WordPress Affiliate Plugin in 2026: Which Ones Can Actually Pay Your Affiliates

AffiliateWP pays affiliates through Stripe and PayPal, Solid Affiliate is the WooCommerce option, SliceWP is the cheapest of the 3 to renew at $229, and Pretty Links does the opposite job of cloaking links you promote. They split on whether a WordPress affiliate plugin can send money. Every price came from the vendor’s own page.

I went looking for what a WordPress affiliate plugin costs and found the same 5 names in the same order on nearly every guide on page 1. That is not suspicious by itself. Popular things are popular.

Then I checked who publishes those guides. 4 of them belong to the company that makes the plugin they all rank first, and not one of them mentions it.

The prices did not survive a closer look either. Every paid program plugin I opened advertises a cut-price first year, then renews at up to 2.5 times that. Only 1 of those 4 guides flags first-year pricing anywhere, and not for the plugin it ranks first.

So this is what each one really charges on renewal, which ones can actually send money to your affiliates rather than just count what you owe them, and where the free versions run out.

Key Takeaways

• Tracking a commission and paying it are separate jobs. AffiliateWP and Solid Affiliate send money from their cheapest tier. YITH needs a second plugin to do it and FluentAffiliate cannot do it yet.
• YITH needs a second paid plugin to pay through PayPal, which takes the automated version from 179.99 euros to 259.98 euros in the first year.
• FluentAffiliate is $199 once for 1 site, and its own features page still lists paying by PayPal as coming soon. You pay affiliates by hand.
• Advertised prices are first-year prices. AffiliateWP renews at $299, Solid Affiliate at $374, SliceWP at $229. Page 1 quotes $149.50, $149.60 and $169.
• 4 of the guides ranking for this term are published by Awesome Motive, which also owns AffiliateWP, the plugin all 4 of them rank first.

One search, 2 completely different plugins

“WordPress affiliate plugin” means 2 opposite things, and which one you want depends on which side of the sale you are on.

Buying the wrong half is the most expensive mistake on this page, and it is the kind of quiet leak I built the free 5-day Online Selling Mistakes Challenge around.

If you sell something and want other people to promote it for a cut, you need a plugin that runs a program. It handles affiliate tracking: registering partners, giving each one a tracking link, and working out what each is owed. AffiliateWP, SliceWP, Solid Affiliate, YITH WooCommerce Affiliates and FluentAffiliate all do that much. Whether they can then send the money is a different question, and the answer is not the same for all 5.

If you promote other people’s products and get paid by their programs, you need link cloaking instead. A link manager tidies long tracking URLs into clean ones on your own domain and counts the clicks. Pretty Links and ThirstyAffiliates do that.

Google knows the query is split. Its AI Overview sorts the plugins into the same 2 groups and then asks the searcher which side they are on. 2 of the 4 questions in the People Also Ask box are about earning as an affiliate rather than running a program.

The install numbers make the split obvious. Pretty Links alone reports 200,000+ active installs. Every plugin in this table that runs a program adds up to 26,000+.

Install counts as wordpress.org reports them, in buckets with a plus sign rather than exact figures. AffiliateWP is missing because it has no free version and is not on wordpress.org at all. Its own pricing page says 30,000+ business owners use it.

One thing in that table is worth a second look. The “Affiliates” plugin by itthinx ranks on page 1 of Google for this exact search with 2,000+ installs and no update since April. SliceWP has 5 times the installs, a higher rating and a far more recent update, and it only reaches page 1 through its own homepage. Google is ranking the wordpress.org domain there, not the plugin.

Which of these can actually send the money

Every plugin here will track a referral and work out what an affiliate is owed. Moving the money to them is a separate job, and 4 of the 7 plugins below cannot do it on their own.

YITH is the clearest case. Its premium plugin at 179.99 euros can schedule a payment run, and it still cannot push the money through PayPal or Stripe by itself.

Its own page says you pay “manually by bank transfer (and then mark them as paid in the plugin panel)” unless you also buy a second YITH plugin. The feature table says it flatly: “Pay commissions through PayPal Payouts (YITH PayPal Payouts for WooCommerce is required).”

That second plugin is 79.99 euros for the first year and 94.99 euros after that. So the automated version of the thing YITH is sold to do costs 259.98 euros to start, not 179.99.

FluentAffiliate has the same gap for a different reason. Its features page lists “Pay with PayPal” and then, in brackets, “(Coming Soon)”.

