As Shopify affiliate apps, GoAffPro and Refersion both tackle the same core problems – managing affiliate codes, tracking commissions, and handling payouts. So how do you choose between them? And is there a better option you should be considering? 🤷‍♀️ Read on and I’ll help you figure it out…

GoAffPro vs Refersion: Comparison overview

GoAffPro vs. Refersion: Side-by-side comparison

Pricing, free tiers, paid plans, and what you actually get

Price shouldn’t be the only consideration when choosing an affiliate marketing solution. But, naturally, you want to feel like you’re getting the most possible bang for your buck 💰

Actually, you don’t need to pay a single cent to start using GoAffPro or Refersion, because both offer free plans.

With Refersion, you can list your program on the app’s public marketplace and publish a percent-of-sale offer that affiliates can view and apply for – all for free. It’s a great way to get more eyes on your affiliate program, but it doesn’t offer any tools for actually running your program.

GoAffPro takes things several steps further by offering a generous free tier aimed at merchants with <100 daily orders. It includes:

👉 Unlimited affiliates

👉 Unlimited sales

👉 Unlimited revenue

You even get access to a basic affiliate portal. It’s everything you need to run a simple affiliate program – although it’s obviously missing a ton of features that are only available on paid plans.

Speaking of which, let’s dig into the premium options for both tools. First up, GoAffPro, which offers a choice of two “regular” paid plans:

There’s also an Enterprise plan, which includes a dedicated account manager and custom mobile apps for affiliates, as well as custom features and pages – but pricing is unlisted, so you’ll need to reach out for a quote.

Similarly, Refersion has two main paid plans:

And then there’s the enterprise-grade Scale plan, which includes all of Refersion’s features along with premium support, white-glove onboarding, Slack channel membership, early feature access, and – most importantly – a flat monthly subscription with zero extra fees. As with GoAffPro, the price isn’t public, although I saw an old version of the pricing page where it started at $599 per month. So make of that what you will.

Affiliate recruitment and onboarding experience

A wise man once told me: you can’t run an affiliate program without affiliates. Turns out he was right – so your chosen affiliate marketing management platform had better offer an effective way to recruit and onboard those all-important creator partners.

With Refersion, you can: 

👉 Build a custom registration page to drive affiliate signups

👉 Set specific criteria to save time filtering out creators who don’t fit your brand

👉 Leverage integrations with third-party tools like Klaviyo to engage potential affiliate partners

👉 Connect with affiliates already in the platform through the Refersion Marketplace

How about with GoAffPro? Well, you can invite affiliates to join your program, but you need to already know their name and email address – not much use if you’re just getting started.

Just like with Refersion, you can also create a listing on the built-in GoAffPro Marketplace to generate inbound applications from affiliates already using the platform.

Unlike Refersion, GoAffPro has its own creator database, which you can use to track down potential affiliate partners based on criteria like:

👉 Niche

👉 Region

👉 Tags

👉 Country

👉 Category

You can even use it to do basic affiliate vetting by opening a creator’s profile to find their bio, age, gender, niche, country, and social media handles. 

The database only contains ~2.8M profiles at time of writing, so it’s not super scalable – you’ll run out of relevant affiliates in narrower niches pretty damn quick. But at least it gives you a proactive, outbound way to grow your program rather than relying 100% on inbound signups.

🤓 Further reading: For more on recruiting and onboarding affiliates, check out 8 Ways to Hire Affiliate Creators (And Actually Activate Them).

Commission structures and customization

If you’re serious about keeping affiliates motivated, you need to offer more than a single flat commission tier. Because surely your top performers deserve more than the same old 10% rate that everyone else gets. So you’ll be glad to hear that both platforms feature a giddying array of customizable commission structures.

Let’s start with GoAffPro. Once you’ve added a default commission rate for your program (either flat-rate or percentage-based), you can:

👉 Pay lower/higher commissions for specific products or variants
👉 Set different rates for new vs returning customers 

👉 Create multiple groups of affiliates, each with its own commission rate and rules

👉 Vary commission rates for coupon codes and/or different conversion sources

👉 Offer multi-level commissions where creators earn a cut of sales from affiliates they invite

👉 Modify commissions based on criteria like order value, shipping location, and customer tag

Refersion is similarly flexible. It offers three different commission structure options:

👉 Percent of sale

👉 Flat rate per item/order

👉 Tiered

You can adjust the default settings for your calculation logic, such as including or excluding shipping and taxes. And you can customize further with product-level commissions based on a product’s name or SKU.

🤓 Further reading: Learn more about commission structures in How To Pay Influencers: 5 Ways To Compensate Creators.

Tracking accuracy, codes, links, and attribution

Honestly, there’s no need to worry about either platform when it comes to tracking accuracy, with G2 users saying both excel here (although it’s worth noting that GoAffPro, in particular, is often described as “super accurate”.)

With GoAffPro, sales are tracked using unique discount codes and affiliate links. It’s largely the same story in Refersion, although the platform also offers a third option: tracking sales based on the customer’s email address.

Payout and invoicing management

Late commission payments are one of the most common reasons for creators to ditch affiliate programs. So it’s important your chosen affiliate software offers an efficient, reliable system for managing invoices and payouts.

With Refersion, there are five ways to pay affiliates:

👉 Unified Payments for automated payouts and tax management (only available for US businesses paying commissions in USD).

