Finding good, motivated affiliates is really hard. Recruiting is probably the HARDEST part of growing an affiliate program.
Just having a program with nice commissions is not enough. Affiliate programs aren’t rare anymore – everyone has them.
To actually scale an affiliate program to become a large source of new customers, you have to go out and actively find the top affiliates and influencers in your niche, and build partnerships that work for them.
But… manual research to find affiliates can take day, or even weeks.
So, the best affiliate recruitment software helps save you days of research by finding the best-fit partners for you, so you can spend your time building relationships with them, rather than wasting time finding out about them in the first place.
The best affiliate recruitment software in 2025 is Endorsely.
And it’s free to use.
You simply add your domain when you sign up, and Endorsely scans your website and core features and niches, finds the top websites, YouTubers, and other influencers either already promoting your competitors or who have created super relevant content to your brand, and surfaces them for you.
Simple!
Best Affiliate Recruitment Software at a Glance
Source: Company websites and direct platform testing, January 2025
Compare Key Features
Not all affiliate tools are created equal. Here's what each platform can actually do:
Source: Feature comparison from platform documentation and testing, January 2025
Detailed Reviews
1. Endorsely - AI Affiliate Finder
- Rating: 4.9/5
- Price: Free until affiliates bring $1K/month in revenue, then $39/month
- Free Trial: Unlimited (free to start)
- Best For: SaaS companies wanting to grow their affiliate programs quickly
What Makes It Special
Endorsely does something no other tool does: it actually finds people already promoting similar products.
While affiliate tracking software just help manage existing affiliates, Endorsely's AI searches the internet to discover content creators, bloggers, and influencers who are already talking about products like yours.
Depending on how large your niche is, Endorsely can often find 300+ affiliates with audiences who are actively looking for your software. These are great potential affiliates that would have taken weeks to find manually.
Endorsely also supplies high-converting email outreach templates in their Circle community, that you can download and use.
The platform also includes tracking that connects directly with Stripe. This takes just a few minutes to set up your affiliate program, so you have all the tracking and payouts in one place, as well as the Affiliate Finder to help grow your program.
For SaaS companies, it's especially valuable because it tracks ongoing subscription revenue, not just the initial sale.
Pricing
Endorsely is completely free until $1,000 per month in affiliate revenue. After reaching that point, it costs a flat $39 per month no matter how many affiliates you have or how much revenue they bring in.
This "no success, no cost" model eliminates the risk of paying for software before seeing results. Companies with existing affiliate programs can test Endorsely alongside their current solution without paying anything until it proves its value.
Perfect For...
- SaaS companies starting or growing affiliate programs
- Businesses that don't have dedicated affiliate managers
- Companies wanting to find content creators already promoting competitors
- Teams focused on quality affiliates rather than just quantity
It's particularly effective for B2B software with average customer values above $500, but also works well for consumer SaaS products.
Potential Downsides
Even if Endorsely finds affiliates for you, you still need to outreach them yourself.
How It Looks
The affiliate finder tool shows you potential partners and includes their details to help decide who to contact first.
Overall, Endorsely has a clean dashboard that shows key program stats at a glance. It tracks important numbers like how many new affiliates you've found, how many are active, and total sales. What makes it special is the LTV tracking that shows which affiliates bring customers who stick around longest and spend the most over time.
2. Affistash
Rating: 4.3/5
Price: $97/month
Free Trial: No
Best For: Companies in various industries needing more affiliates
Affistash takes a marketplace approach to finding affiliates. Created by affiliate marketing experts Vic and Dustin, this platform is basically a hub where businesses can find people actively looking for affiliate programs to join.
Two weeks of testing showed Affistash to be straightforward and easy to use. While it doesn't have the AI-powered discovery that Endorsely offers, it does provide access to a solid database of pre-vetted affiliate partners across many different industries.
The platform does a good job organizing affiliates by category, making it easier to find partners in specific niches. For a productivity software client, testing found about 40 potential affiliates in their target market. About 18% of those contacted showed interest, though only about 8% actually became active promoters.
