A comparison of four Affiliate Platforms to manage, track and optimize advertising campaigns
Finding the right Affiliate Marketing Software product for your business can take research and time. In this short guide, we’ve compared four services from Affise, Cake, Everflow, and HOQU to help work out, which is best for you.
Table of Contents
Starting Price
Each service provider offers a selection of packages going from the starter, right the way up to professional, and custom enterprise solutions. HOQU stands out at the very affordable tag of $99/month, with which you’ll get 15,000 conversions and 1.5 million impressions. Cake offers a click-based pricing model, but it is unclear exactly as to what there will set you back.
The lowest level package with Affise starts at $299/month for 10,000 conversions and 1 million impressions. At the same time, Everflow begins at $395/month for up to 50,000 clicks.
All providers offer custom pricing as you go, so they can scale up with you.
In terms of starting price, HOQU has to be the preference at better than half the cost of the known models provided by Affise and Everflow.
Best For
Each provider gives us an overview of their target customer. The summaries below are taken from their own sites.
HOQU is ideally suited for Affiliate Networks, Agencies as well as Direct Advertisers who’d like to launch their own affiliate program. HOQU also welcomes Affiliates & Media buyers to join for free to discover new networks & offers, setup, automate & optimize campaigns to boost revenues – all in one place.
Cake is for performance marketing advertisers, networks, and publishers that manage in-house affiliate or partner programs.
Everflow is best for Performance Marketers looking for an all-in-one Partner Marketing Platform for managing: Affiliates, Influencers, In-App Publishers while tracking every Media Buying channel.
Affise is a Traffic Tracking Platform for creating your own Affiliate Network. It supports Advertisers, Agencies, and Networks with a customizable solution to manage their direct publisher relations.
Each service has a strong offering, although Everflow states it is best for those with between 100 and 500 users compared to 1000+ with the other platforms. HOQU provides the easiest way to create an affiliate program for your business from the platforms presented. Given the lower starting price and strong offering here, HOQU remains on top.
Usability
The Everflow platform is very smooth and easy to navigate as well as being responsive. The dashboards provided are self-explanatory and aesthetically pleasing to the eye. Key features are blocking out traffic and being able to access the platform via mobile to track from anywhere.
Affise seems to be a little slower than Everflow but not painfully slow. The interface is simple and easy to learn. Still, there seem to be technical issues quite regularly, according to their users.
HOQU is the fastest working site of the four providers, as well as the most convenient tracker. The team also helps with migration from previous platforms if required. HOQU has lots of features and walk-thru to provide seamless tracking functionality. With real-time data, advanced targeting, and S2S integration, the tracking options are excellent.
The Everflow and HOQU dashboards are stand-outs here, but given the additional cost-effectiveness and features of HOQU, it stills ranks at the top to this point. Where it comes to speed and reliability, HOQU prevails every time.
The Cake platform provides all the tracking tools that you might need. A lot of the guides are via webinars, which doesn’t suit everybody despite them being useful. The tracking is not as intuitive as the others in this comparison.
Reviews
Based on online reviews from open sources, Everflow comes out on top at 4.8/5, respectively.
Cake (4.6) seems to have lost points whereby support is sometimes hard to get hold of despite being excellent at solving problems when available.
Similarly, Affise (4.3) seems to falter with technical service. Users have noted about raising bugs that don’t tend to get fixed as quickly as the other platforms. For the price, Affise doesn’t have any stand-out features that create good value.
Affise users have switched to HOQU for the excellent service offering creating better value.
As it stands, Everflow ranks the best. Based on positive user reviews alone, the platform stands out. However, HOQU is still new to the market, and the volume of reviews is limited. The functionality looks the widest amongst their competitors while being the best price.
Trial Period
All the providers seem to offer a demo of the platform as a minimum. However, both Cake and Everflow don’t specify any sort of trial via their customer websites. Everflow did respond via their live chat service and specified they could provide a sandbox environment to test with.
HOQU can provide a free trial without feature restrictions or any setup fees, contracts, or the need for card details. Users can sign up as either an affiliate or as an advertiser. When you do opt for HOQU, there are also free onboarding sessions to get you started.
Affise offers a 30 day free trial period of the platform upon request. No card details are needed, and you just need to fill out a short form to get started within hours. As with HOQU, there are onboarding sessions available too.
Both HOQU and Affise make it easy for potential customers to get a free trial. While the other providers do respond on request, it is more ambiguous as to what you might get.
Support, Service, and Training
All the providers in this comparison offer ongoing support, service, training. They all state that 24/7 support is available through different channels, including phone, email, and live chat.
For training, they give lots of documentation as well as webinars, online tutorials, and face-to-face workshops.
HOQU will give a dedicated account manager, migration packages, and onboarding sessions as part of their service. The focus is on building a face-to-face personal relationship with their customers.
Everflow offers similar support functions and responds very quickly through online chat functionality. They seem to offer more in the way of online training as opposed to face-to-face.
Cake and Affise seem a bit slower with their responses than the other providers. However, they do still have agents available whenever you need them. Cake was very professional with their responses in particular via their live chat service. Training has an online and webinar focus on both of these providers.
Support and service are hard to judge until you have a problem, but at face value, all providers can give the service you require when needed. Each of those in this comparison can adapt to the needs of the user and offer different channels and methods. HOQU is newer to the market and provides a more dedicated service, but Everflow and Affise are experienced and have more proven support, service, and training functions.
Overall
All the systems reviewed in this comparison have great functionality and an impressive set of features. Most of the time, they are like for like, and the choice of the system might rest of the aspects of their systems they highlight. Affise has a great mobile offering, and Everflow is very smooth and easy to use. However, the best partner for you might rely on the use case. HOQU has recurring payments that are relevant for the popular gambling and betting markets, a feature that is not available through any of the competition.
Everybody will have their own idea of what makes a great Affiliate Platform. The choice should first be made based on your task, but this article will help affirm your decision and work with the best provider for you.
