A link cloaker and an Amazon toolkit are not really competitors
These two get compared because both have “affiliate” in the description, but they solve different problems and a lot of sites should genuinely run both. This page is mostly about working out whether you are one of them.
Who wrote this. We make Ama Affiliate Pro, so we are one of the two products on this page and we are not a neutral party. What we can offer instead of neutrality is checkability: every row in the table below is a feature that either exists or does not, and you can confirm each one on ThirstyAffiliates’s own site in about five minutes. Where ThirstyAffiliates is the better choice, this page says so and names who should buy it.
The short version
- ThirstyAffiliates manages links across every programme. That is its job and it does it well.
- We are an Amazon toolkit — product data, displays, writing, analytics, maintenance.
- They overlap on about a fifth of the work: inserting links and counting clicks.
- Read Amazon’s rules on cloaking before you cloak an Amazon link. Amazon’s operating agreement has specific requirements about how its links may be presented, and this is not a place to guess.
- Running both is a normal setup: ThirstyAffiliates for your non-Amazon programmes, us for Amazon.
What each one actually is
ThirstyAffiliates
A link management plugin for WordPress. It stores every affiliate link you use as a tidy internal URL on your own domain, lets you insert them by name while writing, redirects them out to the merchant, and reports on clicks. It is programme-agnostic — Amazon links are simply one kind of link it holds — and it is the standard answer for “my affiliate URLs are a mess”.
Ama Affiliate Pro
A WordPress plugin that writes the five kinds of article an Amazon affiliate site needs, keeps the products inside them alive as they go out of stock, records which article earns rather than which is busy, and sends international readers to their own Amazon store. Ultra adds an agent that decides which of those to do today.
Feature by feature
Only checkable capabilities are in this table. Nothing here is a judgement about which tool is nicer to use — that is not something a tick can honestly represent.
| Capability | Ama Affiliate Pro | ThirstyAffiliates | What the difference means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon product boxes | ✓ | ✗ | ThirstyAffiliates manages links; it does not fetch or render Amazon product data. |
| Comparison tables | ✓ | ✗ | Not what it is for. |
| Works without Amazon API approval | ✓ | ✓ | Trivially true of a link manager, and genuinely true of ours through its three-source chain. |
| Writes the articles | ✓ | ✗ | Five content types on your own AI key. |
| Per-article click analytics | ✓ | ~ | ThirstyAffiliates reports clicks per link. Ours reports visits AND Amazon clicks per article, so click rate is visible. |
| Finds discontinued products | ✓ | ✗ | Requires product data, which a link manager does not hold. |
| Finds and fixes dead links | ✓ | ~ | Ours scans every post for 404s and dead domains. Check ThirstyAffiliates’ current link-checking behaviour. |
| International link localisation | ✓ | ~ | Ours routes Amazon links on the reader’s real country. Check what geolocation ThirstyAffiliates offers today. |
| One-off licence available | ✓ | ~ | Check the current terms on both sides. |
✓ included ~ partly, or through another tool ✗ not included · ThirstyAffiliates’s side checked VERIFY
Where ThirstyAffiliates is the better answer
Written first, and at length, because it is the part of a comparison page that is usually missing and the part that decides whether you should trust the rest of it.
Every programme, not just Amazon
If you have links to twenty merchants scattered across four hundred posts, ThirstyAffiliates is the tool that makes that manageable — one place where a link lives, one URL to change when a programme changes its tracking, and no hunting through posts. Ama Affiliate Pro does nothing of the kind for non-Amazon links and is not trying to.
Changing a URL once instead of four hundred times
This is the real argument for link management and it is a strong one. A merchant changes its affiliate network, or your tracking ID changes, and with cloaked links you edit one record. Without them you edit every post that ever mentioned that merchant. Our converter solves the Amazon-shaped version of this problem; ThirstyAffiliates solves the general one.
It is small, focused and long-established
A tool that does one job, has done it for a long time, and does not ask you to adopt a workflow. That has value, and it means adding it alongside something else is low-risk.
Choose ThirstyAffiliates if:
- You have affiliate links from several programmes spread across a lot of posts.
- You want tidy internal URLs and one place to change a destination.