The main difference between Affistash and Endorsely is industry focus. While Endorsely specializes in finding SaaS affiliates specifically, Affistash works with many different types of businesses, including e-commerce, fitness, finance, and more. This makes it a good option if your products go beyond just software.
However, there are some important limitations. Affistash doesn't include tools to track commissions or process payments, which means you'll need another platform to handle those tasks. The $97/month price is also considerably higher than Endorsely's free-until-success model, making it more expensive for startups and small businesses to try.
Good Points:
- Well-organized list of pre-registered affiliates
- Easy-to-use interface with category filters
- Established community of active affiliate marketers
- Works for many industries beyond just software
Not-So-Good Points:
- No AI to discover untapped prospects
- Limited to affiliates already in their system
- Doesn't track commissions or process payments
- Higher upfront cost with no free option
- Requires other tools for complete program management
For businesses with established affiliate programs looking to add more partners quickly, Affistash provides a ready-made pool of potential affiliates. But for companies mainly focused on finding high-quality, targeted SaaS affiliates who are already promoting similar products, Endorsely offers both better targeting and a more affordable starting point.
Source: Affistash platform testing, December 2024-January 2025
3. Respona - Email Outreach Platform
Rating: 4.4/5
Price: $49/month (billed yearly)
Free Trial: 7 days
Best For: Content-focused outreach campaigns and link building
Unlike dedicated affiliate platforms like Endorsely and Affistash, Respona approaches affiliate recruitment from an email outreach angle. It's primarily designed for content promotion and link-building but can be adapted for affiliate recruitment.
Respona's strength is its powerful email capabilities. Three weeks of testing showed its email automation features are very helpful for sending personalized messages at scale. The platform includes tools for finding contact information, creating email sequences, and tracking response rates—all important parts of manual affiliate recruitment.
What makes Respona interesting for affiliate programs is its content research feature. The platform helps identify relevant content and the people who created it, which can help find potential affiliates who are already creating content in your niche. While not as targeted as Endorsely's AI discovery engine, it does provide a systematic way to find content creators.
The email sequence builder is intuitive and allows for good personalization. During testing, outreach campaigns achieved a 22% response rate, which is solid for cold outreach. The platform also provides detailed stats on open rates, response rates, and campaign performance.
However, Respona lacks affiliate-specific features like commission tracking, affiliate portals, or promotional resources. It's basically an outreach tool that requires significant manual work to use for affiliate recruitment. You'll need to export your contacts to a dedicated affiliate platform once you've made the initial connection.
Good Points:
- Powerful email outreach with automated sequences
- Built-in contact finding and verification
- Detailed analytics on outreach performance
- Content research tools to find relevant publishers
Not-So-Good Points:
- Not specifically designed for affiliate recruitment
- No commission tracking or affiliate management
- Requires other tools for complete program management
- More expensive than some dedicated affiliate solutions
- Takes longer to learn than affiliate-specific platforms
Respona is worth considering if your affiliate recruitment strategy focuses heavily on blogger outreach and content partnerships. It works particularly well for businesses that are also running PR, link building, and affiliate recruitment campaigns at the same time, as it can serve multiple purposes.
Respona pairs well with Endorsely—using Endorsely for AI-powered affiliate discovery and management, and Respona for broader content partnership outreach when needed. This combination provides both automated discovery and sophisticated email capabilities.
Source: Respona platform testing, November-December 2024
4. Pitchbox - Enterprise Outreach Platform
Rating: 4.2/5
Price: Custom pricing (typically $500+ per month)
Free Trial: Demo only
Best For: Large companies and agencies managing multiple affiliate programs
Pitchbox is the heavy-duty option in the affiliate recruitment world. As one of the more established outreach platforms on the market, it provides industrial-strength tools for large-scale prospecting and relationship management.
Campaign management experience with enterprise clients shows that Pitchbox's workflow automation is its standout feature. The platform excels at turning affiliate recruitment into a repeatable process with clear stages and accountability. For large teams with multiple people involved in recruitment, this structured approach helps maintain consistency.
