11 Best URL Shorteners For 2024 (Pros And Cons)
Looking for the best URL shortener? I’ve got you covered.
Shrinking your links is essential for every marketing campaign, especially if you’re using UTM tracking codes.
Not only are shorter URLs more clickable, easier to type, and easier to fit within social media character limits, but they’re also useful for click tracking and analytics.
I’ve tried out a bunch of different URL shorteners over the years. And in this post, I’ll be reviewing and comparing each of them to help you figure out which one is right for you.
#1 – Sniply
Sniply is hands down, one of the best URL shorteners on the market right now. It offers a great balance of features and affordability.
The best thing about it is that it doesn’t just shrink your links, but also lets you overlay your own content on the destination site.
That’s a huge game-changer as now, you can send your audience to third-party websites without disengaging them, and get more return on the links you share.
For example, let’s say you’re a blogger and you want to share a link in one of your posts to a useful third-party resource for your readers. But, you also don’t want to send your visitors off your website completely—you’d rather they stick around.
In that case, you can use Sniply to add a CTA to that third-party resource that links back to the blog post on your site. So once they’re done reading, they can find their way back. Problem solved.
That’s just one use case, but I can think of a ton more. I’ve found it’s super useful for affiliate marketing and for social media content curation in particular.
In addition to that core USP, Sniply also has all the other features you’d expect from a link shortener, including analytics, click tracking, and A/B testing.
Pros and cons
Pricing
Plans start at $9/month, save 2 months when you pay yearly. Get started with a 14-day free trial.
#2 – Replug
Replug is a complete link management solution and the best choice for marketers on account of its built-in bio link tool and retargeting capabilities.
My first impression of Replug is that it’s super feature-rich. It has a lot of bells and whistles that you don’t get with basic URL shorteners.
You can use it to create shortened links that feature your brand name or domain (rather than Replug’s). This is a good thing as I’ve found that branded short links tend to perform better than unbranded versions—your audience is more likely to trust and click them.
I also find Replug’s ‘link rotation’ feature super useful. It enables you to intelligently direct visitors to multiple landing pages from one single link based on filters like the visitor’s country, time, date, etc.
Social media marketers will appreciate the bio link tool. You can use it to build a microsite to house all your important links and content, and then share it through one branded bio link. Then, retarget visitors who interact with your bio links across channels.
Replug’s analytics are better than most too. It doesn’t just tell you basic metrics like clicks and visitors, but also things like visitor demographics and traffic parameters. And its automated presentation-ready reports are excellent.
All that said, it might be too feature-rich for some users. If you just want to shorten a few URLs and you don’t need a comprehensive link management toolkit, you’re probably better off looking elsewhere.
Pros and cons
Pricing
Plans start at $19/month, save 20% when you pay yearly. Get started with a 14-day free trial.
#3 – JotURL
JotURL is another good choice for marketers who want the whole works. Like Replug, it goes way beyond URL shortening and comes with a raft of features to help you brand, track, optimize, and manage the links you share.
With JotURL, you can change long and unwieldy URLs into neat and tidy branded links, or scannable QR codes, in seconds.
Plus, customize your social media link previews, track conversions, dig deep into analytics, set up deep links, add CTAs, create a link-in-bio page, and a whole bunch of other stuff.
I particularly like the Activity Monitoring feature. It keeps an eye on your links around the clock and lets you know the instant it detects any problems like broken links, server outages, or changes to the destination content.
This is super important as it enables you to take action quickly and update your links to avoid missing out on conversion opportunities or worse, damage to your brand reputation.
I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve added a link to a post on Blogging Wizard, only to find that the content I linked to had completely changed a couple of years later. JotURL’s Activity Monitoring makes sure if something like that happens, you’ll know about it.
Pros and cons
Pricing
Plans start from €69/ month and save over 20% when you pay yearly. Get started with a 14-day free trial.
