Pretty Links vs TrackRev: WordPress Cloaking or Revenue Attribution?

If the question you care about is which channel actually earns your MRR, the honest answer is that a WordPress cloaking plugin and a revenue-attribution tool sit on opposite sides of it.

Pretty Links is installed on well over a million WordPress sites as a free plugin, with a Pro tier from roughly ~$99/year, and it is one of the best tools in existence for cloaking and shortening links inside WordPress.

If you are a publisher who wants tidy, branded yoursite.com/go/product links pointing at the affiliate offers you promote, Pretty Links is close to perfect and this article will not argue otherwise.

But it is worth being honest about something the head-to-head framing hides: Pretty Links and TrackRev are on opposite sides of the same transaction. Pretty Links helps a publisher cloak the outbound affiliate links they promote.

TrackRev helps a merchant see which inbound clicks turned into revenue — and run their own affiliate programme. The right choice depends entirely on which side of that line you are on.

Disclosure: this comparison is published by TrackRev. Here is the plain version. Pretty Links is a WordPress plugin: it lives inside your WordPress install, cloaks and redirects links, and counts clicks in your WordPress database.

TrackRev is a hosted, platform-agnostic tool: it runs branded short links on your own domain, ties each click to a Stripe, Paddle, Polar, or Lemon Squeezy charge with a first-party pixel, and runs an affiliate programme with a branded portal.

If your whole world is a WordPress content site cloaking affiliate offers, Pretty Links is the right tool. If you are a SaaS or subscription business that needs revenue attribution, TrackRev is.

There is also a dedicated Pretty Links alternative for SaaS write-up.

Why this matters for your revenue

If you are a merchant, tracking clicks without tying them to payments ranks your channels by the wrong number.

The median revenue per click across TrackRev workspaces is $3.80 and the median click-to-paid rate is 4.2% (TrackRev platform data, Q2 2026), and both vary enough by source that click counts alone mislead.

A plugin that records clicks in your WordPress database cannot tell you which of those clicks became a Stripe customer, so you cannot compare your channels by the only metric that pays the bills.

There is a second cost that is specific to the WordPress-plugin model: click tracking that writes to your site database adds load, and on a busy content site it can bloat tables and slow pages.

That is a fine trade for a publisher counting outbound affiliate clicks, but it is the wrong architecture for a merchant that needs server-side, revenue-linked attribution surviving Safari ITP and iOS privacy changes.

The reasoning is in first-party link tracking after iOS privacy changes and server-side versus client-side tracking.

What Pretty Links is genuinely good at

Pretty Links has earned its enormous install base. If the following describes you, it is a strong choice on its own merits.

• Link cloaking inside WordPress — turn long affiliate URLs into branded yoursite.com/go/x links that look native to your site.
• Redirect management — 301, 302, and 307 redirects, nofollow control, and link categories, all inside the WordPress admin.
• Keyword auto-linking (Pro) — automatically turn chosen keywords into cloaked links across your content.
• Free plugin, low-cost Pro — a genuinely useful free version and an inexpensive annual Pro licence.

Link cloaking inside WordPress

Cloaking is Pretty Links' core strength. Affiliate offers often come with long, ugly tracking URLs; Pretty Links masks them behind clean, branded links on your own domain, which look more trustworthy and are easier to place in content.

For a WordPress publisher promoting dozens or hundreds of affiliate offers, that alone justifies the plugin.

TrackRev also runs branded short links on your own domain, but Pretty Links' in-editor cloaking workflow is purpose-built for WordPress content and hard to beat for that specific job.

Redirect and category management

Pretty Links handles redirect types, nofollow settings, and link organisation cleanly from inside the WordPress admin, so a publisher never leaves their CMS to manage links.

Link categories keep large libraries tidy, and the Pro tier adds link health checks and dynamic redirects.

This is exactly the unglamorous management work a content site needs, and Pretty Links does it well without asking you to adopt a separate platform.

A free plugin with a low-cost Pro tier

Pretty Links' free version is genuinely useful, and Pro is an inexpensive annual licence rather than a monthly SaaS subscription — attractive economics for a bootstrapped blogger.

If your only need is cloaking and shortening links on WordPress, that pricing is hard to argue with.

TrackRev offers a free tier too (1,000 tracked events a month, including conversion tracking), but the two optimise for different things: Pretty Links for cheap WordPress link management, TrackRev for revenue attribution across channels.

Where a WordPress link plugin stops

Pretty Links does the publisher-side cloaking job well. The limits appear the moment you need merchant-side revenue data — and two of them are structural.

It lives inside WordPress

Pretty Links is a WordPress plugin, full stop. If your product is a SaaS app, a mobile app, or anything not served by WordPress, the plugin has nowhere to run and no way to see your checkout.

Even on a WordPress marketing site, the plugin cannot follow a visitor into a separately hosted app or billing flow.

TrackRev is platform-agnostic: a first-party pixel and a billing webhook, independent of your CMS, so it works whether or not WordPress is anywhere in your stack.

