ReferralCandy vs Refersion (vs Mention Me): Which Referral Platform Fits Your Brand?

Quick Summary

Choose ReferralCandy to run customer referrals and affiliate campaigns together, or Refersion to recruit and manage external partners. Mention Me comes in if you’re an established brand seeking to grow through customer advocacy, with deeper insights and expert testing support.

Compare all three platforms at a glance in the table below.

ReferralCandy vs Refersion: Head-to-Head Comparison

ReferralCandy and Refersion overlap, but their strengths serve different priorities. ReferralCandy combines customer referrals and affiliate campaigns. Refersion centres on recruiting, tracking and paying partners.

Compare how each handles the work your team needs to do.

Referral and Affiliate Features, Rewards, Tracking and Fraud Protection

ReferralCandy lets you set separate rewards for the advocate and their friend. For example, a homeware brand could offer a friend £15 off and give the advocate £15 in store credit. Personal links and codes connect the recommendation to the purchase.

Its referral marketing features include automated rewards and purchase review periods. You can hold rewards while checking suspicious, cancelled or returned orders. This helps avoid paying an incentive before a sale is valid.

Refersion focuses on partner-led sales. Its Marketplace helps brands find affiliates seeking products to promote. Brands can review applicants before approving them, so access to a marketplace does not mean giving up control.

Refersion also supports coupon, email and product SKU tracking (Launch plan and higher). These methods can attribute sales without a link click. A creator could share a coupon during a video, for example. Refersion also provides conversion reviews and coupon exclusions to control which sales earn commission.

Your choice depends on who you want to encourage to recommend your brand. ReferralCandy suits rewarding customers for referring friends, while Refersion suits recruiting and managing affiliates, creators and other partners.

Related: check our review of ReferralCandy and how it compares to Mention Me

Campaign Setup and Launch

ReferralCandy gives you control over the offer, referral pages, emails and promotion points. Its Shopify journey can include post-purchase prompts and customer account placements. Your team decides where an invitation fits naturally and what reward the margin can support.

For a skincare brand, the first campaign might start after checkout, with a follow-up email inviting customers to share. The work involves choosing incentives, adapting the design and testing the reward journey.

Refersion adds decisions around partner offers and tracking. Its setup guidance explains that coupon codes must be assigned as promotion methods within the affiliate account. Creating a code in Shopify alone may leave sales unattributed.

Before launching either programme, place a test order to check that the right person receives credit and the correct reward or commission. With Refersion, also decide who will review affiliate applications. The time needed to launch will depend on your store setup and these checks.

Integrations and Ecommerce Platform Support

ReferralCandy’s integrations cover Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Magento and custom stores, although installation methods differ. Its connections also include marketing and payment tools.

For teams using Klaviyo, the value lies in what happens after a referral event. ReferralCandy can pass enrolments, referred purchases and earned rewards into Klaviyo flows. You could send a branded reward email when an advocate earns an incentive, using your existing email setup.

Refersion’s integration directory includes Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, Chargebee and Stripe. It also lists Klaviyo, Mailchimp, analytics tools and influencer platforms such as Upfluence. Zapier extends its connections further.

ReferralCandy includes all integrations and full API access on every plan, while Refersion gates API access and 30+ marketing integrations behind its Growth tier.

Look at how each platform works with the tools your team already uses. For referral emails, check which customer actions can trigger a message, such as earning a reward. If recruiting partners is your priority, connections to influencer platforms may be more useful.

Pricing, Monthly Fees and Additional Costs

Both platforms offer a way to start free, with different limits. Prices below are in US dollars, checked on 30 September 2026, using monthly billing.

ReferralCandy Pricing

ReferralCandy offers a seven-day free trial across its plans, starting when you activate the app. Sales generated during the trial carry no success fee.

The success fee applies to each newly acquired customer’s first three orders, calculated after discounts and before tax and shipping. Later orders carry no success fee. Plans run month to month without an annual commitment.

A higher plan can cost less overall. For example, at $10,000 in fee-eligible sales, Grow costs $429 and Scale costs $399, before rewards and payment-provider charges.

Refersion Pricing

Refersion offers a free Marketplace listing where brands can publish a commission offer and attract affiliate applications.

Refersion’s free listing lets affiliates discover your programme and apply. You need a paid plan to review applications and manage sales or payouts.

At $10,000 in monthly affiliate-driven sales, Launch costs $339, while Growth costs $399, before affiliate commissions and payment fees. Growth therefore needs to justify its higher cost through features your team will use. At $16,000, both plans cost $519. Above this amount, Growth’s lower percentage fee makes it cheaper.

Analytics and Reporting

ReferralCandy’s Shopify reporting separates first-purchase referral revenue from repeat-purchase revenue. It also shows purchases where advocates redeem reward discount codes.

This helps answer two questions. Are referred friends returning, and are earned discounts bringing advocates back? The advocate metric covers reward-code purchases, rather than their full purchase history. Affiliate campaigns have separate reporting tabs within the same app.

