Refersion and Impact are both popular affiliate platforms – but they’re built for different stages and types of programs.

Refersion gives you a fast setup, first-party tracking without cookies, and a smoother Shopify integration. Impact gives you more control over commissions, multi-touch attribution, and the ability to run influencer and customer referral programs alongside your affiliate program.

This article breaks down how the two compare – across pricing, creator recruitment, commission structures, content tracking, fraud detection, etc. – and where both fall short if you want to run influencer and affiliate programs from one place.

Refersion vs. Impact at a glance

Refersion is a Shopify-friendly affiliate platform that gets you tracking sales within minutes. You can install the app and hit the ground running. The tradeoff is depth: attribution is last-click only, reporting is straightforward, and there’s no influencer or customer referral program support.

Impact is a partnership management platform built for brands that want to manage multiple partner types from one account. You get affiliates, influencer campaigns, and customer referral programs under one roof, with granular commission controls and multi-touch attribution. But the best features are available from the Essentials plan, costing $500/month, setup takes longer, and the learning curve is steep.

If you’re a Shopify brand evaluating your first affiliate tool, the choice comes down to how much complexity you’re ready to take on and what your budget allows.

Modash sits in a different lane entirely. It’s built for brands that want influencer and affiliate management in one Shopify-native dashboard – with creator discovery, content tracking, product gifting, and payouts included from day one.

Try Modash for free.

Refersion has a free plan and lower entry pricing, but Impact’s higher tiers cover more ground

Refersion offers a free plan – but it only lets you list your brand on the Refersion Marketplace so affiliates can find and apply to your program. You can’t track sales, manage commissions, or pay affiliates on it.

To actually run your affiliate program, you need Refersion’s Launch plan – which costs $39/month. Impact’s Starter plan is comparatively cheaper ($30/month), but it doesn’t include some important features like access to Impact’s partner marketplace, creating performance bonuses, or custom payout rules. 

Plus, Impact’s Starter plan is $30/month or 2.5% of partner-driven revenue, whichever is higher. So, if your affiliates bring in $2,000 in commissions in a given month, your Impact fee is $50, not $30. The 2.5% fee applies to the total partner-driven revenue, and you pay whichever amount is higher.

As you move up the tiers, Impact’s plans get much more expensive, too. The Essentials plan costs $500/month – which is almost thrice the cost of Refersion’s Growth plan ($199/month).

That said, Impact’s higher price comes at the addition of many unique features like:

• Automate campaign workflows
• Access to Impact’s marketplace
• In-depth reporting with 40+ pre-built reports
• Ability to run customer, influencer, and affiliate programs from one place
• …and a lot more

Refersion and Impact also charge an additional fee on top of the subscription plan, but they approach it differently.

• Refersion takes a cut of your affiliate sales (3% or 2%, depending on your plan)
• Impact takes a 20% cut on your affiliate commissions ($2,500/month in partner payouts are free)

Neither tool is sufficient on its own, though. You’ll still need separate tools for finding affiliates at scale, tracking the content they post, and viewing combined performance metrics for your influencer and affiliate program.

Modash starts at $199/month and includes all of that in one dashboard: a database of 380M+ creator profiles (with AI search), content tracking, affiliate management, product gifting, and payouts – all natively connected to your Shopify store.

Modash, like Impact, also doesn’t charge you based on affiliate-generated revenue. It charges based on the affiliate payout. There’s no fee for payouts up to $10,000/year. After that, it’s 5% of the payout amount.

So if your affiliates generate $1M in sales in a month at a 10% commission rate ($100,000 in payouts), this is what the three tools would charge you on top of the subscription fee:

• Refersion = $30,000 in the Launch plan (3% of affiliate sales)
• Impact = $19,500 in the Essentials plan (20% of $97,500 payouts since $2,500 are free)
• Modash = $4500 (5% of $90,000 affiliate payouts since the first $10k are free)

Try Modash for free.

Impact can help you run affiliate, influencer, and customer referral programs, Refersion focuses on affiliate management only

Impact offers three separate program types from one dashboard:

• Performance (affiliates)
• Creator (influencers)
• Advocate (customer referrals)

Refersion is built for affiliate management. You can track referral sales, manage commissions, and process payouts. It does have a post-purchase widget that turns customers into affiliates after checkout – they click a button, get auto-registered, and can immediately start sharing a referral link or coupon code.

But this turns customers into affiliates within your existing commission structure – it’s not a standalone referral program. You can’t offer non-commission rewards like points or credit, and you can’t embed referral touchpoints across the customer journey the way you can with Impact’s Advocate program.

