Routy and Impact.com: Why Publishers Use Both

Impact.com comes up in almost every conversation about affiliate software, but Routy and Impact.com are built for different sides of the same market. Impact.com is where brands build and run their partnership programs. Routy is where publishers run their business. This guide explains how they fit together, and when Routy is the right alternative.

Up front: Routy is not trying to replace Impact.com. In fact, Routy integrates with it, so the data from your Impact.com account flows into Routy alongside everything else.

What Impact.com does well

Impact.com is a leading all-in-one partnership management platform for brands, agencies, and publishers. If you run a program, its strengths are clear:

• A huge partner marketplace: hundreds of thousands of vetted partners, from influencers to niche affiliates, that brands can discover and recruit.
• Resilient tracking: multi-layered tracking designed to connect conversions across events, channels, and devices even as cookies erode.
• Workflow automation: automated partner onboarding, approvals, payout triggers, and compliance.
• Fraud protection: detection for affiliate, influencer, and traffic abnormalities across the conversion path.
• One program hub: manage affiliate, creator, and referral programs from a single dashboard.

If you're a brand building and scaling a partnership program, Impact.com is a serious platform.

Different sides of the same table

Here's the key distinction. Impact.com is advertiser-side software for running a program: it's built for the brand that wants partners to send it customers. Routy is publisher-first: it's built for the affiliate or publisher promoting many programs across many platforms, Impact.com being just one of them.

So this isn't really a head-to-head. For a publisher, Impact.com is one of the dozens of dashboards you log into. Routy is the layer that brings all of them together.

What Routy gives the publisher

Routy is built around two core pillars for publishers:

• Every source in one dashboard: Routy pulls your Impact.com data in alongside 40+ other networks and platforms, your ad-spend from every traffic source, and its own first-party click and impression tracking, so you see all of it, with true ROI, in one place.
• Scale your own traffic and your sub-affiliates: Routy's sub-affiliate network is a core part of the platform, not an add-on. Recruit and manage your own sub-affiliates, track their traffic, and grow beyond what you can drive yourself, with rollup reporting across the whole network.

When Routy is the right alternative

If you're a publisher who wants to set up and run your own affiliate network, rather than a brand running a program on Impact.com, Routy is a genuine alternative. Because the sub-affiliate network is core, you can recruit sub-affiliates and unify all your data in the same place, without standing up brand-side program software.

Using both

Most publishers don't choose between Routy and Impact.com. They keep their Impact.com account and use Routy to unify and act on the data. Reach for Impact.com when you're a brand running a program. Reach for Routy when your job is promoting across many programs and scaling your own traffic and sub-affiliates. For the network-software side of this comparison, see Routy vs HasOffers (TUNE).