5 Best Tools For Finding Affiliates (From My Testing)

I’ve spent the last two years building my journalist media database SaaS, JournoFinder, to help brands and PR agencies create media lists and pitch journalists on their story.

One way I’ve grown my customer base is via affiliates - especially influential partners in the PR, SEO, and media space.

In fact, most people don’t see how intertwined influencer and affiliate campaigns are with PR (more on this later in the article).

I’ve finetuned my process over time, and these are my favorite tools for finding affiliates that I’ve used to grow my business.

Overall, the best affiliate recruitment software is AffiliateFinder.ai.

AffiliateFinder saves me the most time, finds me all the active affiliates and influencers promoting my direct competitors and finds me their emails so I can outreach them, and even helps me draft outreach email pitches to win them over.

Here’s my full summary:

Comparison of the top affiliate recruitment tools:

1 - AffiliateFinder.ai - Best Overall For Affiliate Recruitment

Pros:

• Discovers affiliates already actively promoting your competitors

• Finds YouTuber emails that other tools miss

• Setup takes literally 30 seconds with instant results for 500+ potential affiliates

Cons:

• No built-in commission tracking (requires a separate affiliate platform)

• Limited to discovery and outreach only (no relationship management)

My favorite affiliate recruitment software is AffiliateFinder.ai, and it has completely transformed my affiliate program.

Instead of hoping random influencers will convert, it shows me exactly who's already making money promoting my competitors. These are proven affiliates who understand your industry, have the right audience, and know how to sell products like yours.

I found 300+ qualified affiliates in my first 15 minutes using the tool, including several YouTubers with 100k+ subscribers I'd been trying to contact for months.

It’s cleverly built - basically, you sign up, and it finds your top competitors and keywords, and uses these to find all the active affiliates promoting them, as well as the websites, YouTubers, and Instagram and TikTok influencers creating content on your niche. For example, for me it’s digital PR related content.

You can change these competitors and topics if you want to, and then every 7 days it refreshes to find the newest influencers and affiliates creating content on your niche, or newly promoting a competitor, so you can win them over to promote you instead.

Personally, my favorite feature is the YouTuber email discovery. By default, YouTube hides emails behind a Captcha, which can take 2+ minutes for each email. AffiliateFinder finds around 90% of emails instantly with one click, so you can contact them straightaway for a partnership.

The AI-generated personalized outreach templates analyze each affiliate's content and audience to create customized emails that actually get responses. This is useful if you’re low on time - though often I use my own templates instead.

At $99/month for the Pro plan, you get unlimited affiliate discoveries. I have 1,100 affiliates I still need to evaluate and outreach, prioritized based on the best fit.

I recommend it highly if you’re looking to grow your affiliate program and recruit more affiliates.

2 - Endorsely - Best for SaaS Affiliate Recruitment

Pros:

• Completely free up until $1,000 in affiliate revenue

• Beyond recruitment, it also has full affiliate tracking and payouts built in

Cons:

• Focused on SaaS companies only

• Doesn’t support Paddle yet, focuses on Stripe

Endorsely is specifically built for SaaS affiliate recruitment and tracking. It’s also free, and you only pay the $39/month base plan once you’ve reached $1,000 in affiliate revenue. For bootstrapped SaaS founders, this removes all financial risk from starting an affiliate program.

I personally use Endorsely for hosting JournoFinder’s affiliate program, and it’s worked well for me.

Their affiliate recruitment feature works similarly to AffiliateFinder.ai, identifying competitors' existing affiliates and finding their emails for you. While not quite as comprehensive, it's impressive for a tool that's potentially free. 

Their Content Studio feature monitors all content that affiliates create across blogs, social media, and review sites, so you’re instantly alerted when an affiliate creates content promoting you, which is very useful for managing this.alerting you to brand mentions and enabling immediate performance correlation.

Since it’s built specifically for SaaS, it comes with all the major SaaS benchmarks built-in. Instead of just tracking initial sales, it monitors trials, upgrades, downgrades, churn, and lifetime value that each affiliate is delivering customers for. 

You can finally see which affiliates bring high-quality customers who stick around versus those driving users who cancel after the first month. The automatic Stripe integration means zero manual commission calculations - it all syncs in real-time. 

It takes around 10 minutes to get fully setup. You need to install their code on your website and connect it to your Stripe checkout.

Endorse costs $39/month once you exceed $1,000 in affiliate revenue, which is a lot cheaper than most alternatives, and it still has all the features I personally need.

3 - Respona - Best for Content Marketing Teams

Pros:

• 98% email delivery rate with 13% reply rate (industry-leading)

• Handles multiple outreach types beyond affiliates (PR, podcasts, link building, and affiliate recruitment outreach)

Cons:

• Expensive, starting at $198/month for basic plan

• Not a dedicated affiliate platform (requires separate tracking system)

• Only for websites, not other types of affiliates like YouTubers, email newsletters, TikTok, Instagram

Respona is an email outreach tool that some people use for emailing affiliates at scale to recruit them. While it's not specifically built for affiliate marketing, its useful if you are just going after website and SEO affiliates.

It discovers relevant affiliates via Google advanced search operators, and analyzes their content for personalization opportunities, finds their contact information, generates personalized outreach using AI, and manages follow-up sequences automatically. This can save you a lot of time.

What impressed me most is the depth of personalization possible. The AI doesn't just insert {FirstName} tags - it analyzes entire articles to reference specific points, understands content themes, and crafts genuinely relevant partnership proposals.

At $198/month for the Starter plan, Respona is pricey for pure affiliate recruitment. However, if you're also doing link building, PR outreach, or podcast pitching, it becomes better value. The Pro plan at $495/month includes 5 email accounts and 25,000 data credits.

