Rewardful and Tolt are both great affiliate marketing software options to run your SaaS business.
These are 2 of my personal favorites.
Iāll try my best to give you an unbiased comparison of the 2, so you can make the right decision based on your individual needs.
Ease of signing up
Iāve personally signed up for both of them, and both of them were very quick and easy.
Iāve been doing affiliate marketing for over 20 years.
Based on experience, I can tell you that how easy it is to sign up for an affiliate program is one of the most important aspects of affiliate software.
Why?
You are trying to find as many high quality affiliates to sell your SaaS product as possible.
You have 2 ways to incentivize potential affiliates to promote your business.
The one everyone thinks about is % commission. And it is true that this is the most important part.
But the second most important thing you can do to attract affiliates is to make the sign-up process quick and easy.
Affiliates want to focus on selling. They want to write articles, make YouTube videos, and put their affiliate link to work.
The last thing they want to do is to spend a bunch of time filling out a long form with meaningless questions.
Trust me, Iām an affiliate and I will abandon any program that takes more than 2 minutes to sign up and get my affiliate link.
This should be automatic.
When I sign up as a new affiliate, I just want to put in my name, email, Paypal account email for where you will pay me, and thatās pretty much it.
If you want to know the website Iāll be promoting your product on, then fine.
But thatās it!
Donāt make me fill out a long form or wait 24 hours. If I sign up as an affiliate, I want to start writing an article that minute.
Some of your competitors will let me sign up and get my link within 2 minutes. And those are the ones I want to promote.
Verdict
I would give a slight edge to Rewardful with how easy it is to sign up.
Iām an affiliate marketer for several brands who use Rewardful, like Beehiiv and Exploding Topics for example.
So if you use Rewardful, youāll be in good company.
Anytime Iām considering being an affiliate of a product I like, if I notice they are using Rewardful, I have a higher chance of following through.
Rewardfulās signup process is automatic. It literally takes 2 minutes for me to get my new affiliate link. Then Iām ready to start promoting immediately.
Honestly, Tolt was really easy too and I was impressed by it.
Another strong point for Tolt is that their customer service is very fast. I read about the excellent customer service reviews for Tolt, and I tested it myself.
They have a live chat (with a real person, not an AI) on their website.
I had one question. They figured it out for me, live, within 3 minutes of typing my question into the chat window.
Price
The pricing is pretty similar, but Iāll make a comparison chart to show you.
Both are very affordable.
Monthly Affiliate Revenue | Tolt Pricing | Rewardful Pricing |
Up to $2,500 | $29 (Starter) | $49 (Starter) |
Up to $7,500 | $49 (Growth) | $49 (Starter) |
Up to $15,000 | $99 (Pro) | $99 (Growth) |
Up to $20,000 | $99 (Pro) | $149 (Pro) |
$20,001+ | Contact for Enterprise pricing | $149 (Pro) |
The big thing that stands out in terms of price is that Tolt lets you dip your toe into the game with a $29 per month tier.
The prices for both companies are the same at $7500 in monthly affiliate sales.
But if you are just starting out, have very low sales, and are watching every penny of your marketing budget, then Tolt is a great way to get started.
Verdict
Even though the prices are similar at most price points, the fact that Tolt has a lower tier for anyone just starting out is a good option. So for this reason Iāll give Tolt a slight edge in the pricing category.
What we like about Tolt
One cool feature that Tolt offers is a customizable affiliate portal to offer your affiliates.
This can make your brand look more professional because it looks like youāve set the whole affiliate program up yourself.
When your affiliates login to check how many sales theyāve made, they will see your logo, your branding colors, and the whole experience makes you stand out and look impressive – even to potential investors.
At first I didnāt think this feature was a big deal, but the more I think about it, the more I do like the idea of having my brand right in there when my affiliates are looking at it.
Tolt also lets you set up your own subdomain. So it would be: affiliates.yourdomain.com
So for us, it would be affiliates.aigrowthguys.com That is a nice domain to send affiliates to for us. Again, this kind of thing looks more professional.
Tolt also offers affiliates passwordless logins. When an affiliate logs in, they just use their email address. Then they get a simple, one click āmagic linkā to enter their portal.
This is a good feature because most affiliates arenāt logging into their portal very regularly, so itās easy for them to forget a password.
And who wants to reset a password? No one.
This magic link makes things quick and easy.
Another feature I like is that you can upload all of your marketing assets into your affiliate portal with Tolt.
You upload all of your logo variations and other graphics in there.
Therefore it is easy for your affiliates to get your marketing assets and start promoting your product.
Itās also easy for you because they wonāt be emailing you and asking for this kind of stuff.
Trust me, when you have over 50 affiliates helping to market your product or service, you donāt want to be bogged down answering their questions.
You need to make things easy for them.
Note: I just tried this feature now while Iām writing this. Here is how it looks.
You can see their logo right there. I downloaded it. Here it is:
Pretty easy. And as an affiliate myself, I can tell you, this kind of thing is important.
I hate wasting time looking around for marketing assets.
Check out all of Toltās features.
What we like about Rewardful
As I mentioned earlier, I love when companies Iām looking to promote are using Rewardful. I have experience with at least 4 of them.
The process is quick and easy to set up every time. I get my personal affiliate link within 2 minutes of deciding I want to be an affiliate.
Note: Imagine wanting to be an affiliate of a certain product. They make you fill out a long form, and then you need to wait a week or so before someone reviews your link. By the time they approve you, youāve already moved on to promoting other products. This happens all the time. I know from experience.
Rewardful also lets you customize your affiliate portal with your own branding.
They offer advanced affiliate segmentation.
This means you can group your affiliates and offer certain groups different % commissions.
You may want to give people a higher % commission after theyāve made 10 sales for example. This kind of thing is easy to do with Rewardful.
For more tech savvy people, Rewardful lets you access their API for advanced customization options.
Rewardful also identifies affiliate fraud. This could be where a person signs up for an affiliate link, and then buys your product for themself with that link. If Rewardful notices this suspicious behavior, they will deactivate the link for this sale.
One last thing I like about Rewardful is that they make it easy to understand how to link to different pages of any site.
Look at this screenshot.
It tells me very clearly how to link to any page.
It is shocking how most affiliate marketing software does not make this simple, but important, thing clear.
Check out all of the features Rewardful offers.
For another comparison, check out Rewardful vs PartnerStack
Are you still wondering if you should use affiliate marketing to promote your SaaS business?
Conclusion:
Both Tolt and Rewardful are great. Seriously.
If you are just starting out and you really care about price. You might want to check out Tolt because of their $29 per month tier.
If you want an affiliate software that is slightly more established and used by awesome companies like Beehiiv, Iād go with Rewardful.
Some of the links in this post may be affiliate links. We might earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Itās one way to support us and keep things running. We also only put affiliate links we believe in fyi.