#4 – Bitly
Bitly is a great choice if you want to keep things simple. You don’t even need to sign up for an account to use it, so it’s ideal for anyone who just wants to quickly shorten a link (for free) without having to jump through a bunch of hoops first.
I like that Bitly lets you make up to 10 links a month for free, but that’s probably not going to be enough for most users. For more than that, though, you’ll need to sign up for one of their paid plans.
Depending on your needs, it’s probably worth doing that anyway as the paid plans come with much more advanced features, like the ability to brand your links and replace the ‘bit.ly’ section with your own domain name. Other advanced features include link redirects, bulk link shortening, and a UTM builder.
Aside from short links, you can also use Bitly to create QR codes and build landing pages to showcase your links and content. I say landing pages rather than link-in-bio pages because they’re better than the basic bio link pages you get with a lot of other link shorteners.
Pros and cons
Pricing
Free plan available. Paid plans start from $8/month (annual only) or $35/month (month to month).
#5 – TinyURL
TinyURL is my favorite free URL shortener. It’s a really nice, simple tool for users who aren’t ready to invest in a paid solution yet.
I was surprised at how straightforward it was to use—it took all of 3 seconds to shorten a link in my tests.
I didn’t have to create an account or log in to try it out. I just opened up the website, entered a long URL and an alias (this is the URL slug), and clicked ‘Shorten URL’. It’s as easy as that.
The shortened URL takes the format ‘tinyurl.com/alias’ which, to be honest, isn’t as short as I’d have liked.
The TinyURL domain name is kind of long compared to other URL shorteners, so there are still fairly a lot of characters there, but it’s better than nothing. And given that you don’t have to pay a penny, I’ll take it.
And of course, if you’d rather replace the ‘TinyURL’ part with your branded domain, you can, but you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan. Doing so will also unlock other advanced link management features and analytics.
Another thing I like: If you want to turn your short link into a QR code, you can do so in one click and download it as an SVG or PNG file. Again, this takes less than 5 seconds and is totally free.
Pros and cons
Pricing
Free plan available. Pro plans start from $12.99/month and you can save over 20% when you pay annually. Get started with a 14-day free trial.
#6 – Rebrandly
Rebrandly has a nice web app and some powerful features like traffic routing, deep links, and retargeting scripts.
It offers a free plan which is sufficient for casual users who only need to create a handful of links a month, but its paid plans offer much better features.
You can do things like connect a custom domain to create branded short links, personalize all the URLs you create with custom slugs, add UTM parameters, build and customize QR codes, and more.
I particularly like Rebrandly AI—its new AI-powered suggestion tool.
With it, you can now click ‘boost this link’ after shortening your URLs, and Rebrandly will use its machine learning algorithms to analyze data points from millions of links like yours, and use that to tell you the optimal time to share the link with your audience.
It’ll even predict how much sharing at the recommended time will boost your CTR. This is something I haven’t seen on any other URL shortener.
Pros and cons
Pricing
Free version available. Paid plans start from $14/month, and save up to 18% when you pay annually. Get started with a 14-day free trial.
#7 – BL.INK
BL.INK is a good choice for SMBs and enterprises that need a solution that the entire team can access. It’s much pricier than most other URL shorteners, but it’s one of the few tools that support multiple users.
The higher starting price of BL.INK is somewhat justified by the higher plan limits. You can have 10k active links even on the entry-level plan, whereas a lot of other URL shorteners limit you to 100-500 or so.
Feature-wise, BL.INK is similar to most other advanced URL shorteners. You can create links, QR codes, and landing pages.
Plus, set up Dynamic Links to route traffic to different destinations based on smart rules, and even change the destination of your short links after the fact, without having to update the URL or pause your campaign.
In my opinion, the user interface could be better. It doesn’t feel as easy to use as other URL shorteners but its strength lies in its team collaboration tools, rich reporting, and high plan limits.
Pros and cons
Pricing
Plans start from $48/month. Get started with a 21-day free trial.
#8 – T2M
T2M offers great value for money. It’s one of the few URL shorteners to offer a ‘lifetime’ plan, and it only costs five bucks.
