Awin and Refersion are both popular affiliate marketing platforms – but they have unique strengths.

Awin gives you comprehensive reporting, multi-touch attribution, and flexible commission tools. Refersion gives you a simpler setup, first-party tracking, and a smoother Shopify integration.

This article breaks down how the two compare – and where both fall short (especially if you want to run influencer and affiliate programs from one place).

Awin vs. Refersion at a glance

Awin is better suited for brands that want to tap into a vetted affiliate network and need advanced tools like multi-touch attribution, assisted commissions, and AI-powered partner matching. It’s more powerful – but also more complex and takes longer to set up.

Refersion is better suited for brands that want to launch an affiliate program fast with minimal technical overhead. It’s easier to set up, has native subscription commission support, and uses first-party tracking that works without cookies. But its attribution is last-click only and the tool has limited reporting on lower plans.

The problems with both tools are:

• Neither lets you manage influencer campaigns alongside your affiliate program
• Both charge transaction fees on affiliate revenue top of monthly pricing
• Both require affiliates to sign up before you can track them
• Neither tracks the content your affiliates post

Modash handles all of that – creator discovery, content tracking, affiliate management, product gifting, and payouts – in one Shopify-native dashboard. Here’s how the three compare:

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Awin and Refersion are priced similarly, but you’ll need additional tools to fill the gaps in both

Refersion offers a free plan, but it’s only for listing your brand in its marketplace. To start onboarding and tracking affiliate performance, you need to upgrade to the paid plan, which starts at $39/month with an additional 3% cut of affiliate-driven sales. Awin is priced quite close at $49/month with a 3.5% transaction fee per transaction.

Awin’s lowest tier plan is costlier (and also requires a three month commitment), but as soon as you scale even slightly, it becomes the more affordable option.

• Awin’s Accelerate plan costs $99/month with a 2.5% cut on affiliate-driven sales
• Refersion’s comparative Growth plan jumps to $199/month with a 2% fee
  

The issue is neither tool is sufficient on its own. You’ll need another tool for recruiting affiliates, tracking the content they post, and managing influencer collaborations. That’s why you might hunt for alternatives that offer a lot more than affiliate management, even if it’s a higher entry-level pricing – like Modash.

Modash’s plans begin at $199/month, but you get access to:

• A database of 380M+ creators and affiliates (including AI search!)

• Automatic collection of content your affiliates and influencers post

• Pay your affiliates automatically without thresholds or hold periods (included in the $499/month plan)
  
• Ability to collect performance data for influencers and affiliates in one dashboard
  

The best part is Modash doesn’t charge you based on affiliate-generated revenue; it charges you based on the creator payout. For example, if you have $100 in affiliate revenue:

• Awin will either charge you $3.5 (in the lower tier plan) or $2.5 (in the higher tier plan)
• Refersion will either charge you $3 (in the lower tier plan) or $2 (in the higher tier plan)
• But with Modash, it’s $0 in fees to start, you only pay a fee once you’ve exceeded $10,000/year in payouts. After that, it’s 5% of payouts
  

These costs add up fast as your affiliate programs grow. In the long run, you’ll get much better operational and financial ROI from Modash.

See it for yourself.

Try Modash for 14 days at no cost.

Bottom line: Awin and Refersion are priced neck to neck, but neither gives you enough on its own. You’ll end up paying for additional tools for affiliate discovery, content tracking, and influencer management.

Neither Awin nor Refersion is enough for affiliate recruitment

If you need a tool to find affiliates in addition to managing them, both Awin and Refersion are going to fall short. Refersion has a database of over 1M+ partners and Refersion has 6.6M affiliates in its marketplace.

These numbers may sound good enough, but as soon as you start applying filters like location, follower count, engagement rate, brand fit, etc., there’ll be a handful of prospective affiliates remaining. Whichever tool you opt for, you’ll run into a wall soon and will need to look for a separate tool for affiliate discovery.

Modash is a much better option here with its database of every creator on the planet with over 1k+ followers across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. That’s over 380M+ potential affiliates. You can keep scaling your affiliate program without worrying about running out of affiliate partners.

Also: your affiliate partners need to sign up to Awin and Refersion for you to communicate with them and track their performance. This alone can create a lot of friction for your creators. On Modash, everything (including creator content) is collected automatically and your affiliates don’t need to sign up anywhere to partner with you. 

(They only need to create an account on Modash if you choose to pay them via Modash.)

Bottom line: both Awin and Refersion have marketplaces, not databases. Refersion has 6.6M affiliates and Awin has over 1M+ partners. This means you’ll need another tool to find more affiliates, especially as your program grows.

Awin offers agency and consultancy services, Refersion only offers premium onboarding

Awin offers a lot more than Refersion if you want to outsource your affiliate management or simply need more guidance along the way.