Its plans include “Manual Payouts” and “Unlimited Payouts” and no card or PayPal rail anywhere. So the plugin that advertises “No Feature Gating. All inclusive, no matter the plan” cannot yet pay anybody without you opening PayPal and typing amounts in yourself.

The 2 free plugins in this comparison are honest about it. Affiliates Manager and the itthinx Affiliates plugin both say payouts are manual and leave it there.

AffiliateWP at $149.50 and Solid Affiliate at $149.60 both pay affiliates from their cheapest tier. SliceWP pays only on its $169 paid plan, YITH needs a second plugin at 79.99 euros, FluentAffiliate cannot do it yet, and the 2 free options never could.

Every price above is for a 1-site licence, read on annual billing at the vendor’s own pricing page. The YITH figures are for its base plugin only, so add 79.99 euros for its payouts add-on if you want the automatic version.

The rail itself has a price too. I searched all 4 of the guides ranking above this one for “payout fee”, “Payouts API” and “2%” and none of them mentions it. PayPal’s own fee page puts PayPal Payouts at 2% of the amount sent, capped at $1 for a US payment, or a flat 25 cents when a plugin sends it through the Payouts API. Paying an affiliate outside the US costs 2% capped at $20, so a scattered international roster costs real money to settle.

If you would rather not run any of this inside WordPress, the same job exists as hosted software, and I priced that separately in what affiliate software costs. The floor there is $49 a month.

The small print at the bottom of all 3 pricing pages

AffiliateWP, SliceWP and Solid Affiliate all advertise a discounted first year, and all 3 admit it in a line you have to scroll past the buy buttons to reach. WP Mail SMTP is the only guide above this one that raises first-year pricing at all, and it does so for AAWP and MonsterInsights while quoting AffiliateWP’s $149.50 with no renewal note.

• AffiliateWP: “Special introductory pricing, all renewals are at full price.”
• SliceWP: “Sale price applies to the first year only. Annual renewals are full price.”
• Solid Affiliate: “Introductory pricing is limited; renewals will be at the regular price.”

The renewal column in the table above is the one to plan around. Solid Affiliate makes the sharpest jump, from $149.60 to $374, which is 2.5 times. AffiliateWP doubles. SliceWP is the gentlest at $169 to $229, and over 2 years it is the cheapest of the 3 by $50.50.

This is a habit across paid WordPress plugins rather than something odd about affiliate tools. The same footnote turns up on Easy Digital Downloads, MemberPress and WP Simple Pay, which I priced in year 1 against year 2 for WordPress store plugins.

FluentAffiliate is the exception worth knowing about. It sells a one-time licence with lifetime updates instead of a subscription, so its $199 costs less than AffiliateWP from month 13 onward. Whether that is a bargain depends on how much you mind paying every affiliate by hand.

The 2 guides published by the same company do not even agree with each other on these numbers. WPForms lists Solid Affiliate at $99 a year, which matches neither the sale price of $149.60 nor the regular price of $374, and it lists YITH as simply “Free” with no premium price at all.

WP Mail SMTP lists YITH at “$179.99” when the price is 179.99 euros, so an American reader is quoted a number below what they would actually be charged. The 2 articles also disagree on ThirstyAffiliates, at $99.60 on one and $79.50 on the other.

What a free WordPress affiliate plugin does before you pay

Free WordPress affiliate plugins are real and several are well maintained. They stop at almost exactly the same place: the moment money has to move.

YITH publishes a full side-by-side list, and counting it gives a clean number. 27 of its 66 features are in the free version. Free gets you a default commission rate for everyone, an affiliate dashboard where partners see visits, conversion rate and payment status, and referral cookies with a set expiry. It also lets you pay commissions manually.

What free does not get you is every automatic payment rule: paying when someone crosses a threshold, paying on the 15th of the month, paying daily. It also holds back per-product, per-category and per-person commission rates, so every affiliate gets the same percentage on everything.

Affiliates Manager and the itthinx Affiliates plugin are the same story with fewer features. Both register affiliates, track referrals and calculate commissions. Neither pays anybody. You export what is owed and pay it yourself.

That is a fine setup for a first program with 3 or 4 partners. It gets old around the point where you are copying figures into PayPal every month and worrying about typos.