Once you’ve signed up for T2M’s lifetime plan, you can shorten up to 1,000 URLs and have up to 5,000 clicks/redirects per month. That should be plenty for casual users, and if you need higher limits (or more advanced features), the month-to-month plans are pretty affordable too.
The user interface needs some work in my opinion. But feature-wise, it has everything most users will need.
It aims to be an all-in-one link management platform so aside from shortening URLs, you can also generate dynamic QR codes, track clicks and performance, run A/B tests, set up redirects, and all the other stuff you’d expect.
Pros and cons
Pricing
A $5 lifetime plan is available. Monthly plans start from $9.99/month, and you can save up to 30% when you pay yearly. Get started with a 15-day free trial.
#9 – Tiny.cc
Tiny.cc is another simple URL shortener that couldn’t be easier to use. You can get started for free but it’s paid plans offer better limits and more features.
One thing I like about Tiny.cc is that it does a better job of shrinking your URLs than a lot of other free tools.
I tested it out with a custom 3-letter slug, and the total character count was just 11 characters (tiny.cc/bw9).
In comparison, with TinyURL, free shortened links are, at a minimum, 17 characters long (tinyurl.com/alias). That’s a pretty big difference.
You can shorten URLs on the homepage without having to create an account. And if you do sign up for a paid plan, you’ll benefit from hundreds of more advanced features including deep analytics, branded links, automatic traffic routing, retargeting, and 24/7 link monitoring.
There are even a couple of features to help with other areas of your online marketing campaigns. For example, it has its own built-in social media listening tool that you can use to track mentions and measure brand awareness.
Pros and cons
Pricing
Free version available. Plans start from $5/month, save 8.3% when you pay yearly. Get started with a 7-day free trial.
#10 – Polr
Polr is my recommendation if you’re looking for a self-hosted URL shortener. It’s completely free and open source, but it requires a lot of technical knowledge, so it’s a better choice for businesses with dev teams that know how to implement it, rather than casual users.
You can use Polr to run your own URL shortener, on your own domain. This is a good choice if you want to retain control over your data when shortening links, or you want to offer a URL shortening service under your brand.
You can use it as it is out of the box, but you’ll probably want to edit the code to customize things like the theme, shortening permissions, etc.
The interface is simple and easy to use, but visually, it needs some work. You can try it out before you implement it on the demo site.
Pros and cons
Pricing
Polr is free to use.
#11 – YOURLS
YOURLS is another one of the best self-hosted URL shorteners on the market. Once you set it up, you can use it to shorten links on your own domain, rather than through a third-party site.
As with Polr, I wouldn’t recommend YOURLS to casual users. It requires a lot of technical knowledge to set up and manage (if you don’t have a background in programming, you’re going to struggle), and you’ll need your own database and webserver of course.
I like that it can be easily extended with plugins when you want to implement new features and functionality. The development team is great too—they’re very responsive.
Pros and cons
Pros
- Free and open-source
- Helpful and responsive developer team
- Easily customizable interface
- Super extensible with a great plugin architecture
- Deep analytics (historical click reports, visitor geo-locations, etc.)
Cons
- Complicated and difficult to set up
- The interface isn’t very stylish
Pricing
YOURLS is free to use.
Final thoughts
As you can see, there are many URL shorteners on the market to choose from, and each has its own strengths and weaknesses.
If you just want to shorten URLs and you don’t need all the other bells and whistles, then any of the tools we’ve covered in this comparison will do the trick.
What separates them is all the other features they offer around that and how easy they are to use. Ultimately, the best choice for you will depend on the features you need, your budget, and your UI preferences.
Planning on sharing your shortened links on social? Check out these Instagram bio link tools and social media automation tools that can help you get better results.To track and analyze your link clicks, visits, and conversions, see our roundup of the best web analytics tools. You might also enjoy our roundup of the latest content marketing stats and trends.
Disclosure: Our content is reader-supported. If you click on certain links we may make a commission.
