How Affilert compares
Publishers usually reach for a WordPress plugin like Pretty Links or ThirstyAffiliates, an SEO crawler like Screaming Frog, or an affiliate analytics tool. Each solves a real problem. None of them was built to answer the question Affilert exists for: are your affiliate links still earning right now? Here is where Affilert fits, and where it is different.
Feature comparison
| Capability | Affilert | Broken-link crawlers | WordPress link plugins | Affiliate analytics |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Purpose-built for affiliate links | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Continuous scheduled monitoring | Yes | Partial or limited | Partial or limited | No |
| Follows the full redirect chain | Yes | Partial or limited | No | No |
| Detects stripped / missing tracking tags | Yes | No | No | Partial or limited |
| Works across every network in one place | Yes | Partial or limited | No | Partial or limited |
| Not tied to a single CMS | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| Instant alerts on breakage (email / webhook) | Yes | No | Partial or limited | No |
Yes Partial / limited NoCategory comparison based on the typical design focus of each tool type; individual products vary.
The alternatives, and where they stop
Broken-link crawlers & SEO auditors
Site crawlers and SEO audit tools are excellent at finding site-wide 404s. But they are built for on-page SEO, not affiliate revenue: they often stop at the first response instead of following the whole redirect chain, and a link that resolves to a generic homepage with your tag stripped looks perfectly healthy to them. They also run when you launch a crawl — not continuously.
WordPress link-management plugins
Plugins such as link cloakers and managers are great for organizing, cloaking, and inserting links inside a single WordPress site. Their limits show up at scale: they are tied to one CMS, they focus on managing links rather than continuously verifying the live destination, and they cannot give you one cross-site, cross-network view of what is broken right now. See our guide on link management for multi-site publishers.
Affiliate analytics platforms
Analytics and attribution tools help you understand which links earn and where revenue comes from. That is a different job from health monitoring: they are built to measure performance, not to proactively alert you the moment a link stops resolving or loses its tag. Affilert complements analytics by watching for the breakage that analytics only reveals after the money is already lost.
Named comparisons
The tools publishers most often weigh against Affilert, and how the jobs differ. Each description reflects what that product is built to do; feature sets change, so check the vendor's current documentation before you decide.
Affilert vs. Pretty Links
Pretty Links is a WordPress plugin built around link cloaking and click tracking: it turns a long affiliate URL into a tidy branded short link and reports how often that link is clicked, all from the WordPress admin. That is a serving-and-organising job, and it does it well. Affilert answers the other question — is the destination still working, and did your tag survive the trip? — and answers it for every site you run, WordPress or not. Plenty of publishers use both: one to serve the link, one to watch where it lands.
Affilert vs. ThirstyAffiliates
ThirstyAffiliates is the other long-standing WordPress affiliate-link manager: cloaked links, automatic keyword linking, and per-link reporting, all inside WordPress. The shape of the decision is the same as with Pretty Links — it is a plugin, so it lives in one WordPress install, per site. Affilert is CMS-agnostic and imports links from any site, sheet, or feed, so a portfolio spanning WordPress, Ghost, Webflow, and static sites is one dashboard and one alert stream rather than one plugin per property.
Affilert vs. site crawlers (Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, Semrush)
SEO crawlers such as Screaming Frog SEO Spider and the site-audit modules in Ahrefs and Semrush are built to crawl your pages and report technical issues, broken links among them. Their verdict is the HTTP status of a URL, because that is the right verdict for on-page SEO. Affiliate links fail in a way that verdict cannot see: the link returns 200, lands on a category or homepage, and quietly arrives without your tracking tag. Affilert follows the whole redirect chain and checks the tag at the end of it, which is why it complements an SEO crawler instead of replacing one.
What makes Affilert unique
It runs continuously, not on demand
Most tools check when you click a button. Affilert re-checks every link on a schedule, around the clock, so breakage reaches you as an alert instead of a surprise in your payout report.
It understands affiliate redirects
A generic crawler sees a 200 OK and calls a link healthy. Affilert follows the full redirect chain to the real destination and checks that your tracking tag survived — the failures that actually cost commissions.
It covers every network at once
Amazon Associates, CJ, Impact, ShareASale and the rest live in one dashboard and one alert stream — not a separate login and spreadsheet per program.
It isn't locked to one CMS
WordPress plugins only see one WordPress site. Affilert imports links from any site, sheet, or feed, so multi-site and headless publishers get a single source of truth.
See it on your own links
Import your affiliate links and let Affilert monitor them across every network. No card required.