Matt Collar from AllMusic website praised the album and wrote that Partners "works as guided tour down Streisand's memory lane, and with her resonant voice still in supple shape, any excuse to hear her sing is a welcome invitation."

Jim Farber from New York Daily News gave the album three out of five stars and wrote that "only four of the 12 cuts establish a real relationship between the singers, and most of those successes are crowded together at the start."

Mikael Wood from Los Angeles Times wrote that while Streisand claimed that her goal with the album was not simply to remake some of her biggest hits but to provide "a whole other way of looking at the song", most of the dozen tracks on Partners "offer no such vantage", he also elected Streisand's duet with Babyface "Evergreen" the best moment of the album thanks to the vocals in "which she modulates her gale-force singing to suit his sumptuous quiet-storm groove".

Stephen Holden, Nate Chinen and Ben Ratliff from the New York Times criticized the album and wrote that the "instrumentation and the vocal tracks are so processed in pursuit of a high-gloss perfection that any sense of two people standing side by side and singing their hearts out is lost", they also claimed that while Streisand's "voice has noticeably diminished in size" it pulls "its signature quality, ingrained sob" the duets "lack conversational or narrative flow, and you have an uncomfortable sense that the parts were spliced together after the fact".

Helen Brown from The Telegraph gave the album two out of five stars and wrote that "while Streisand's voice still soars this lackluster collection falls into the icky celebrity duet traps".