The prospect discovery tools include advanced search options and connections with SEO data providers, allowing users to identify potential affiliates based on very specific criteria. For a financial services client, testing built targeted lists of finance bloggers meeting exact domain authority thresholds and content relevance metrics.
Pitchbox's email sequence capabilities are among the most sophisticated available. The platform supports complex multi-touch campaigns with conditional logic based on how prospects interact. Testing achieved a 25% response rate on campaigns with careful segmentation and personalization.
Where Pitchbox falls short for affiliate recruitment specifically is its lack of affiliate-focused features. Similar to Respona, it's primarily an outreach platform that requires integration with other tools to handle the actual affiliate program management. There's no commission tracking, affiliate portal, or promotional resource hosting.
The biggest limiting factor, however, is price. Pitchbox typically starts around $500 per month with annual commitments, making it too expensive for smaller businesses or those just starting their affiliate programs. This is a tool designed for enterprises and agencies managing multiple large-scale campaigns simultaneously.
Good Points:
- Comprehensive workflow automation
- Advanced prospecting and filtering capabilities
- Sophisticated email sequence building
- Detailed performance analytics
- Works well for large teams and agencies
Not-So-Good Points:
- No affiliate-specific features
- Takes time to learn all features
- Expensive starting price
- Requires other tools for complete program management
- Too complex for small to mid-sized programs
Pitchbox makes sense for enterprise businesses with dedicated affiliate teams or agencies managing multiple client programs. For most growing businesses, however, more affiliate-focused platforms like Endorsely offer better value and more relevant features at a fraction of the cost.
How to Choose the Right Platform for Your Affiliate Program
Picking the right affiliate recruitment software means matching tools to your specific needs and growth stage. After helping dozens of companies build and scale their affiliate programs, three key areas stand out as the most important when making a decision.
Match Features to Program Size
The features you need depend a lot on how big your affiliate program is right now:
For New Programs (0-10 affiliates):
- Focus first on tools that help find affiliates
- Choose platforms with low starting costs (like Endorsely's free-until-revenue model)
- Look for easy setup (avoid complex enterprise systems)
- Find tools with ready-made outreach templates to save time
When you're just starting, your main challenge is finding your first 10-20 quality affiliates. This is where Endorsely's AI discovery is especially valuable, helping you find potential partners who are already promoting similar products without requiring a big financial investment upfront.
For Growing Programs (10-50 affiliates):
- Need both recruitment and management features
- Better tracking and reporting becomes important
- Need proper affiliate resources and creative assets
- Want automated commission calculations
At this stage, you're juggling both finding new affiliates and managing existing ones. Tools that combine discovery with basic program management (like Endorsely or a combination of Affistash with another tracking platform) offer the best balance.
For Large Programs (50+ affiliates):
- Need advanced affiliate grouping
- Complex commission structures
- Multiple team member access
- Connection with other marketing tools
- Enterprise-level analytics
Large-scale programs might need the robust features of platforms like Impact.com or the outreach capabilities of Pitchbox, but these should be additions to, not replacements for, dedicated recruitment tools.
Think About Total Cost (Not Just Monthly Price)
When looking at affiliate recruitment software, think beyond the monthly fee to understand what it will really cost:
Direct Costs:
- Monthly/yearly subscription fees
- Per-affiliate or transaction fees (common with networks like Impact.com)
- Setup costs
- Extra user licenses
Hidden Costs:
- Time spent connecting with other tools
- Training time
- Ongoing management time
- Cost of manual work if the platform lacks automation
Platform evaluations show that tools with higher subscription fees often end up costing more in unexpected ways. For example, companies switching from Impact.com to Endorsely typically save not just on subscription costs but also eliminate transaction fees (which often eat up 20% of affiliate revenue) while reducing management time by about 15 hours per month.
Consider how each platform affects your overall workflow. Does it automate time-consuming tasks? Does it work with your existing tools? Will the cost grow reasonably as your program grows?