Who publishes the guides above this one

4 of the editorial results on page 1 for this term are published by the same company. WP Mail SMTP, WPForms, SearchWP and Easy Digital Downloads are all Awesome Motive brands. So is AffiliateWP, which all 4 of them rank first.

Awesome Motive’s own portfolio page lists them side by side.

Awesome Motive’s own portfolio page, listing SearchWP, Easy Digital Downloads and AffiliateWP as brands it owns.

Three of the 4 carry a reader disclosure covering affiliate commissions. SearchWP carries none at all. WP Mail SMTP’s reads: “Our content is reader-supported. This means if you click on some of our links, then we may earn a commission.” None of them mentions that the plugin ranked first shares an owner with the site reviewing it.

Easy Digital Downloads says of AffiliateWP, “That’s exactly why we use it for our own affiliate program at EDD.” Both are Awesome Motive brands, so that is a company recommending its own sibling product.

Pretty Links, ThirstyAffiliates and Easy Affiliate belong to a second company, Caseproof, which the footer on each of their sites states plainly. Caseproof also owns MemberPress, and the same shared-owner pattern runs through the MemberPress alternatives roundups.

Put the 2 together and SearchWP’s list of the 5 best affiliate plugins is AffiliateWP and MonsterInsights from Awesome Motive, plus Pretty Links, ThirstyAffiliates and Easy Affiliate from Caseproof. Its bonus 6th pick is SearchWP. Not one independent product on the list.

WPForms is the most open of the 4. Its roundup of 12 plugins, plus a bonus 13th pick, names SliceWP, Solid Affiliate, AffiliatePress, YITH, Ultimate Affiliate Pro, Affiliates Manager, AAWP and ReferralCandy alongside its own family. Only 5 of those 13 are Awesome Motive or Caseproof.

None of this makes AffiliateWP a bad plugin. Plenty of people run it happily and its payout tools are the most complete here. It does mean page 1 is closer to 1 verdict than to 4.

One more oddity. Google’s AI Overview cites an article from ARForms as a source. That domain no longer runs a site at all. It resolves to a HugeDomains page offering arforms.com for sale.

What people who actually installed these say

The r/WordPress thread that ranks on page 1 for this term is a year old, archived, and 6 people deep. It reads nothing like the guides above it.

The person asking wanted a plugin that handles “ability to register and track affiliates, flexible commission structures, referral tracking, payout automation” and, in their words, “can’t be buggy, either.”

One commenter tried 4 of them before choosing: “I did what any sane person would do and tried them all: Solid Affiliate, AffiliateWP, SliceWP, Easy Affiliate, etc.” They landed on Solid Affiliate: “the WooCommerce integration is amazing (it’s way wayyy better than AffiliateWP’s).” Another commenter pushed back and said they found AffiliateWP’s and SliceWP’s better, which is a useful reminder that this is taste as much as fact.

A third was blunter: “Affilitewp is garbage. It used to be one of the better ones but now it is expensive and antiquated.” They ended up buying Coupon Affiliates. In a separate line they added that a different plugin, AffiliatePress, “messes up our payment gateway and cost us 5000 bucks in lost orders.”

Take that number as one person’s account rather than a measured figure. What is checkable is which plugins these people reached for. Between them they name FluentAffiliate, Coupon Affiliates and Siren Affiliates, and none of those 3 appears on any of the 4 roundups ranking above the thread.

The 3 settings that decide what this really costs

Every price in this article is smaller than the thing it is attached to. At 30% commission on a $49 product you hand over $14.70 per referred sale, so 21 sales in a year already costs more than any first-year licence here. That is the right way round: an affiliate only costs you money after they have made you money.

It does mean the licence is close to a rounding error. These 3 settings are where the money actually goes, and they are worth checking before you buy.

What happens when a referred sale is refunded. This is the one nobody on page 1 covers, and AffiliateWP’s own documentation is blunt about it. Its refund setting only rejects referrals still marked Unpaid. In its words: “Any referrals that have a status of Paid cannot be manually or automatically rejected, or recalled from your affiliates or their account(s).”

Its own advice follows from that. Wait out your refund window before you pay anybody. AffiliateWP’s docs use a 30-day policy as the example and say you should not pay January’s referrals until the beginning of March. That is a real cash-flow decision, not a setting.

YITH handles it differently and its free version already does it: refunded orders deduct the commission automatically. Worth knowing if you plan to pay affiliates quickly.

