ThirstyAffiliates vs Pretty Links: One Owner, Two Price Tags
If you’re weighing ThirstyAffiliates vs Pretty Links, you’re choosing between two products made by the same company. Scroll to the bottom of either site and the footer reads ”© 2026 Caseproof, LLC.” Same owner. The price ladder is identical too, which makes the real decision smaller and far more specific than most comparison articles suggest.
We build geo-routing and link health checking for creators at Affilytics. So we spend our days at the far end of these links, including the cloaked /go/ and /recommends/ paths these two plugins create.
Not narrowed the field to these two yet? Start wider with the best Amazon affiliate WordPress plugins, which covers the shared-parent story and the rest of the category in one pass.
This post covers what the two plugins actually charge, where their site allowances split, what each one does better, and the links neither plugin was built to go looking for.
ThirstyAffiliates vs Pretty Links: the short answer
Section titled “ThirstyAffiliates vs Pretty Links: the short answer”Both plugins cloak affiliate links competently, and I want that on the record before anything else here. This isn’t a takedown of either one. If you haven’t set that layer up yet, start with what cloaking actually does to your links, then come back and pick a plugin.
The decision rule is two lines. If you run more than one WordPress site, the site allowance settles it. If your links reach well past Amazon, Pretty Links has the wider shape.
| ThirstyAffiliates | Pretty Links | Affilytics | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | WordPress plugin | WordPress plugin | Not a plugin; nothing to install |
| Owner | Caseproof, LLC | Caseproof, LLC | Independent |
| Promotional price | $99.60 / $149.60 / $199.60 per year | $99.60 / $149.60 / $199.60 per year | Flat, no per-click charges (see pricing) |
| Renews at | $249 / $374 / $499 per year | $249 / $374 / $499 per year | Same plan, no renewal step-up |
| Sites per rung | 1 / 5 / 10 | 1 / 2 / 5 | Not licensed per site |
| Geo-routing | Yes, Geographic Redirects, Basic tier and up | Yes, Geographic Redirects, all three tiers | Yes, per-country routing rules |
| Broken-link checking | Yes, Automatic 404 Checker; depth undisclosed | Yes, LinkHealth; depth undisclosed | Yes, eight-status monitoring including attribution loss and out of stock |
| Finds links you already published | Built to manage the links you create in the plugin | Built to manage the links you create in the plugin | Scans a YouTube channel or a website and finds them, cloaked paths included |
| Networks covered in one pass | Amazon-oriented importing | Any URL you shorten | The major affiliate networks detected in a single scan |
| Try before you buy | 14-day refund guarantee, no trial | 14-day refund guarantee, no trial | Two weeks fully unlocked, no credit card |
Two rows in that table do most of the work. The prices match at every rung, so “which one is cheaper” has no answer. The site counts don’t match, and that’s where your money actually goes in different directions.
Both plugins are made by the same company
Section titled “Both plugins are made by the same company”Same footer, same legal owner, two brands: ”© 2026 Caseproof, LLC.” sits at the bottom of thirstyaffiliates.com and prettylinks.com alike.
Caseproof is the company behind MemberPress. ThirstyAffiliates’ own footer lists six sibling brands under an “OUR BRANDS” heading:
- MemberPress
- Easy Affiliate
- MemberMouse
- WishList Member
- Buy Now Plus
- PopupAlly
So what does that change for you as a buyer? Mostly this. You’re not picking between two rival roadmaps racing each other for your money. You’re picking between two products that answer to one roadmap, one support org and one set of priorities about which feature ships next.
The vendor isn’t hiding any of it. The ownership sits in plain sight in both footers, on their own material. What surprises me is how rarely it comes up anywhere else: of the six page-one comparisons we read in full, exactly one mentions the shared parent, and that one is the vendor’s own.
Same price ladder, different site allowances
Section titled “Same price ladder, different site allowances”Three rungs, two products, identical numbers: $99.60, $149.60 and $199.60 per year. Billing is annual only on both, neither offers a free trial, and both give you a 14-day refund guarantee instead.
The allowances are where the two ladders come apart. One site costs the same on both. Five sites cost $149.60 on ThirstyAffiliates and $199.60 on Pretty Links.
The middle rung is the widest gap, 2.5x the sites for the same money, and it is the first rung where the two products stop being interchangeable. If you run three niche sites, that single row decides your purchase.
So what does year two cost?
Both pricing pages carry the same line, “Special introductory pricing; all annual renewals are at full price”, and full price is $249, $374 and $499 per year. Of the six page-one comparisons we read in full, none of them apply that caveat to either plugin.