• Awin can get deeply embedded in your affiliate marketing strategy and help you find the right affiliates, handle admin tasks, and improve your strategy
  
• You can also opt for one-hour consultancy calls as an add-on whenever you need them for more assistance, if you want to keep affiliate management in-house

The Launch, Reach, and Elevate service add-ons start at £299 and the Publisher gap analysis at £99 (+VAT)

Refersion, in comparison, doesn’t offer any expert help. You can opt for premium onboarding, which costs $500 for monthly Launch and Growth Plans ($250 if you commit to an annual plan).

Bottom line: Awin offers flexible expert and operational guidance for your affiliate program. Refersion only offers a one-time premium onboarding service to help you get set up on its platform.

Neither Awin nor Refersion lets you manage influencer and affiliate campaigns in one place

Both Awin and Refersion are only for affiliate management. If you, like many teams, run influencer and affiliate management programs simultaneously, you’ll need a different tool to manage your influencer relationships.

You can’t search for influencers, track brand awareness campaigns, or collect influencer content on Awin or Refersion. This means your results and campaigns are often siloed, even if they influence each other. And if you want to convert an influencer to an affiliate, you’ll need to onboard them separately to Awin or Refersion.

If you’d rather opt for a tool that allows you to run your affiliate and influencer programs from one window, Modash is the perfect choice. You can:

• find affiliates and influencers
• connect your Shopify store to accurately track affiliate performance
• measure influencer performance (likes, shares, EMV, etc.) in one dashboard

And neither your affiliates nor your influencers need to sign up anywhere to partner with you. You can find, vet, outreach, communicate, brief, collect the content they post about your brand, and measure their performance without them lifting a finger. Talk about a seamless creator experience.

Bottom line: Awin and Refersion are affiliate management programs only. If you’re running influencer campaigns, too, you need a separate tool to manage those collaborations.

Awin offers more commission flexibility, but Refersion is better for subscription brands

Awin and Refersion both significantly restrict commission flexibility in its lower tier plans. But as you upgrade, Awin becomes more suitable for brands that want to track affiliate-influenced sales, too, and Refersion takes the lead for subscription businesses.

Awin offers “Commission by Assist” – which helps you track an affiliate’s influence on a sale, even if they weren’t the last click. That’s a big deal if you care about upper-funnel content creators who drive awareness but don't always close the sale. On top of that, Awin has a multi-touch attribution tool (Single View) that maps the entire customer journey across touchpoints.

Refersion’s higher tier plans offer more options for commissions, but that doesn’t include assisted commission or multi-touch attribution. adds flat-rate commissions, product-level (SKU) rates, and new vs. returning customer rules. But it doesn't offer per-publisher commission rates, assisted commissions, or multi-touch attribution. Refersion is last-click only.

But when it comes to subscription-based Shopify brands, Refersion wins because it handles recurring commissions natively. You can even set how many renewal cycles an affiliate gets paid for. Awin supports subscription commissions through commission groups, but it requires manual configuration of tracking parameters.

Another Awin restriction is you can only reduce commission rates by 20% at a time, once every 30 days, with 7 days’ notice. Refersion has no such limitation.

Bottom line: Awin gives you more commission flexibility and multi-touch attribution at a lower price. Refersion’s recurring subscription support is more plug-and-play – but for everything else, Awin offers more for less.

Awin and Refersion don’t track affiliate-generated content

If your affiliates are posting Instagram Reels, TikTok videos, YouTube content, or Stories that drive sales to your store, neither Awin nor Refersion will show you that content. Both platforms track clicks, conversions, and revenue – but you have zero visibility into what was actually posted to generate those numbers.

On Awin, you can see which affiliate drove a sale and what link they used. But you can’t see the Instagram post or TikTok video that led to the click. If you want to know what a creator said about your product, you have to go find the post yourself.

Refersion is the same. It tracks referral links and coupon code usage, but there’s no content library, no automatic post collection, and no way to see which pieces of content are driving performance. You’re flying blind on the creative side.

This is a big gap if you care about:

• Knowing which content formats and messaging drive the most sales
• Ensuring affiliates are following brand guidelines and ad disclosure rules
• Repurposing high-performing creator content for your own channels
• Reporting on campaign performance with actual content examples
  

Modash handles content tracking automatically. As soon as a creator posts, Modash collects the content (including Instagram Stories) and saves it to your campaign dashboard. Your creators don’t need to sign up, authenticate, or share screenshots.

You see every post alongside its performance metrics: views, engagement, EMV, link clicks, promo code redemptions, and revenue (synced from Shopify).

There’s also an Event Mode that captures everything a creator posts during a campaign period, even if they forget to tag your brand or use the required hashtag. 

And compliance alerts flag posts that are missing ad disclosures proactively before it becomes a problem.

Bottom line: neither Awin nor Refersion tracks the content your affiliates post. You see that a sale happened, but not what drove it. If understanding which content performs – and ensuring brand compliance – matters to your program, you’ll need a separate tool on top.

Refersion has a smoother Shopify integration, but doesn’t offer native gifting

Both Awin and Refersion have Shopify apps, but they’re not equally built for Shopify brands.

Refersion was designed around ecommerce platforms. You install the Shopify app, connect your store, and your product feed syncs automatically.

