Why is Prefinery the Best InviteReferrals Alternative in 2024?

Right after signing up with your new account, Prefinery immediately walks you step-by-step through a campaign creation wizard. InviteReferrals on the other hand first checks with you if you want a demo first which seems like a great idea, but there's a reason why.

If you decide to skip the demo offer for InviteReferrals, you're then plunged right into their campaign wizard, and here comes the catch: you'll immediately realize that you actually need that demo. By the time you're already testing out signups and referrals with your Prefinery campaign, you're still stuck trying to figure out how to setup and install your InviteReferral campaign, or going through that demo.

With Prefinery, the wizard requires the bare minimum information to set up your whole campaign dashboard according to your specs. There is a short checklist to help guide you afterwards which you can refer to at any time, but you are not forced to follow it. It just makes it easy for you to find what you are looking for.

InviteReferrals' on the other hand appears to be built around the expectation that you take their demo offer and/or you have all the time and relevant knowledge to sift through their documentation and knowledge base.

With our rebrand in May 2023, besides the new, modern look, we've also put great focus on user experience. Both Prefinery and InviteReferral may be offering the same level of great support and comprehensive documentation, but we believe you should always have the option to easily do things yourself first.

With Prefinery's signup form you can collect more than just a name, an email address and a phone number from your leads. You get a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) form builder to create a 100% customizable form in your own design and language. images, videos, custom HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to your form.

On the other hand, InviteReferrals' signup form supports very limited customization, in particular, only being able to collect names, emails, and phone numbers. You can't rearrange the layout nor add media or custom code. The restrictions are the same with the referral portal (sharing status page). These referral marketing solutions do offer the option to allow signing up via Facebook, Google and Twitter login.

Prefinery's waitlist/leaderboard system can use four different ranking algorithms - by signup time, by most referrals, by position skipping, and by most points. Points-based referral systems ensure higher customer loyalty toward businesses. InviteReferral, on the other hand, ranks referrers either by invites, clicks, or converts.

Both Prefinery and InviteReferral boast a WYSIWYG editor for email copy, but Prefinery goes further by allowing you to create and apply highly customizable and reusable email layouts through a visual editor, without having to write any HTML email code. Or, you can customize one of Prefinery's built-in layout templates.

When it comes to emails, InviteReferral provides only two transactional email messages: one that's sent to the referrer for signing up, and another to remind them about the campaign. There's also no support for delivery conditions (e.g. only send if referrer is X or has performed Y). You also can't use your own sender address.

Prefinery offers a robust emailing system that allows you to create as many email messages as you need to send with support for delivery conditions, delivery delays, CCs and BCCs, and over 50 dynamic tags compared to InviteReferrals' 10 last we checked. You'll also be sending these emails through your own custom domain email address or even through your own SMTP setup for higher ROI.

Other notable features that differentiate Prefinery from InviteReferrals are double opt-in and email analytics.

Both Prefinery and InviteReferrals allow you to automate your referral marketing program from end to end and support the following reward types:

Single-sided Rewards — Reward a brand advocate when their referral converts or performs a goal-based action.

Double-sided Rewards — Reward both people when a referral converts or performs a goal-based action.

Prefinery supports vanity referral codes, which are based off a lead's name or email address, and are much easier to remember. InviteReferrals on the other hand, supports personalized coupon codes that can be assigned to referrers which, when used by a referral tracks back to the referrer.

Everyone can easily use the word “waitlist” these days, but no other competitor actually offers specific features around running pre-launch or closed beta campaigns. With Prefinery marketing automation, you can invite and send unique invitation codes to your leads.

InviteReferrals offers basic analytics and works okay if you just need an overall view of how your campaign is doing.

Prefinery also offers an overview while also allowing you to go into the nitty-gritty as it tracks more KPIs like opt-ins, referral sources, increased sales, conversion rate, individual email metrics, demographics, and form responses.

Both offer a lead database that lets you search, sort, and filter lead information with customizable columns, but Prefinery employs cloud-based management solutions to track more data points with every lead, achieving better workflow. No other competitor offers the ability to dig this deep into lead data. Once your list gets massive, you'll appreciate this even more.

Furthermore, accessing each lead's profile in Prefinery shows a ton more info, including their notes (that you can add per lead), email history, webhook history, referral history, gift cards history, etc.

InviteReferrals supports more direct integrations with affiliate marketing, namely with Freshsales, Zoho, Hubspot, Pipedrive, Leadsquared, CampaignMonitor, Klaviyo, and Salesforce.

Direct integration for other apps like Mailchimp and Google Analytics is supported by Prefinery as well as InviteReferrals. Both also offer Zapier and webhooks integration which means you can also easily integrate Prefinery with any of the above.

When it comes to API, Prefinery's remain to be the most robust in comparison to others. You'll have more integration options outside of Zapier, and can send/receive more data points.

Prefinery offers an unlimited number of campaigns through its marketing platform, even with our Free plan. InviteReferrals only allows you up to 3 campaigns on their basic plan, with only up to 6 on the standard tier.

Over the past 16 years Prefinery has smoothly handled HUGE marketing campaigns for SaaS companies, some with more than 800,000 leads. Many of our new customers come from competitors that just couldn't handle the load.

Prefinery has been around since 2008 — that's 16 years of experience — and was around years before any of our competitors.

Prefinery offers opt-in consent features requiring leads to agree to your terms when signing up and record this on the lead's profile which you can reference as needed.

Prefinery was the first to offer GDPR compliance. Privacy, Security, and Cookie policies are duly published, and our Data Processing Amendment includes the EU's SCCs (Standard Contractual Clauses). Everything is encrypted, whether at rest or in transit. Prefinery doesn't use Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, or other tracking software when you visit our homepage or use Prefinery.

With regards to account access, InviteReferrals only supports a limited number of team members on an account (up to 5 members only). Prefinery provides it for free and with no limits on the number of team members. You can specify their privileges (role-based access control), require 2FA for all team members on the account, and audit log of who did what and when for all changes to the campaign.

Prefinery respects you and your leads' privacy.

InviteReferrals categorizes signups into two: referrers and leads. Referrers are people who have opted in to join the campaign, while leads are people who are simply referrals (e.g. clicked through a referral link and made a purchase). If an existing lead signs up to join the campaign, they are then counted as a referrer. With that, InviteReferrals bills you for the number of new referrers/month.

With Prefinery referral software, leads automatically become referrers. Referrers though will continue to be able to sign up even if you've reached your customer acquisition limit — no person will ever be turned away! While an unlimited number of people can submit your signup form, if you go over your limit, you won't be able to view those additional subscribers or acquire new customers until you upgrade your subscription, but they can keep coming in.

With InviteReferrals, on the other hand, if you reach your monthly quota, your campaign will stop (actually not display for the end user) until the end of the current billing period. You will have to upgrade the plan to continue the campaigns.

Given those facts, one can be cheaper than the other depending on the kind of campaign you're trying to run, and depending on how that campaign turns out to be. If your campaign shaped up to have more referrers than leads (or perhaps all want to be referrers too, like in a typical referral campaign), then Prefinery would be cheaper. If it's more leads than referrers (e.g. like in an affiliate campaign), then InviteReferrals would be more cost-effective.

Because of this difference in pricing model, it is difficult to provide an apples-to-apples pricing comparison.