Recurring commissions. If you sell a subscription, does the affiliate get paid on renewals or only on the first payment? AffiliateWP puts recurring referrals on its Pro tier at $299.50. Solid Affiliate puts subscription renewal referrals on Pro at $224.70. On a free plugin the answer is usually no.

Lifetime commissions. Does an affiliate keep earning on a customer they sent you 3 years ago? This one the plugin only enforces. The decision is yours.

I have been on the paying side of it. When I bought the domain birdsend.com, the person selling it had already been sending traffic to my email tool by redirecting that domain through his own affiliate link, before I owned it.

I still pay him commissions on those customers. Plenty of friends and subscribers told me it was unethical and should not be allowed. My view was that he took a real risk buying that domain, so I kept paying.

Set your program up either way. Just decide before you recruit anybody, because changing the terms afterwards is what turns a quiet channel into an argument.

FAQ

What is the best affiliate plugin for WordPress?

For running your own program, Solid Affiliate and SliceWP are the 2 that come up most often from people who tested several, and SliceWP is the cheapest to renew at $229. AffiliateWP is the most widely recommended of the 3, and it renews at $299 a year after the first. For managing links you promote, Pretty Links has 200,000+ installs and a 4.8 rating.

Is there a free WordPress affiliate plugin?

Yes, several. SliceWP, YITH WooCommerce Affiliates, Affiliates Manager and the itthinx Affiliates plugin all have free versions that register affiliates, track referrals and calculate commissions. All of them stop before automatic payouts. YITH’s free version covers 27 of its 66 features and can only pay by hand.

Which is the best WooCommerce affiliate plugin?

Solid Affiliate is built around WooCommerce, and its Starter tier at $149.60 includes 1-click PayPal payouts. YITH WooCommerce Affiliates is the other obvious candidate and has a free version, though automating payments there means buying its PayPal Payouts plugin as well. AffiliateWP and SliceWP both integrate with WooCommerce too.

Do I need WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads as well?

Usually yes. An affiliate plugin tracks sales made by something else, so you need a checkout underneath it. That is a second plugin, sometimes a second licence, and it is worth pricing before you commit, which I did in which WordPress ecommerce plugin to use.

You can also take payments outside WordPress through a hosted checkout like CartMango, Gumroad or Payhip, and keep WordPress for the content. A WordPress affiliate plugin then cannot see those sales, so the affiliate side moves to wherever the checkout lives.

How much commission should I pay affiliates?

For digital products, 20% to 40% is the usual band. Start at 30% if you have no particular reason to pick something else. At 30% on a $49 product, 21 referred sales a year already cost you more than any first-year price in this article.

Which Amazon affiliate plugin is best for WordPress?

That is the other job. If you promote Amazon products and earn from Amazon’s program, you want a link manager rather than a program plugin. AAWP is the Amazon-specific option that appears in 2 of the roundups above, and Pretty Links or ThirstyAffiliates handle the general case.

Paying an affiliate on a checkout that does not take a cut

A WordPress affiliate plugin can only count sales that go through the checkout sitting underneath it. So before you compare $149.50 against $169, it is worth asking what that checkout is costing you, because on most WordPress setups it is the larger of the 2 numbers.

CartMango is a checkout for digital product sellers. CartMango is free until October 2026 and then runs from $10 to $30 a year, with no cut of your sales beyond what Stripe or PayPal charge. Order bumps are on every CartMango tier, and upsells, downsells and cart abandonment recovery start at the $20 tier.

CartMango does not have affiliate management yet, and that is planned for September 2026. So it is the checkout half of this job and not the affiliate half. Whichever WordPress affiliate plugin you land on, it is only ever counting sales that something else took.

About the Author

👋 I’m Welly, founder of CartMango (the site you’re on), a checkout platform for digital product sellers. We’ve previously processed $179M+. I also run BirdSend (email marketing tool, 3.1B+ emails sent). On the side I show other non-techie digital sellers how I use AI workflows to automate 50%+ of my operations. Find me on LinkedIn.

Related Reading

• What affiliate software costs: the hosted version of this job, priced from $49 a month
• Which WordPress ecommerce plugin to use: the checkout that sits underneath an affiliate plugin
• Choosing a WooCommerce checkout plugin: live prices and the block-versus-classic split
• The best WordPress LMS plugin: the same renewal trap, priced across 7 plugins
• Affiliate marketing data: 49 statistics on how the channel actually performs