ThirstyAffiliates vs Pretty Links vs DevDome: Which One Fits?
Two of these tools cloak and track links. The third keeps Amazon clicks earning. Here is what each one actually solves, and which gap is costing you money.
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ThirstyAffiliates and Pretty Links are link cloakers, and they are good at it. Both turn a long affiliate URL into a tidy link on your own domain, keep every destination in one list, count clicks, and let you repoint a link once instead of editing fifty posts. If your affiliate links point at a single merchant for a single country, either plugin covers what you need. DevDome Affiliate Manager is built around a different problem: the Amazon click that lands on the wrong storefront, the product that quietly went out of stock, and the click count that turns out to be a bot.
So the useful question is not which plugin wins overall. It is what your links actually are. Here is what each tool solves, where cloaking stops short on Amazon specifically, and how to decide without paying for three plugins that overlap.
What ThirstyAffiliates and Pretty Links Do Well
Both plugins are mature, widely used, and solve a real annoyance: affiliate URLs are ugly, hard to remember, and scattered through years of content. Replace them with a link on your own domain and you get something readable in your posts, something you can change in one place when a merchant switches networks, and a click count per link so you can see which recommendations pull.
Both also handle the housekeeping around links: grouping or categorising them, adding attributes such as nofollow or sponsored, opening links in a new tab, and turning chosen keywords into links automatically. Each sells paid tiers that add reporting, automation and integrations. Feature lists and prices move, so check their own pricing pages rather than any comparison table, including this one, for current numbers.
Where Cloaking Stops Short on Amazon
A cloaked link is still one destination for everyone who clicks it. That is fine for a merchant with one global store. Amazon is not that. Amazon runs a separate affiliate program per marketplace, each with its own approval and its own tracking tag, so your US tag means nothing on the UK or German store.
That is why a reader in Manchester clicking your tidy /go/kettle link can buy a kettle and pay you nothing. The link resolved to the US store, they drifted to their local Amazon, and the tag that reached the checkout was either missing or invalid there. We wrote the full mechanics up in why international Amazon clicks earn nothing. The short version: prettier URLs do not change which store the click reaches.
Geo-Routing Is the Biggest Practical Difference
This is the gap DevDome is built to close. DevDome Affiliate Manager resolves the visitor’s country when they click, then sends them to their local Amazon with the tag you configured for that store, across 22 storefronts. Stores you have no tag for are never targeted, so you never trade a working commission for a redirect to a store where you earn nothing.
It also tags links at display time rather than rewriting your posts in the database. Your stored content stays exactly as you wrote it, sitewide defaults can be overridden per category or per post, and switching the plugin off returns every link to its original form. Old posts start routing correctly without you touching them.
Link Health: Dead and Out-of-Stock Products
Broken-link checking is a common paid feature in cloaking plugins, and it catches genuine 404s. The failure that costs Amazon affiliates more is quieter: a listing that is still live, still returns a normal page, and simply cannot be bought right now. Nothing is broken in the technical sense, so a link checker reports it as fine while your click bounces.
DevDome indexes every Amazon product ID on your site and checks it on a schedule, then groups products into live, out of stock and 404, each with the pages that use them. Clicks on a dead product can be sent to a replacement instead of a dead end. If you have never audited this, what happens when your Amazon product goes out of stock is the place to start.
Which Clicks Were Actually Human
Every link tool reports click counts, and most count anything that hits the redirect. Crawlers, uptime monitors, security scanners and preview bots all follow links, so an inflated number quietly becomes your baseline for which content converts.
That gap is bigger than it sounds. Over the last 30 days on one of our own affiliate sites, real people made about 9,450 tracked clicks while bots fired a further 4,070 click events, so roughly 3 in 10 raw click events came from bots. A browser-side counter would have folded those into the totals; classifying each click on the server kept them out.
DevDome blocks known bots before they reach Amazon and counts real clicks per tag. Paired with DevDome Analytics, clicks are captured server side, which means an ad blocker cannot strip the measurement the way it strips a tracking script, and human visitors are separated from bot hits using six signals. Our plans are metered on human pageviews only, so bot traffic never eats your allowance. Two related reads: why ad blockers break click tracking and how to tell bot traffic from real visitors.
One Caution About Cloaking Amazon Links Specifically
Cloaking is normal practice for most affiliate programs. Amazon is stricter than most about how its links are used and presented, and the details live in the Associates Program Operating Agreement rather than in any plugin’s marketing. Before you route Amazon URLs through a cloaked path, read Amazon’s current terms and decide deliberately.
This is worth a minute of your time because the downside is asymmetric. A tidier URL is a small gain, and an account problem is a large loss. Neither we nor any plugin vendor can promise a setup is acceptable to Amazon on your behalf, so treat the agreement as the authority.
How to Choose
If your links are mostly non-Amazon merchants and you want tidy, repointable URLs, a cloaker is the right buy, and ThirstyAffiliates or Pretty Links will both do it. When most of your income is Amazon, spend your effort where the money leaks instead: correct tags, the visitor’s own storefront, live products, and click numbers you can trust.
Plenty of sites end up running both, with the cloaker handling other merchants and the Amazon plugin handling Amazon links. DevDome Affiliate Manager starts on the Free plan, and paid plans begin at $49 a month if you outgrow it, with details on our pricing page. Whichever combination you choose, check one thing this week: click a link from a foreign IP address and see which store you land on.
Key takeaways
- ThirstyAffiliates and Pretty Links are link cloakers: tidy URLs on your own domain, central management, click counts.
- Cloaking one URL still sends every country to the same Amazon store, where most foreign tags do not pay.
- DevDome adds geo-routing across 22 Amazon storefronts, stock and 404 monitoring, and bot-filtered click stats.
- Amazon products can go out of stock while the URL still returns a normal page, so a broken-link check misses it.
- Many sites are best served by a cloaker for non-Amazon merchants plus a geo plugin for Amazon links.
Sources
- Amazon Associates Help: international linking and per-marketplace programs — each Amazon marketplace runs its own program with its own tag
- Amazon Associates Program Operating Agreement — the rules that govern how Amazon links may be used and presented
- ThirstyAffiliates product site — feature set and current pricing, from the vendor
- Pretty Links product site — feature set and current pricing, from the vendor
Links last checked August 2, 2026.
Frequently asked questions
Is ThirstyAffiliates or Pretty Links better?
They overlap heavily. Both cloak affiliate URLs behind your own domain, group links, and count clicks, and both sell paid tiers that add reporting and automation. Pick on the admin experience you prefer and the specific paid features you need, and check their pricing pages for current plans rather than trusting an old comparison table.
Do I still need a cloaker if I use a geo plugin?
If you promote merchants other than Amazon, yes, a cloaker is still useful for tidy links you can repoint later. For Amazon links specifically, tagging and geo-routing at click time matters more than the pretty URL, because that is what decides whether the click can earn a commission at all.
Will running two link plugins conflict?
They can if both try to rewrite the same links. The usual arrangement is to let the cloaker handle non-Amazon merchants and let the Amazon plugin handle Amazon URLs. Test a few posts after setup and confirm each link type resolves once, to the destination and tag you expect.
Do cloaked links protect my Amazon commissions?
Not by themselves. Cloaking changes how the link looks and where it is managed, not which storefront it lands on or whether your tag is valid there. A cloaked link pointing at one Amazon store still earns nothing from a visitor who ends up buying on a different one.