It cloaks links; it does not attribute revenue

Pretty Links counts clicks on the links it cloaks. It has no connection to Stripe, Paddle, Polar, or Lemon Squeezy, no first-party conversion pixel carrying a session through to a payment, and no attribution models.

It cannot tell you which cloaked link produced a paying customer, only which produced a click.

And it is not a merchant affiliate platform — it helps you promote others' offers, not run your own programme with a partner portal, commission rules, and payouts. TrackRev's affiliate programme and revenue attribution cover exactly that merchant-side gap.

Pretty Links vs TrackRev: different jobs, compared

Because these tools sit on opposite sides of the transaction, the table below is less a feature race and more a map of which job each is built for.

Read it as “which side of the affiliate relationship are you on?”

When Pretty Links is the right choice

Pretty Links is genuinely the better tool for a large group of people — and TrackRev is simply not aimed at them.

WordPress publishers cloaking affiliate links

If you run a WordPress content site and your job is promoting affiliate offers — cloaking long tracking URLs into clean branded links, auto-linking keywords, and keeping the library organised — Pretty Links is the right tool and TrackRev is not aimed at you.

You are the affiliate, not the merchant, and Pretty Links is built for exactly that role. Its low-cost annual licence and in-editor workflow fit a publisher's economics and habits.

No SaaS billing to attribute

If you do not sell a subscription through Stripe, Paddle, Polar, or Lemon Squeezy — you earn through affiliate commissions, display ads, or sponsorships on a content site — TrackRev's revenue attribution has nothing to connect to.

There is no checkout of your own to tie clicks to. Pretty Links' click-and-cloak model matches how a content publisher actually earns, and paying for merchant-side attribution would be paying for capacity you cannot use.

When TrackRev is the right choice

The mirror image — where you are the merchant, and Pretty Links was never built for the job.

Merchants tying clicks to Stripe revenue

If you sell a subscription and need to know which click, campaign, or channel produced a paying customer, TrackRev ties every click to a real billing event and lets you switch between first-touch, last-touch, and linear attribution models without re-tagging.

The channel analytics view ranks paid and organic sources by revenue in the same units. A WordPress cloaking plugin has no path to that data, because it never sees your checkout.

Teams running their own affiliate programme

If you want affiliates promoting your product — with a branded partner portal, recurring and one-time commissions, refund and chargeback reversal, and automated payouts — that is a merchant affiliate platform, which Pretty Links is not.

TrackRev runs your programme on the same data model as your link tracking and attribution, so affiliate revenue sits alongside every other channel. See why affiliate tracking and link tracking belong in one tool.

Products not built on WordPress

If your product is a hosted SaaS app, a mobile app, or a marketing site on any stack other than WordPress, a WordPress-only plugin cannot help.

TrackRev's first-party pixel and billing webhook are platform-agnostic — they attach to your domain and your payment processor, not your CMS — so attribution works regardless of what you build on.

That independence is the whole reason a non-WordPress business would look past a plugin in the first place.

Pricing comparison

The pricing models are not directly comparable — one is an annual WordPress licence, the other a hosted SaaS subscription — but here is the honest side-by-side.

Moving from Pretty Links to TrackRev

Most teams do not migrate from one to the other — they use them for different jobs. But there is a real overlap worth naming.

When the two actually overlap

The overlap is a WordPress-based SaaS or subscription business that started by cloaking a few links with Pretty Links and now needs to know which of those links drives paying customers.

At that point you are shifting from publisher-side cloaking to merchant-side attribution.

You do not have to remove Pretty Links; you add TrackRev alongside it, pointing your revenue-critical branded links through TrackRev so they carry the first-party pixel, while Pretty Links continues to cloak any outbound affiliate offers you promote.

What to set up in TrackRev

Recreate your revenue-critical slugs as branded short links on your own domain in TrackRev, connect Stripe (or Paddle, Polar, Lemon Squeezy), and add the first-party pixel to your site so clicks tie through to charges.

If you plan to run your own affiliate programme, set up commission rules and the branded portal on the same data.

From there, your channel and affiliate revenue live on one dashboard, while Pretty Links keeps doing the WordPress cloaking it is best at.

When NOT to use TrackRev

If you are a WordPress publisher cloaking affiliate offers with no subscription of your own to attribute, TrackRev is the wrong tool and Pretty Links is the right one — you are the affiliate, not the merchant.

TrackRev is also not a WordPress content plugin; it will not auto-link keywords or live inside your WordPress admin. And it is not built for teams whose billing sits outside Stripe, Paddle, Polar, and Lemon Squeezy.

TrackRev is for SaaS and subscription merchants that want links, revenue attribution, and their own affiliate programme on one data model.

For the merchants TrackRev is built for, the clearest reason to choose it is not any single feature — it is that link tracking and affiliate management cost less to run together than apart.

A merchant assembling the pieces separately — a link tool plus a dedicated affiliate platform — typically pays $84 or more per month, for example Bitly Growth (~$35/mo) plus Rewardful Starter (~$49/mo), across two tools with two definitions of a conversion.

TrackRev is $39/month for link tracking, revenue attribution, and a full affiliate programme on one data model, with one definition of a sale.