From there, you can generate affiliate links, assign Shopify discount codes to individual affiliates, track conversions by referral link or coupon code, and embed a post-purchase widget that turns customers into affiliates – all without leaving the Refersion dashboard.

Awin’s Shopify app covers the basics – install the app, set your advertiser ID, and tracking starts. But Awin uses Shopify’s internal order ID (a long numeric string) as the order reference, not the customer-facing order number.

So when you’re trying to reconcile Awin reports with your Shopify admin, you have to manually look up each internal ID or export CSVs to match them. This might cause issues with syncing product feeds and inaccurate tracking of partial refunds.

Awin also doesn’t track gift cards or automatic/manual discounts – only discount codes. And if you’re running a headless Shopify setup, the app may require additional configuration or manual tracking implementation.

Neither tool offers product gifting natively – you can’t send free products to creators through your Shopify inventory from either platform’s dashboard.

That’s something Modash handles. Its Shopify integration lets you create promo codes and affiliate links, send product gifting links (where creators choose items up to a max value you set), and track clicks, redemptions, and revenue per creator – all synced to your Shopify store automatically.

Bottom line: Refersion integrates more smoothly with Shopify and is purpose-built for ecommerce. Awin’s integration works, but requires more setup and has friction points that Shopify-first brands can find frustrating.

Refersion’s first-party tracking is simpler to set up, but Awin’s tracking is more comprehensive (and complex)

Both tools track affiliate performance, but the underlying technology and setup effort are different.

Refersion uses a first-party tracking domain and no third-party cookies. This means tracking works even when browsers block cookies or users have ad blockers enabled.

The setup is also straightforward: install the Shopify app, and tracking starts automatically via referral links, coupon codes, customer email, and SKU-level attribution (the latter two on Growth and above).

Awin’s tracking is more layered. It uses a combination of first-party cookies, server-to-server tracking, deterministic cross-device tracking, and coupon code attribution.

Awin also recently introduced its Conversion Protection Initiative (CPI) to address missed conversions from ad blockers and cookie restrictions. Brands that don’t implement server-to-server tracking will have estimated sales added using Awin's probabilistic model.

So Awin’s tracking is more comprehensive because cross-device journeys, multi-touch attribution, and server-to-server support give you a fuller picture of what’s actually driving sales. But you need to set up a lot of complex metrics to get here. You need to configure tracking tags, manage consent compliance, and potentially coordinate with Awin’s technical team for advanced features.

Refersion’s tracking is narrower but more plug-and-play. It’s first-party, cookie-free, works out of the box on Shopify. But it’s last-click only – so you can’t do cross-device tracking, measure assisted conversions, or map customer journeys.

Bottom line: if tracking accuracy across devices and touchpoints matters to your program, Awin offers more. If you want simple, reliable first-party tracking that works immediately on Shopify without technical overhead, Refersion is the easier choice.

Awin has a steeper learning curve than Refersion, but it’s also more comprehensive

If you’re launching your first affiliate program, Refersion gets you live faster. Install the app, connect your store, and hit the ground running.

Awin has a steeper learning curve compared to Refersion. The setup involves configuring tracking tags, setting up commission groups, managing product feeds, etc.

Once you’re set up in Awin, though, the depth can be an advantage. The reporting, commission flexibility, and multi-channel attribution give you more to work with. But the time to value is longer, especially for small teams without affiliate marketing experience.

Refersion’s simplicity, which makes onboarding easy, also means less depth in reporting and analytics. As your program grows, you may outgrow what Refersion’s dashboard can show you without upgrading to the higher tier plans.

Bottom line: Refersion is the faster path to a working affiliate program. Awin is more powerful once you’re up and running, but expect a longer setup and steeper learning curve before you see ROI.

Awin vs. Refersion: which one should you choose?

After reading through all the differences, you'll have a sense of which platform fits your program better.

Choose Awin if:

• You need multi-touch attribution and the ability to reward upper-funnel affiliates
• You want commission flexibility across voucher codes, publishers, campaigns, and SKUs 
• You have the budget and team to handle a steeper learning curve and longer setup time

Choose Refersion if:

• You want a fast, simple setup with minimal technical overhead
• You run a subscription-based business and need native recurring commission support
• First-party, cookie-free tracking matters more to you than multi-touch attribution or upper-funnel rewards

A third choice: Modash

Even after picking between Awin and Refersion, you’ll run into the same gaps on both platforms:

• Both require creators to sign up and get approved before they can partner with you
• Neither lets you find creators proactively – you’re limited to whoever's already signed up for their network or marketplace
• Neither offers product gifting, outreach, or influencer management alongside affiliate tracking
• Neither tracks the content your affiliates post – you see clicks and conversions, but not the Instagram Reels or TikTok videos driving them

Modash fills those gaps.

• Affiliate and influencer discovery: Modash has 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 in the same dashboard: outreach, gifting, content tracking, promo codes, affiliate links, and payouts, all connected to your Shopify store natively
  
• Automatic content collection: affiliate and influencer content is collected automatically as creators post – including Stories – without requiring any authentication

‍Try Modash free for 14 days – no credit card required.