Refersion’s performance reports break results down by affiliate, offer, marketing asset and SKU. A fashion brand could compare which partners sell its higher-margin products before changing commission rates.

Its performance reports include approved conversions only. Pending sales can therefore explain differences between a performance report and a broader conversion export.

ReferralCandy gives customer referral teams useful repeat-purchase detail. Refersion gives affiliate managers several ways to assess partner and offer performance.

Mention Me as an Alternative to ReferralCandy and Refersion

Mention Me is a strong option for brands seeking to measure more recommendations and improve referral performance. It combines referral tracking, customer value reporting and testing support to help teams understand what works.

How Mention Me Differs From ReferralCandy and Refersion

ReferralCandy covers customer referral operations, while Refersion supports partner programme management. Mention Me’s referral platform adds tools for understanding which customers create value through their recommendations.

eLTV combines a customer’s own spending with revenue from people they directly refer. Consider a customer who spends £200 and introduces five friends who each spend £150. Their combined contribution is £950. Looking only at the original customer’s purchases would miss much of their value.

Network Revenue looks beyond direct referrals to the wider referral chain. If those five friends refer more customers, it tracks revenue from those connections too. Your team can see the wider value an advocate creates.

The practical benefit is better treatment of valuable advocates. A customer with modest personal spending may deserve more attention because their recommendations bring in additional revenue.

Earned Referral shows which customers share your product pages without a referral prompt or incentive. It tracks those shares through to visits and sales, alongside incentivised referrals in the same dashboard. Your team can identify these advocates and invite them into your referral programme.

Global Readiness supports multiple markets, languages and currencies in one programme. Teams can adapt rewards by region and view combined or regional results. This helps brands expand without rebuilding their referral programme for each market.

Mention Me suits established ecommerce brands with happy customers and enough orders to test what drives more referrals. Our custom pricing includes technical integrations and category benchmarks, helping your team connect referral data to existing tools and identify where to improve.

Where Mention Me Excels

NameShare® makes a spoken recommendation easier to attribute. A friend enters the advocate’s name at checkout, allowing Mention Me to match the referral and apply the programme’s reward rules. No referral link needs to change hands.

This suits products people discuss in person, such as furniture, clothing or cooking equipment. Attribution happens through the checkout journey. Mention Me does not need to monitor the conversation.

Across Mention Me’s network, NameShare® drives 34% of referrals on average. This is a network result, rather than a promised increase for an individual brand.

Benchmarking gives your results context. Mention Me compares referral performance with brands in your category. A stable conversion rate may look satisfactory internally, yet comparison with similar brands can reveal room to improve.

Your team can then test incentives, messages or campaign placements against a clear objective. Benchmarking helps set priorities, while A/B testing shows which change works for your audience.

Expert support helps turn findings into action. Mention Me’s Client Success Managers provide programme guidance and testing recommendations. This suits teams that want help choosing their next experiment, alongside software to run it.

These tools help you understand who brings in valuable customers and how to encourage more referrals. As referral marketing becomes a bigger part of your growth plans, you can use these insights to guide your spending.

How to Choose the Right Referral Software for Your Brand

Start with what you want your programme to achieve over the next year. Use the guidance below to see which platform best supports that goal.

Choose ReferralCandy If You Want Customer Referrals and Affiliate Campaigns Together

ReferralCandy is a sensible choice when your team wants to manage customer rewards and selected affiliate relationships in one platform. It also suits teams comfortable choosing their own offers and reviewing campaign performance.

Use a sales forecast to select the plan. A low subscription is less attractive when the percentage fee outweighs the saving. Include reward costs in your comparison, particularly when offering incentives to both the advocate and their friend.

Choose Refersion If Partner Recruitment Is Your Priority

Choose Refersion when creators, publishers and affiliates are central to your acquisition plan. Its Marketplace and partner reports support a team focused on finding and managing external promoters.

Build your shortlist around the tracking and commission rules you need. If the programme depends on product-level tracking or different rates for returning customers, assess the relevant plan. Also assign someone to review applicants and conversions.

Choose Mention Me If Referral Marketing Is a Strategic Growth Channel

Prioritise Mention Me when you want to grow through existing customers and understand the value their recommendations create. It suits teams seeking testing support, optional category benchmarks and a clearer view of referral revenue.

Ask for a proposal built around your order volume, current referral performance and growth goals. Evaluate the opportunity using customer value and expected returns alongside the total quoted cost.

Gozney’s case study shows this approach in practice. The brand reported 9x ROI from customer advocacy, with 58% of referred customers acquired through NameShare®.

Turn Customer Recommendations Into Growth With Mention Me

Choosing referral software means deciding how you want your brand to grow. The right platform should help you turn recommendations into sales and understand which customers bring lasting value.

Mention Me helps established brands capture referrals through NameShare® and measure advocates’ wider value through eLTV and Network Revenue. Category benchmarks and expert testing support help your team identify opportunities, improve campaigns and use referral insights across your marketing.

Request a Demo to explore how Mention Me could support your goals.