- You need link management and already have your product displays sorted.
Where Ama Affiliate Pro is the better answer
It holds the products, not just the URLs
A link manager knows that a URL exists. It does not know what is on the other end of it — the title, the image, the rating, the features, or whether the product still exists. Everything on our side of the table follows from holding the product rather than the link: boxes, tables, health checks, article generation.
The articles
Five types, on your own AI provider key. No link manager writes content and none claims to.
Click rate, per article
Clicks per link tells you which link is popular. Visits and clicks per article tells you which page is failing — and those are different questions. The second one is the one that produces a to-do list.
Choose Ama Affiliate Pro if:
- Amazon is where your affiliate income comes from.
- You need product data, not just link storage.
- You want the writing and the maintenance covered as well.
What moving actually involves
The honest part of any switch. Nobody’s migration is free, and a page that pretends otherwise is setting up a refund.
This is usually an addition, not a migration
The two plugins do not conflict. The common setup is ThirstyAffiliates keeping your non-Amazon links tidy while ours handles Amazon product data, displays and content. Nothing has to be moved for that to work.
If you do consolidate, do the Amazon links only
Our Growth Tools converter rewrites hand-typed Amazon URLs to our shortcode so they inherit your tag, nofollow setting and click tracking. Leave every non-Amazon link where it is — ThirstyAffiliates is the better home for those and moving them buys you nothing.
The verdict
These are not really alternatives to each other, and a comparison that framed them as such would be misleading. ThirstyAffiliates is the answer to “my affiliate links are a mess across every programme I belong to”. We are the answer to “Amazon is my business and I need the products, the articles and the upkeep handled”. If both sentences describe you — and for a lot of sites they do — the correct answer is both, and it costs less than most people expect because neither is priced as an all-in-one.
Look inside before you decide
Every admin screen of Ama Affiliate Pro and Ultra, clickable, on one page — no sign-up, no email, nothing to install. Compare it against ThirstyAffiliates’s own demo and make your own mind up.
Open the interfaceCompared with the others
The same nine capabilities, applied to every alternative: all the comparisons in one table. If you are still deciding what kind of tool you need at all, the playbook walks through the stages of an affiliate site and names which problems a plugin solves and which it cannot.
Common questions
Can I use ThirstyAffiliates and Ama Affiliate Pro together?
Yes, and it is a common and sensible setup. They do not conflict. ThirstyAffiliates manages links across your programmes; ours handles Amazon product data, displays, writing and maintenance.
Should I cloak my Amazon links?
Read Amazon’s operating agreement on this before you do anything, and if in doubt ask Amazon rather than a forum. Amazon has specific requirements about how its links and product information may be presented, and the consequences of getting it wrong are account-level rather than page-level. This is genuinely not a place to take a plugin vendor’s word for it — including ours.
Does Ama Affiliate Pro cloak links?
It routes Amazon links through the plugin so they carry your current tag, your nofollow setting and click tracking, and so they can be redirected to the reader’s own marketplace. That is a different intent from general link cloaking, and it is Amazon-specific by design.
Does ThirstyAffiliates show product images and prices?
Not from Amazon product data — it manages links rather than holding product information. Check its current feature list, but the structural point stands: a link manager knows a URL, not what is behind it.
Which one tracks clicks better?
Different units. ThirstyAffiliates reports clicks per link, which is what you want when you are managing a lot of links. Ours reports visits and Amazon clicks per article, which is what you want when you are deciding which page to fix next.
I only have Amazon links. Do I need a link manager at all?
Probably not, and that is the honest answer. The main argument for link management — changing one URL instead of four hundred — is largely handled for Amazon links by our converter and by the fact that the tag comes from settings at page load rather than being baked into each link.
I have Amazon plus five other programmes. What do I actually buy?
Both, most likely. Or ThirstyAffiliates plus a broader multi-network tool if Amazon is a minority of your income — in which case see the Content Egg and Lasso comparisons, both of which are better fits for that shape of site than we are.
You sell one of these. Is this fair?
This page argues that the two are complementary and that a lot of readers should own both, which is not what a page trying to displace a competitor looks like. Every table row is checkable on thirstyaffiliates.com.