Stripe” product (also developed by Affiliate Royale team) to send payments through Stripe and track your affiliates commissions.

Paying Affiliates with Affiliate Royale:

In order to generate and download PayPal’s Mass Payment file you need to check the relevant boxes under the “Paid” column and click the “Mark Checked Commissions as Paid” button to download the Mass Payment file:

Paying Affiliates with Affiliate Royale

Autoresponders Integration

For staying in touch with your affiliates, notifying them when new products are available for promotion, send them messages, special offers, contests and different announcements, you would need an autoresponder integration.

AffiliateWP integrates with GetResponse (which we are using and love), and also with MailChimp.

Affiliate Royale integrates with Aweber and MailChimp.

Recommendation:

If you are not already using one of the above autoresponders, you can go with MailChimp, which is one of the most popular autoresponders services that also offers you free sign-up for if you have fewer than 2000 subscribers and then it starts with $10 only.

eCommerce Platforms Integration

If you are looking for adding an affiliate program to your eCommerce website, both AffiliateWP and Affiliate Royale integrate with the following eCommerce platforms:

• Easy Digital Downloads
• Jigoshop
• Shopp
• WooCommerce
• WP e-Commerce

AffiliateWP also integrates with iThemes Exchange and is in development stages for Cart66 while Affiliate Royale also integrates with MarketPress.

Membership Plugins Integration

Membership sites have become very popular in the last couple of years, as the world shifted from one-time payments to recurring payments.

If you are looking to integrate your affiliate program with your membership site, then both AffiliateWP and Affiliate Royale integrate with the following membership sites:

MemberPress (owned by the same company that developed Affiliate Royale) and Wishlist Member.

*** Affiliate Royale integrates with Wishlist Member when using PayPal only.

In addition, AffiliateWP also integrates with:

• MemberMouse
• Paid Memberships Pro
• Restrict Content Pro (owned by the same company that developed AffiliateWP)
• s2Member – In development stages

Other Integrations

Other integrations that can be implemented with AffiliateWP:

• Gravity Forms
• Ninja Forms

Other integrations that can be implemented with Affiliate Royale:

You can integrate Affiliate Royale with other payment solutions using Affiliate Roylae tracking pixels (not supported by the plugin in the basic). You will find more instructions and also the complete list in this link: https://www.affiliateroyale.com/integration-options/

Go to AffiliateWP Product Page or Affiliate Royale Product Page

General Information

Affiliate Royale is a well known affiliate plugin in the market developed by Caseproof, LLC which is also behind the plugins Pretty Link and MemberPress.

Affiliate Royale has 2 plans:

• Merchant ($85) – Single website license
• Developer ($165) – Unlimited websites license

Go to Affiliate Royale product page

AffiliateWP is quite new in the affiliate plugins arena, however, it is hardly a reason to disqualify it, as its developers and owners’ reputation precedes them.

One of the developers of AffiliateWP plugin is Pippin Williamson, the owner of the well respected: Easy Digital Downloads eCommerce platform and Restrict Content Pro membership plugin.

We are using both Easy Digital Downloads and AffiliateWP in our online store at HappyPlugins.com and we can testify that Pippin and his team provide excellent support, both fast and professional.

AffiliateWP offers 4 different plans:

• Personal ($99) – Single website license
• Plus ($149) – 3 websites license
• Professional ($249) – Unlimited websites license + 14 pro add-ons
• Ultimate ($449) – Unlimited websites license + 14 pro add-ons + unlimited support & updates (instead of 1 year)

Go to AffiliateWP product page

Which Plugin Should I Choose?

When it comes to the question which plugin to choose, I would definitely go with AffiliateWP.

From my own personal experience with both plugins, AffiliateWP is a more advanced plugin in many ways.

Top 5 Reasons for Choosing AffiliateWP

Here are my top 5 reasons for choosing AffiliateWP over Affiliate Royale:

1. Better affiliate dashboard for both affiliates & administrator

Both the affiliate dashboard which is displayed in the front-end of your website and the administrator management tools that are used for you as an administrator or by your affiliate manager are better designed and easy to use. Even in simple things you will need fewer clicks to manage your affiliate program.

AffiliateWP Admin Panel Overview:

AffiliateWP Admin Overview

Affiliate Royale Admin Panel Overview:

Affiliate Royale Admin Panel Overview

AffiliateWP Affiliates Panel Overview:

As you can see, with AffiliateWP you can create affiliate links to inner pages by entering the page in the Page URL box and lick the Generate URL button:

AffiliateWP Affiliates Panel Overview

Affiliate Royale Affiliates Panel Overview:

With Affiliate Royale you can use the link to the homepage as seen in screenshot #1 under “My Affiliate Link” or create banners and links to specific pages, but only pages you setup in advance, which means that your affiliates will not be able to link to any page they want to, only the ones you setup as can be seen in screenshot #2:

Screenshot #1: Affiliate Royale Affiliates Panel Overview

Setting Up Affiliate Links to Specific Pages:

Screenshot #2: Setting Up Affiliate Links to Specific Pages

2. Short learning curve

Because AffiliateWP was built as an alternative to existing affiliate platforms, the main concern was to build a system where you as the admin can understand the reports and statistics and build an affiliate program for your business much faster.

This fact is also the reason that Pippin Williamson, the developer of AffiliateWP stated, and because we have used several other programs, including Affiliate Royal and Affiliates Pro, we can testify that the learning curve is much shorter.

3. Extensive features add-Ons & ability to add your own extensions using simple code

Like all other plugins that are developed by Pippin Williamson and his partners, AffiliateWP includes many WordPress actions and filters that allow you to adapt the affiliate platform to your needs.

Also, even if you are not a developer, the Professional package of AffiliateWP already includes important add-ons that will cover most things you will probably need.

4. Detailed reports and tracking options

One of the biggest things that you need when you are managing an affiliate program is knowing how much the affiliate platform contributes to your success.

Detailed reports that include the right information can give you the right tools for the job. One simple example is: you can easily see who are your highest performing affiliates and reward them with better percentage or even special gifts.

Go to AffiliateWP Product Page or Affiliate Royale Product Page

AffiliateWP Affiliates Reports:

AffiliateWP Affiliates Reports

Affiliate Royale Affiliates Reports:

Affiliate Royale Affiliates Reports

AffiliateWP Referrals List:

AffiliateWP Referrals List

5. Supported and developed by a large community

AffiliateWP is managed by the community which can contribute to the AffiliateWP code and by that, creating a much more stable affiliate platform.

Every WordPress plugin needs consistent updates and fixes in order to perform well on every platform. By allowing the community to contribute to the AffiliateWP code, both the AffiliateWP plugin and the users themselves enjoy a much more stable environment.

Go to AffiliateWP Product Page or Affiliate Royale Product Page

More Screenshots

Due to sensitive information, most screenshots in the review are taken from the example screenshots that can be seen in both AffiliateWP and Affiliate Royale websites.

You can find more screenshots with explanations for AffiliateWP here and for Affiliate Royale here.

Demo Website

AffiliateWP does not have a demo for AffiliateWP, Affiliate Royale has a demo for both the admin and affiliates panels and you will fins it in this link

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