👉 PayPal via Refersion’s integration

👉 Trolley for routing payments to an affiliate’s bank/PayPal in bulk

👉 Gift card sent via email (this can be automated for Shopify Plus merchants)

👉 Manual payments by wire transfer, check, Venmo, and other methods

Whereas with GoAffPro, it’s a straight choice between PayPal, store discount coupons, or external payment methods like bank transfer and debit card.

GoAffPro also lets you automatically generate invoices for commission payments – including the ability to customize invoice templates and make them available for your creator partners to download via their affiliate dashboard.

Reporting and performance dashboards

First off, I gotta tell you: if you’re looking for eye-wateringly beautiful data visualization, you’re not going to find it in GoAffPro or Refersion. Neither is particularly easy on the eye when it comes to reporting – but, on the flip side, both provide all the essential information you need to measure affiliate program performance.

First up, GoAffPro. The merchant dashboard gives you an at-a-glance view of affiliate-generated…

👉 Page views

👉 Orders

👉 Revenue

Plus you can see some other useful numbers, like the total number of affiliates enrolled in your program and your top affiliate partners.

Refersion is pretty similar. Use the dashboard to find figures for…

👉 Orders

👉 Sales

👉 Clicks

…with the ability to filter by offer or date range.

Scroll down the page for a list of your top affiliate partners, including individual figures for clicks, conversions, revenue, commission, and most recent conversion.

Creator-facing portal and experience

Of course, you’re not the only one who needs accurate, easily digestible data on clicks, sales, and other key affiliate metrics – your creator partners need to understand how they’re performing, too.

Fortunately, both GoAffPro and Refersion offer access to this key information (and more) via dedicated affiliate portals. Again, they’re not gonna win any beauty awards, but they get the job done.

Here’s the first thing your affiliates will see when logging into Refersion’s portal:

As you can see, it provides a quick glance at their next estimated commission payment, commissions in approval, and previous payments received, as well as their affiliate referral code. The dashboard also offers access to marketing assets, conversions (including each sale’s commission and payment status), product-specific referral links, performance reports, and more.

All in all, it’s pretty comprehensive 👏

The GoAffPro affiliate portal is more or less the same. On the main screen, you’ll find referral information (AKA links and coupon codes), plus a summary table showing referrals, orders, conversions, sales, and earnings.

Elsewhere, the dashboard provides in-depth analytics, product links, media assets, payment information… basically, all the stuff your affiliates need to promote your products and optimize their campaigns.

GoAffPro also allows brands to customize the appearance and functionality of their affiliate portal, such as adding their…

👉 Logo

👉 Brand font

👉 Color palette

It’s not exactly a dealbreaker, but as far as I can tell, you can’t do this in Refersion.

Shopify integration depth

Both platforms integrate with Shopify – and they both do the job pretty well. 

Refersion offers some nice features, such as an automated start guide to integrate with your Shopify store and sync your product feed, helping you get up and running in minutes. 

Meanwhile, GoAffPro works with the Shopify Admin and is compatiable with Shopify POS – handy if you’re running one or more brick-and-mortar shops alongside your online store.

Ease of setup and ongoing management

Compared to many affiliate marketing platforms, GoAffPro and Refersion are definitely at the user-friendly end of the spectrum. Both have been praised for their easy setup and ease of use on G2, and both offer in-depth support documentation to help you overcome basic issues.

For anything more challenging, all Refersion customers can access email-based support, while chat support is also available to customers on the Growth plan (and remember, there’s a dedicated Slack channel for enterprise customers). GoAffPro promises 24/7 support but doesn’t actually specify how it works.

Where GoAffPro wins

Better free tier for brands just getting started

Any free functionality is better than none. But GoAffPro’s free plan is clearly superior because you can actually use it to manage your whole affiliate program, with unlimited affiliates, sales, and revenue. With Refersion, you’re limited to publicly listing your program on its built-in marketplace.

Simpler setup with fewer configuration decisions

To reiterate: neither platform is super difficult to set up. However, because Refersion offers a slightly broader feature set – API access, marketplace exposure – it requires you to make a few more decisions before you go live. So if you’re looking for a lean setup and nothing else to configure, GoAffPro is a better bet.

Where Refersion wins

More third-party integrations

At time of writing, Refersion integrates with no fewer than 60 third-party tools, covering everything from email and SMS marketing to analytics to landing page design. GoAffPro has less than half as many integrations (24, to be precise) – and it doesn’t integrate with Google Analytics.

There’s just one big, glaring asterisk hanging over this point: Refersion only offers third-party integrations on its top-tier Growth plan ($199/month). That’s pretty annoying – smaller businesses need integrations too! For comparison, GoAffPro bundles them with all paid plans.

If you’re interested, I’ve linked to the full list of integrations for both platforms here:

👉 GoAffPro integrations

👉 Refersion integrations

Better fit for brands that also sell on non-Shopify channels

Refersion supports multi-channel tracking across platforms beyond “vanilla” Shopify (e.g. Shopify Plus, WooCommerce, headless setups), whereas GoAffPro is more tightly scoped to Shopify. If the brand has a more complex commerce stack, Refersion handles it better.

Where both tools fall short

Limited proactive creator recruitment

Sure, both GoAffPro and Refersion give you tools to grow your program by hiring more affiliates – but almost all of those tools require creators to come to you. If you want to get proactive, your only option is to search GoAffPro’s creator database, but it’s pretty limited, with only ~2.8M creator profiles (for context, most influencer search tools are at least 50X larger).