Refersion also doesn’t support influencer campaign management. You can’t search for creators, track the content they post, or manage paid partnerships alongside your affiliate program.

That said, Impact’s data across its programs isn’t seamless. If you want to convert a creator to an affiliate or a customer to a creator, you can’t easily carry their existing performance data into the Performance dashboard.

Modash combines the entire influencer and affiliate workflows in one place. A creator who starts as a gifting partner can be promoted to an affiliate with a promo code and commission – and their entire history (content, engagement, clicks, revenue) stays in one profile.

And you don’t reconcile anything because it’s all in the same dashboard, synced natively with your Shopify store.

Neither Refersion nor Impact gives you enough affiliates to scale

Both tools give you ways to find affiliates – but the pools are small, and almost all of them require creators to come to you.

Refersion has a marketplace with 6.6M affiliates managed across the platform. You can list your program for free and wait for affiliates to apply.

There’s also an AI-powered Discovery feature (currently in beta) that recommends affiliates matched to your product categories.

Impact has over 300K creators in its marketplace (available only in the Essentials plan) and 25M+ creators in its database.

For both tools, once you start filtering by location, niche, engagement rate, and brand fit, the pool of relevant creators gets thin fast.

Both tools also require every affiliate to sign up to the platform before you can track their performance. If you find an affiliate on Instagram who’d be a great fit, you still need to ask them to create an account on Refersion or Impact, connect their profiles, and go through onboarding. That friction can put off creators who are already managing multiple brand partnerships.

You’ll need a third discovery tool like Modash to find enough affiliates in the long-term. Modash has a database of 380M+ creator profiles across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube – every creator with 1k+ followers on those platforms. You can filter by audience demographics, engagement rate, niche, location, brand collaborations, and more.

Or you can use AI search to describe the kind of creator you’re looking for. You can even upload a visual reference to find affiliates with the same vibe.

Your affiliates don’t need to sign up to any marketplace for you to find, vet, or outreach them. You can track their content and measure performance without asking them to get onboarded anywhere. They only need to create a Modash account if you choose to pay them through the platform.

Impact offers managed services and expert support, Refersion offers premium onboarding

If you want hands-on help building or scaling your affiliate program, Impact offers significantly more than Refersion.

Impact has two managed services options:

• Jumpstart  (for your first campaign). Impact’s team helps with goal setting, program strategy, partner review, and tracking setup. They also provide mid-campaign advice and post-campaign analysis.
  
• Service Operations (for ongoing programs). You can outsource operational tasks or get strategic support on an evergreen basis.
  

Impact doesn’t disclose how much these services cost, but if you’re launching your first affiliate program and don’t have experience with partner recruitment, commission strategy, or tracking setup, Impact’s expert services can save you weeks of trial and error.

Refersion’s expert support is limited to a one-time premium onboarding service. It costs $500 for monthly Launch and Growth plans, or $250 if you're on an annual plan. The service includes 1:1 guided calls with an onboarding specialist, a platform walkthrough, tracking setup assistance, and tips on managing affiliates.

Once onboarding is done, there’s no ongoing strategic support – email support is available on all plans, and chat support only on Growth and above.

Impact offers more commission flexibility

Impact lets you build dynamic payouts based on 100+ factors – promo code, cart size, customer status (new vs. returning), product category, geographic location, device type, and more.

You can set up per-partner contract terms, performance bonuses, payout groups with different rates for different segments, CPC payouts, and participation bonuses that reward upper-funnel partners who drive awareness but don’t close the sale. Both tools also support recurring commissions for subscription brands.

Refersion offers three commission structures:

• percent of sale
• flat rate per item/order
• tiered

You can also add product-level (SKU) rates and new vs. returning customer rules. And you can vary commission rates by attribution type – for example, different rates for link conversions vs. coupon code conversions.

But there are no per-partner contracts, no participation bonuses, no CPC payouts, and no multi-touch attribution. Refersion is last-click only.

The only thing to remember is that most of Impact’s granular commission tools are available from the Essentials plan ($500/month) and above.

Neither Refersion nor Impact tracks affiliate-generated content

If your affiliates are posting Instagram Reels, TikTok videos, or Stories that drive sales to your store, you want to see that content. But both tools don’t have this option for affiliates.

Refersion allows you to see clicks, conversions, and revenue per affiliate – but not what content they posted. There’s no content library, no automatic post collection, and no way to connect a piece of content to its sales performance.

Impact is better here, but only within its Creator program. For creators hired into Creator campaigns, you can view and manage submitted content, see post-level performance metrics (engagement, impressions, reach), and store content for later use. But you can’t do this in their Performance (aka affiliate) program.