It catches real buyers. On r/Wordpress, a WordPress professional who had already evaluated 24 plugins looking for a simple affiliate link manager priced the top tier and walked away, writing that “500$/year for a simple block is a no-go”. He was quoting the renewal, not the advertised price. He was also right about what he would eventually pay: year one is $199.60, and every year after that is $499.
If you want to poke at either one before spending anything, ThirstyAffiliates has a free version on the official plugin repository and so does Pretty Links.
What each plugin genuinely does better
Section titled “What each plugin genuinely does better”These two sit close enough together that the popular ThirstyAffiliates vs Pretty Links comparisons reach opposite verdicts about them. One declares ThirstyAffiliates the clear winner, another splits the rounds down the middle. So “which one wins” is the wrong question. Carry a different one into the purchase.
Which shape fits you?
One correction first. Comparisons of these two still circulate claiming Pretty Links has no geolocation redirects and no automated link health checker. That is out of date. Pretty Links ships Geographic Redirects across all three tiers plus a continuous broken-link monitor called LinkHealth, and ThirstyAffiliates ships Geographic Redirects from the Basic tier up plus an Automatic 404 Checker. Both do both. Some of those articles have not been restamped in over a year, which is how stale feature claims outlive the features they describe.
ThirstyAffiliates, best for Amazon-first WordPress bloggers
Section titled “ThirstyAffiliates, best for Amazon-first WordPress bloggers”Its signature trick is smart uncloaking: your reader sees a tidy branded link, and on click it resolves to the underlying Amazon URL so Associates attribution still works. Four of the six page-one comparisons we read in full lead with it, so one line is enough here. Amazon publishes its own participation requirements for Associates, and that document is what the feature is built around.
The rest of the Amazon-first kit: Geographic Redirects from the Basic tier up, Amazon API importing, and automatic keyword linking that turns a chosen phrase into an affiliate link wherever it appears.
Its real advantage is duller and more useful than any of that. Sites per licence. Five at the middle rung, ten at the top, and nothing in the feature list moves the needle as much for someone running a small portfolio.
Best for: a blogger running several Amazon-heavy WordPress sites off one licence.
Pretty Links, best for branded links beyond Amazon
Section titled “Pretty Links, best for branded links beyond Amazon”Pretty Links treats any URL as fair game rather than orbiting Amazon. Branded shortening on your own domain, split-test links, and automatic link disclosures at the Marketer tier.
PrettyPay™ is the genuinely unusual one: a branded one-click checkout for selling your own digital products through a Pretty Links link. That is a strange and interesting thing to find inside a link cloaker. The Link in Bio add-on is listed at the Marketer tier and above.
Their own positioning line says the rest of it: “Link Management that Starts on WordPress …and Earns Everywhere Else.”
Best for: a creator shortening and branding links across many programs, not just Amazon.
Where a WordPress plugin’s reach ends
Section titled “Where a WordPress plugin’s reach ends”Both plugins are built around the links you create inside WordPress, through the plugin. That is the design, they execute it well, and it also draws a line, which is exactly where managing affiliate links across a whole blog starts getting harder than it looks.
The cleanest way to see that line is to count your own surfaces. A licence buys you WordPress installs, one to ten of them depending on the product and the rung you paid for. Everything else you publish to is a surface the licence never covered: a YouTube description, a post on X or Facebook, and the next site you launch after filling up your allowance.
Neither product ships a dashboard outside wp-admin, and neither ships a mobile app, so there is no second window anywhere that those other surfaces could appear in. ThirstyAffiliates has no native YouTube, Instagram, TikTok or link-in-bio support. Pretty Links has no native YouTube channel scanning or link discovery.
So where does that leave the links you posted somewhere that is not your blog?
Buyers describe this gap better than any vendor does. The same professional who evaluated 24 plugins said what he actually wanted: “The goal is just to centralize affiliate links in one place, without having to maintain a duplicate Google Sheet list for the extra infos.” Another wanted his Amazon clicks counted “strictly for tracking purposes and not rewording”. Both are asking for an inventory of what they already published, which is closer to how you would check the affiliate links on your website than to how you would create a new one.
That inventory layer is what we build. Paste a website URL or a YouTube channel URL into Affilytics and we crawl it, find the affiliate links already published there (cloaked /go/ and /recommends/ paths included), and monitor them from then on. Turning one of those into a geo-routed affiliate link is a separate step you take by hand when a link earns it. Scanning discovers and monitors, it never converts anything on its own.
How deep does a link checker actually go?