Expert Tips to Get More From Any Affiliate Tool
Getting an affiliate recruitment tool is just the first step. These strategies will help you get much better results no matter which platform you choose.
Create a Profile of Your Ideal Affiliate
Before starting any recruitment, create a clear picture of your perfect affiliate partners. This helps focus your efforts on people most likely to bring in good traffic and sales.
A good affiliate profile should include:
Audience Factors:
- Audience size and how similar they are to your customers
- Content topics and how engaged their followers are
- How they make money now (are they already promoting similar products?)
- Where they're located (if that matters for your product)
Performance Factors:
- What content formats they're good at (blogs, videos, podcasts)
- How they typically ask followers to take action
- Their conversion rates if you can find this information
- How often they promote products
Relationship Factors:
- How they prefer to communicate
- What commission rates they expect
- Which competing products they promote
- Whether they could become long-term partners
Data from successful affiliate programs shows that the top 20% of affiliates usually generate 80% or more of revenue. By defining what makes a great affiliate partner from the start, you can focus on quality rather than quantity, leading to much higher returns.
When a marketing software company created a detailed affiliate profile before recruitment, they saw 3.2× higher conversion from application to active promotion compared to their previous unfocused approach.
Use Extra Tools to Personalize Outreach
While platforms like Endorsely provide good basic information about potential affiliates, adding extra research tools can dramatically improve personalization and response rates. Consider using:
Contact Finding Tools:
- Hunter.io for verified email addresses
- Clearbit Connect to find decision-makers
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator for relationship mapping
Content Analysis Tools:
- BuzzSumo to see how affiliate content performs
- Similar Web for traffic insights
- Ahrefs for backlink and keyword data
By combining data from these sources with basic affiliate information, your outreach messages can mention specific content performance metrics, suggest concrete improvement ideas, and show you really understand the affiliate's business.
For example, a software company using Apollo.io alongside Endorsely personalized their outreach with specific website traffic statistics and content performance data, getting a 34% response rate versus 21% with standard templates.
Pro tip: Use Zapier to automatically move data between these tools and your affiliate platform to avoid manual data entry and keep information consistent across systems.
Send Follow-Up Emails That Don't Sound Robotic
The difference between successful affiliate recruitment and wasted effort often comes down to good follow-up messages. However, these emails must not sound automated or generic.
Effective follow-up emails should:
Be Perfectly Timed:
- Schedule based on when people open emails
- Space messages about 3-5 days apart
- Send during business hours in the affiliate's time zone
- Avoid weekends and holidays
Add New Value Each Time:
- Each message should offer something useful, not just "checking in"
- Start with content collaboration, then introduce affiliate opportunities
- Mention specific insights from their recent content
- Include proof that gets stronger with each message
End Gracefully:
- Set a clear end point (usually after 4-5 emails)
- Make the final message helpful regardless of response
- Offer alternative ways to connect (newsletter, future collaboration)
- Leave the door open without pushing for immediate action
Companies using well-structured follow-up sequences see 2-3× better conversion rates than those sending single outreach emails. When implementing follow-up automation for a SaaS client through Endorsely's sequence builder, testing showed a 41% increase in positive responses compared to their previous manual approach.
Affiliate Recruitment Software FAQs
What's the difference between affiliate recruitment software and traditional affiliate networks?
Traditional affiliate networks like ShareASale or Commission Junction function as marketplaces where affiliates can discover programs to join, but they rarely actively help with recruitment. They're passive platforms where affiliates must find you.
Affiliate recruitment software actively helps identify and connect with potential partners. While networks focus on tracking and payment once affiliates are in your program, recruitment tools focus on filling your program with high-quality affiliates in the first place.
Most mature affiliate programs use both: recruitment software to find partners and a network (or tracking software) to manage commissions and payments.
Can these tools work with existing affiliate platforms like ShareASale, PartnerStack, or Impact?
