Rewardful vs FirstPromoter
Both are alternatives to PartnerStack. Here's how they stack up — verified facts, no spin.
Also searched as FirstPromoter vs Rewardful — same comparison, one verdict.
Rewardful
TOP PICKStripe-native affiliate tracking with a flat fee and no revenue share.
Rewardful does one thing precisely: affiliate and referral tracking for companies billing through Stripe or Paddle. It reads your subscription data directly, so recurring commissions, upgrades, refunds and churn are handled correctly without reconciliation work. Crucially it charges a flat monthly fee rather than a percentage of partner revenue, which inverts the economics — a successful programme costs you no more to run. There is no marketplace, so you bring your own partners. For a company that already knows who its affiliates are, that is not a limitation.
FirstPromoter
The mature flat-fee option, with the deepest reporting of the three.
FirstPromoter has been running SaaS affiliate and referral programmes for years and shows it: multi-tier commissions, campaign segmentation, fraud detection, white-labelled partner portals and reporting well beyond what the newer tools offer. It integrates with Stripe, Paddle, Chargebee and Recurly, so it is not tied to one billing provider. Proprietary and hosted like the rest of this list. It is the pick when the programme is a real channel with several partner types and you want the analytics to match, without moving to a revenue-share platform.
Side by side
| Rewardful | FirstPromoter | |
|---|---|---|
| Sovereignty Score | 46 | 45 |
| Open source | No | No |
| Self-hostable | No | No |
| Local-first | No | No |
| License | Proprietary (hosted service) | Proprietary (hosted service) |
| Pricing | Flat monthly fee by tracked revenue volume — no percentage of partner-driven revenue. Free trial available. | Flat monthly tiers by tracked revenue; no percentage of partner-driven revenue. |
Rewardful is Macrostack's recommended PartnerStack alternative, so it's our pick here.
Rewardful
Strengths
- +Flat fee, not a revenue share — a growing programme does not cost more to run
- +Deep Stripe and Paddle integration handles recurring, upgrades and refunds correctly
- +Fast to set up: a script tag and a webhook
- +No marketplace means no gatekeeper and no approval to wait on
Trade-offs
- −No partner marketplace — recruiting affiliates is entirely your job
- −Proprietary and hosted
- −Stripe or Paddle only; other billing stacks are not supported
- −Lighter on enterprise features than PartnerStack
FirstPromoter
Strengths
- +Most mature and feature-complete of the flat-fee options
- +Works with Stripe, Paddle, Chargebee and Recurly — not locked to one
- +Multi-tier commissions, segmentation and fraud detection
- +White-label partner portal on higher tiers
Trade-offs
- −Interface is dated next to Tolt and Rewardful
- −No marketplace
- −More configuration required to get running
- −Proprietary and hosted
More PartnerStack head-to-heads
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Facts verified 2026-08-01. Licenses and pricing change — spotted something out of date? That's a correction we want.