Section titled “How deep does a link checker actually go?”None of the six page-one comparisons we read in full ask this question. Both plugins ship a checker, the Automatic 404 Checker on one side and LinkHealth on the other, and neither vendor states on its public pages how deep the check goes. That is a statement about disclosure, not about quality. I have no evidence either checker is shallow and I am not going to imply it.
So what does depth actually mean? Three failure modes a plain status-code check can wave through:
- A bot-protection challenge page that answers with a perfectly healthy 200 and shows a human nothing but a checkbox.
- A product page that loads fine and is out of stock.
- A redirect chain that quietly drops your affiliate tag, so the page still loads, still sells, and pays you nothing.
Here is what we disclose, because we can. Affilytics tracks eight link statuses rather than working versus broken, including attribution lost and out of stock. Our checks are made to look like a real browser request instead of a script, bot-protection blocks get surfaced as blocked rather than miscounted as broken, and a confirmation gate requires several consecutive bad checks before a healthy link is downgraded, so one flaky response never triggers a false alarm. We go through the mechanics in our guide to affiliate link monitoring.
This is the one dimension where I am asking you to compare disclosure instead of taking my word for anything. Read what each vendor publishes about its own checker, and decide what that tells you.
So which one should you pick?
Section titled “So which one should you pick?”No crown. Find your row:
- One WordPress site, mostly Amazon: either one. The entry rungs are identical in price and in site count, so pick on which interface you prefer after an hour of clicking around.
- Several WordPress sites: ThirstyAffiliates, on allowance alone, and the gap is widest at the middle rung where five sites face off against two.
- Links well beyond Amazon, or you sell your own digital products: Pretty Links.
- Already installed one and content with it: stay. One long-time user put it better than I can: “I use Pretty Links for this and find it easy to set up and it just works.” Switching between two products this close together rarely pays for itself.
- Publishing anywhere other than WordPress: the plugin is still fine for the WordPress part. The links living everywhere else need something that goes and finds them.
- Neither, at that price: both entry rungs cost the same because both products come from the same company, so switching between them is not an escape from the annual licence. If that is what you are actually shopping for, we sorted the free Pretty Links alternatives sorted by job rather than by rank.
Whatever you pick, put the renewal date in your calendar the day you buy. Both renew at full price, and $99.60 turning into $249 is a much better surprise in a calendar than on a card statement.
See what you already published
Section titled “See what you already published”Whichever plugin you install, it manages the links you create with it inside WordPress. The links you’ve published outside WordPress, in YouTube descriptions and on social, are a separate inventory, and most creators have never seen the whole thing in one list.
Create your free account and scan the site or channel you already run. Two full weeks, everything unlocked, no credit card. Then decide what needs a plugin and what needs a layer above one.
Are ThirstyAffiliates and Pretty Links made by the same company?
Section titled “Are ThirstyAffiliates and Pretty Links made by the same company?”Yes. Both are owned by Caseproof, LLC, the company behind MemberPress, and both product footers carry the Caseproof copyright line. ThirstyAffiliates’ own footer also lists sibling brands including MemberPress, Easy Affiliate and MemberMouse. The ownership is stated openly on their own sites, it just rarely comes up in the comparisons.
Which is cheaper, ThirstyAffiliates or Pretty Links?
Section titled “Which is cheaper, ThirstyAffiliates or Pretty Links?”Neither. The promotional ladder is identical on both products at $99.60, $149.60 and $199.60 per year, and both renew at full price, $249, $374 and $499. The real difference is how many sites each rung covers: ThirstyAffiliates gives 1, 5 and 10 sites, Pretty Links gives 1, 2 and 5.
Do ThirstyAffiliates and Pretty Links both have geo-routing?
Section titled “Do ThirstyAffiliates and Pretty Links both have geo-routing?”Yes. Both ship Geographic Redirects. ThirstyAffiliates includes them from the Basic tier up, and Pretty Links includes them in all three tiers. Older comparisons claiming Pretty Links has no geolocation redirects are out of date.
Can either plugin find affiliate links I published somewhere else?
Section titled “Can either plugin find affiliate links I published somewhere else?”Both plugins are built to manage the links you create inside WordPress through the plugin. ThirstyAffiliates has no native YouTube, Instagram, TikTok or link-in-bio support, and Pretty Links has no native YouTube channel scanning or link discovery. Finding links you already published elsewhere is a separate layer, which is the job a scanner like Affilytics does.
Should I switch if I already use one of them?
Section titled “Should I switch if I already use one of them?”Usually not. The two are close enough on features that switching rarely pays for itself, especially mid-licence. The more useful question is whether your links have outgrown WordPress: if you also publish on YouTube or on social, the gap is not between these two plugins, it sits above both of them.