Yes, most affiliate recruitment tools can work alongside existing affiliate networks. The typical workflow is:
- Use recruitment software like Endorsely to identify potential affiliates
- Reach out and build the relationship
- Once interested, direct them to your existing network for signup and tracking
Some platforms like Endorsely offer their own tracking and commission management, which can eliminate the need for a separate network entirely, especially for newer programs.
How large should my existing affiliate base be before investing in recruitment software?
There's a common misconception that recruitment software is only valuable for established programs. In reality, these tools are often most valuable when you're just starting out.
If you have 0-5 affiliates: Recruitment software is extremely valuable as it helps you build your initial affiliate base with qualified partners.
If you have 5-20 affiliates: Tools like Endorsely can help you identify similar partners to your current successful affiliates.
If you have 20+ affiliates: You can use recruitment software to become more strategic, focusing on quality over quantity.
The key factor isn't the size of your current program but rather your growth goals. If you're looking to scale your affiliate channel efficiently, recruitment software can save hundreds of hours compared to manual methods.
Do these platforms comply with GDPR and CAN-SPAM for outreach?
Most reputable affiliate recruitment platforms design their outreach functions with compliance in mind, but implementation responsibility ultimately falls on the user.
Here's what to check:
- Ensure the platform allows for unsubscribe links in all emails
- Check if contact data is sourced ethically (public business contact information)
- Verify the platform stores data in compliance with relevant regulations
- Confirm the ability to delete contact data upon request
Endorsely and Pitchbox both design their systems with compliance best practices built-in, while platforms like Respona provide templates that follow CAN-SPAM guidelines. However, always consult with legal counsel regarding your specific compliance needs.
How long does it take to see ROI from an affiliate recruitment platform?
Return timelines vary based on program maturity, product price point, and commission structure, but general benchmarks include:
For SaaS products ($50+ monthly):
- First active affiliates: 2-4 weeks
- First attributed sales: 4-8 weeks
- Positive ROI on platform investment: 2-3 months
For E-commerce products:
- First active affiliates: 1-3 weeks
- First attributed sales: 2-4 weeks
- Positive ROI on platform investment: 1-2 months
Programs using Endorsely typically see faster ROI timelines due to the free-until-revenue model, since there's no upfront cost to recoup. In testing with five SaaS clients, all achieved positive ROI within 90 days of implementation, with an average of 57 days to break even on total program costs.
Which metrics should I track after implementing a recruitment tool?
Beyond basic revenue metrics, these key performance indicators help assess recruitment effectiveness:
Recruitment Metrics:
- Outreach-to-response rate
- Response-to-application rate
- Application-to-active conversion
- Time from initial contact to first promotion
Quality Metrics:
- Revenue per affiliate
- Average order value through affiliate channel
- Conversion rate by affiliate
- Customer lifetime value from affiliate-sourced customers
Program Health Metrics:
- Affiliate retention rate (3/6/12 months)
- Percentage of affiliates making at least one sale
- Revenue concentration (percentage from top 10% of affiliates)
- Content/promotion freshness (when affiliates last updated content)
The most successful programs focus on improving quality metrics rather than simply growing affiliate numbers. For example, a B2B software client using Endorsely found that focusing on improving their activation rate (getting affiliates to create their first piece of content) from 22% to 45% had a greater revenue impact than doubling their total affiliate count.
Are there free alternatives or open-source options?
There are limited free alternatives to dedicated affiliate recruitment software, but budget-conscious programs can cobble together a basic system using:
For Affiliate Discovery:
- Google search operators to find competitors' affiliates
- Free Chrome extensions like Hunter for contact finding
- Social media searches for relevant content creators
For Outreach Management:
- Gmail with mail merge plugins
- Free CRM tools like HubSpot (limited contacts)
- Basic spreadsheet tracking
For Program Management:
- WordPress affiliate plugins (limited functionality)
- Custom tracking links with UTM parameters
- Manual commission calculations
While these free methods can work for very small programs, they don't scale well. The time cost of manual processes typically exceeds the financial cost of purpose-built software once you're actively growing your program. Many businesses find that Endorsely's free-until-revenue model offers the benefits of dedicated software without the upfront investment.