So on both platforms, if you’re running a traditional affiliate program, you see sales data but have no idea what content produced those sales.

Modash collects creator content automatically as it goes live – including Instagram Stories – without creators needing to submit, authenticate, or connect anything. Every post appears in your campaign dashboard alongside its performance metrics and Shopify sales data.

You can also hover over to “All content” – it captures everything a creator posts during a campaign window, even untagged content.

Impact’s tracking and reporting are more comprehensive, but Refersion is easier to set up

Refersion uses first-party tracking with no cookies. When a customer clicks an affiliate’s referral link, Refersion records the click and assigns a unique cart ID to the shopping session. That cart ID is matched to the order at checkout. Tracking works even when browsers block third-party cookies or users have ad blockers enabled.

Beyond referral links, Refersion offers coupon code attribution, customer email attribution, and SKU-level tracking. Setup on Shopify is straightforward – install the app, connect your store, and tracking starts. But attribution is last-click only, and there’s no cross-device tracking or multi-touch attribution.

Impact’s tracking is more layered. The platform supports pixel tracking, server-to-server (API/FTP) tracking, and more. Impact also offers cross-device tracking that connects customer journeys across mobile and desktop.

On the reporting side, Impact has 40+ pre-built reports – covering performance by partner, product, promo code, country, device, day, week, month, and more. On higher plans, you get Data Lab for fully customizable dashboards, custom metrics, and performance forecasting.

Refersion’s reporting is simpler. You can track orders, sales, and clicks, and filter by offer or date range.

On the Growth plan, you get advanced tracking by product and customer email. But there’s no custom dashboard builder, no cross-channel reporting, and no forecasting tools.

The tradeoff is time to value. Impact’s depth comes with a steeper learning curve. Setup involves configuring tracking tags, event types, and contract terms – and the platform can take weeks to fully configure, especially for teams without affiliate marketing experience. Refersion gets you tracking affiliate sales within minutes of installing the Shopify app.

Impact has automated fraud detection, Refersion relies on manual review

Impact offers a multi-layered fraud protection suite :

• Invalid Traffic detection identifies suspicious traffic sources in real time – bot clicks, cookie stuffing, and other high-risk events
• Promo Code Monitoring flags expired and unauthorized promo codes being used by publishers
• Web Monitoring scans partner websites for brand safety risks, compliance violations, and unauthorized promotions
• Compliance tools for regulated industries

These run automatically across your program. You don’t need to manually review every conversion to catch fraud.

Refersion takes a different approach. It handles deduplication automatically – if a sale is attributed via both a referral link and a coupon code from different affiliates, Refersion unqualifies the duplicate so only one affiliate gets paid.

You can also exclude affiliates from earning commission on their own purchases, though Refersion notes that if an affiliate uses a different email address for self-referrals, Refersion’s system will not be able to detect such cases – you’d need to catch and deny those manually.

Beyond that, Refersion’s fraud prevention guidance is largely manual: screen applicants carefully, use a detailed application process, define unacceptable behavior in your terms and conditions, and review conversion reports regularly. There’s no in-app IP blocklist, no automated bot detection, and no promo code monitoring.

If you’re running an open registration program that attracts a high volume of signups, Impact gives you more protection.

Impact vs. Refersion: Which should you choose?

Hopefully, after reading through the differences, you already have a rough idea of which tool suits your needs better.

Choose Impact if:

• You have the budget and the team to manage a more complex platform
• You need affiliate, influencer, and customer referral programs under one tool
• Multi-touch attribution and cross-device tracking are important to your program

Choose Refersion if:

• You want to launch an affiliate program quickly on Shopify with minimal setup
• First-party, cookie-free tracking matters more to you than multi-touch attribution
• You want more affordability as you scale

A third choice: Modash

Even after picking between Refersion and Impact, you’ll find both tools insufficient in similar areas:

• Both require creators to sign up and get onboarded before you can track their performance
• Neither tracks the content your affiliates post – you see clicks and conversions, but not the Instagram Reels or TikTok videos driving them
• Neither lets you proactively find creators from a global database

Modash fills those gaps.

• You get a database of 380M+ creator profiles across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube – searchable by audience demographics, engagement rate, niche, and more – without creators needing to sign up first
  
• Influencer and affiliate management live in the same dashboard: outreach, gifting, content tracking, promo codes, affiliate links, and payouts, all connected to your Shopify store natively
  
• Content is collected automatically as creators post – including Stories – without requiring any authentication
  

Modash has a 14-day free trial. Try it for yourself (no credit card, creator authentication, or demos required).