4 - Pitchbox - Best for Website Outreach

Pros:

• Very advanced for finding websites to outreach

• Deep integrations with Ahrefs, Moz, SEMrush for competitor analysis for traffic and filtering out spammy sites

Cons:

• Steep learning curve - it’s complex

• Only covers websites, not other types of affiliates

• Premium pricing ($165-$1,500+ monthly)

Pitchbox is one of the best website and link-building email outreach platforms. It’s mostly for link-building, but it has features for finding product reviewers for competitors on Google and outreaching them - so it can work for some niche affiliate outreach.

Pitchbox starts at $165/month, and costs $1,500+ for enterprise features, so it's very much built for big teams running many outreach campaigns.

It has advanced AI integration to generate email templates personalized to every potential affiliate. And it has enterprise-level probably scoring across domain authority, social engagement, and more, to help you estimate how much of a good fit the website is for outreaching.

It’s only for websites though, so if you’re looking to recruit YouTube affiliate partners or other types like community owners, Twitch streamers, paid ads affiliates, and others, then this won’t work as well for you.

5 - Impact - Best for Enterprise Programs as an Affiliate Network

Pros:

• 800,000+ partner marketplace with AI-powered matching

• Enterprise-level affiliate fraud detection

Cons:

• Minimum $500/month with most features requiring $2,500+ monthly

• Overly complex for businesses under $10M revenue

Impact isn’t a specialist tool for finding affiliates. Instead, it’s an affiliate network with over 800,000 total affiliates within the marketplace that could potentially promote you.

Instead of manual outreach, partners discover and apply to your program directly. The fraud detection is advanced, so you don’t need to worry about fraudulent affiliates sending bad traffic.

Impact is one of the biggest affiliate networks in the world, and over 4,500 brands like Samsung, Uber, and Walmart are on there. If you're running a multi-million dollar affiliate program with hundreds of partners across multiple countries, Impact is built to handle all that complexity.

The platform goes beyond traditional affiliate management to encompass all partnership types - influencers, strategic B2B partners, mobile apps, and customer referrals.

However, it’s expensive, and if you’re a smaller brand it might not be the right time for you.

Why You Need Affiliate Recruitment Software

Having grown JournoFinder’s affiliate program, a lesson I learned early is that if you launch an affiliate program, it doesn’t mean people are going to join.

You have to be proactive and FIND the affiliates who have the audience you want to get in front of. Most of them don’t know about you, so you have to go to them, and not expect them to just find you.

But, finding affiliates takes a lot of time and manual work. Literally 10+ hours per week.

So, these affiliate recruitment platforms are fantastic for automating the boring work and finding you the right affiliates to outreach and recruit.

More importantly, these tools find affiliates you'd never discover manually. Some YouTubers have engaged followings, but no website. Some great Instagram micro-influencers don’t mention their keyword so your keyword searches might not find them.

So, using software like AffiliateFinder.ai is fantastic for identifying these diamonds in the rough that you might otherwise miss.

How Digital PR Works With Affiliate & Influencer Campaigns

Influencers and affiliates work fantastic with digital PR campaigns to get more features, links, and more sales.

If you have a viral PR campaign idea, as well as pitching this to relevant journalists (you can use JournoFinder to do this), you can give the same campaign to the influencers and affiliates in your network.

If these influencers push this content to their audiences, this helps the content reach journalists who might then also write about this, landing you more features in big publications, and getting you more brand awareness and sales.

Most marketing teams leave their PR and influencer/affiliate teams completely separate, but magic can happen when they help each other.

FAQs

Do these tools really work for small businesses, or are they just for big companies?

Two of my top recommendations - AffiliateFinder.ai and Endorsely - are specifically designed for small businesses. Endorsely is free until you're making $1,000 from affiliates, so there’s no risk. AffiliateFinder.ai at $99/month pays for itself if you recruit just 1-2 productive affiliates. 

I've tried affiliate marketing before and affiliates never responded to my outreach. How are these tools different?

You may have been reaching out to the wrong affiliates, on their wrong emails. It’s exactly the same for pitching journalists: you can use tools like JournoFinder to find the most relevant journalists talking about your topics, and their most up-to-date emails.

In the same way, affiliate recruitment tools find the most relevant affiliates for your brand, and find their latest contact details, so you can contact them and build those partnerships. 

These tools seem complex. How long does it really take to see results?

Setup time varies dramatically between tools. If you use AffiliateFinder.ai, you just enter your website in, and it finds your competitors and top keywords - and then finds the top affiliates promoting your competitors. Even Pitchbox, which is more advanced and complex, can be set up to email partners within an hour or two.

Can I use these tools if I already have an affiliate platform like ShareASale or Post Affiliate Pro?

Absolutely - in fact, that's how most people use them. AffiliateFinder.ai, Respona, and Pitchbox are recruitment tools that find and contact potential affiliates. Once they agree to join, you onboard them to your existing affiliate platform. 

Think of recruitment tools as your sales team for finding affiliates, while your affiliate platform handles tracking and payments. Endorsely and Impact are exceptions - they include built-in affiliate management, though Endorsely can also export to other platforms.

What if I'm worried AI will make my outreach sound robotic and hurt my brand?

This concerned me initially too, but modern AI personalization is surprisingly sophisticated. These tools analyze the affiliate's actual content to create relevant, conversational outreach.

You also maintain full control - review and edit any message before sending. Most users find the AI drafts need minimal tweaking and actually sound more natural than their manual attempts because the AI maintains consistent tone while personalizing details.