Dub.co vs. Rewardful: Which Should You Use for SaaS Affiliate Programs in 2026

If you’re planning to launch an affiliate program for your SaaS product, there’s a good chance Rewardful is already on your radar. It’s affordable, Stripe-friendly, and widely recommended for first-time programs.

But as teams grow, a common question starts popping up:

Is Rewardful enough once affiliates become a real revenue channel?

That’s where Dub.co enters the conversation — specifically Dub Partners, a part of the Dub platform (not a separate product, and not “Dub Partners” as a standalone company) that we’ll be focusing on today.

This article compares Dub.co and Rewardful through the lens of real SaaS needs: payouts, analytics, tax compliance, affiliate experience, and pricing — without pretending both tools are built for the same stage of growth.

What Is Dub.co?

Dub.co is a modern link attribution and partner management platform built for SaaS companies that care deeply about end-to-end attribution.

Dub started as a powerful link tracking and analytics tool. Over time, it expanded into partnerships — affiliates, referrals, creators, and revenue-driving relationships — all under one roof.

Dub Partners is the affiliate and partner management layer inside Dub.co. If there’s anything I love about Dub Partners, it’s that it treats affiliates like a first-class growth lever, with infrastructure to match.

What Is Rewardful?

Rewardful is an affiliate management platform designed to be simple, affordable, and tightly integrated with Stripe.

It focuses on the essentials: tracking referrals, assigning commissions, and paying affiliates. For early-stage SaaS teams, this simplicity is often exactly what makes Rewardful attractive.

There’s very little setup friction, the dashboard is easy to understand, and most teams can get an affiliate program live in a day.

But Rewardful intentionally avoids complexity — which can become a limitation once your affiliate program scales beyond “nice to have.”

How Does Dub.co and Rewardful Differ?

Payouts

Payouts are one of the first places the difference between these platforms becomes obvious.

With Rewardful, payouts are handled through PayPal or Wise, typically via CSV exports. The process looks something like this: export payouts, upload them to a payment provider, handle failed payments, retry, then manually mark payouts as completed.

This works — but it’s operationally heavy. Failed payouts are common, especially with international affiliates, and teams often end up chasing verification issues or fraud checks.

Dub Partners, on the other hand, handles payouts natively through Stripe Express (and PayPal where Stripe isn’t supported). Once a bank account is connected, payouts are essentially one click. There’s no CSV juggling, no separate business accounts to manage, and no payout babysitting.

For companies paying a handful of affiliates, this difference may not matter. For companies paying dozens or hundreds, it matters a lot.

Tax Compliance

Tax compliance is another area where Rewardful stays intentionally hands-off.

Rewardful does not collect tax forms or prepare tax documents. Most companies end up integrating a third-party provider to handle W-9s, W-8s, and 1099-NECs once their affiliate earnings cross meaningful thresholds.

Dub Partners builds this directly into the platform.

For U.S. affiliates earning over $600, Dub automatically collects W-9s and prepares 1099-NEC forms. For non-U.S. affiliates, it collects W-8 forms to establish tax residency.

If you’ve never dealt with affiliate tax reporting, this might sound like a future problem. In reality, it becomes a present problem faster than most teams expect.

Analytics

Rewardful’s analytics are clean and approachable. Because it’s Stripe-integrated, subscription changes — upgrades, downgrades, cancellations — are reflected automatically in commissions. For many teams, that’s enough.

Dub Partners goes significantly deeper.

It provides visibility across clicks, conversions, traffic sources, countries, devices, and real-time events. There’s even an event stream where you can watch activity happen live, and export it for deeper analysis.

One important technical distinction: Dub uses server-side tracking. This reduces duplicate events and attribution errors that can occur with client-side tracking — errors that often lead to double-paying affiliates or hours spent reconciling data.

Reward Structures

Rewardful supports standard affiliate reward models: flat fees or percentage-based commissions, with options for one-time, recurring, or limited payouts. This covers most traditional affiliate use cases.

Dub Partners expands the model.

Affiliates can be rewarded not just for sales, but for clicks and leads. Rewards can be flat or percentage-based, applied over custom time windows or even over a customer’s lifetime.

More importantly, Dub allows conditional rewards. You can adjust commissions based on factors like geography, performance tiers, or partner type — without rebuilding your program.

Dub also introduces bounties, which are bonus incentives for hitting milestones or completing promotional actions. These can be performance-based (e.g., drive X leads) or submission-based (e.g., create content). It’s a powerful way to activate affiliates beyond passive link sharing.

Partner Network

Rewardful does not include an affiliate network. You bring your own partners, onboard them yourself, and manage everything internally.

This is perfectly fine if you already have an audience, creators knocking on your door, or a strong community.

Dub Partners includes access to a built-in partner network with thousands of active affiliates. Partners can apply to your program in one click, without creating a separate account.

For teams without the time or resources to actively recruit affiliates, this alone can change the trajectory of a program.

White Labeling

Both platforms support white labeling — but with very different approaches.

Rewardful provides an API that allows you to build a white-labeled experience from scratch. This offers flexibility, but it often requires months of engineering effort.

Dub Partners offers pre-built, embeddable components that can be integrated in under an hour. Affiliates can be automatically enrolled inside your product, without being redirected to a third-party dashboard.

From the affiliate’s perspective, Dub also removes friction. Affiliates don’t pay withdrawal fees for standard payouts, don’t need multiple logins across programs, and can see all their performance data in one place.

So, Which Should You Use?

Final Thoughts

Rewardful and Dub.co are not direct competitors in the traditional sense — they’re built for different stages of the same journey.

Rewardful is a strong choice if you’re launching your first affiliate program and want something simple, affordable, and easy to manage without much overhead.

Dub.co, through Dub Partners, is designed for teams that already see affiliates as a meaningful growth channel — and want automation, attribution accuracy, and scalability baked in.

If your affiliate program is experimental, Rewardful is often enough.

If it’s strategic, Dub starts to make a lot more sense.