Bitly Alternatives
OctoURL is one of the tools on this list, so read it with that in mind. What we have not done is pad the list with products nobody uses to make ourselves look better, or describe competitors in terms they would not recognise. Each entry below says what the tool is genuinely best at, and what you give up choosing it.
List last reviewed: August 2026.
Rebrandly
Best for: Teams whose whole reason for switching is branded domainsBuilt around custom domains first, with domain management and team workflows layered on top. The natural landing spot for a marketing team that wants a platform but wants the links on their own name.
Trade-off: The domain-centric model means a lot of the product assumes you are managing many domains, which is overhead if you have one.
Short.io
Best for: Multi-domain setups and per-domain analyticsStrong at running several branded domains side by side, with deep-linking and integrations that suit agencies handling many clients.
Trade-off: Configuration surface is wide. Powerful if you need it, noise if you do not.
Dub
Best for: Developers who want an open-source, API-first optionModern, open source, and built for people comfortable in an API and a terminal. Good documentation and an active project behind it.
Trade-off: The developer-first framing means non-technical teammates may need someone to set things up for them.
TinyURL
Best for: Throwaway links with no account and no trackingThe fastest possible path from a long URL to a short one. No sign-up needed for the basic case.
Trade-off: If you need to know what happened after the click, this is the wrong category of tool.
OctoURL
Best for: Anyone who wants branded links and real click data without a platformShort links on your own domain, per-click analytics you can export, QR codes, bulk CSV import, and a small REST API. Deliberately sized to the job rather than to an enterprise procurement checklist.
Trade-off: No link-in-bio pages, no SSO, no campaign attribution modelling. If those are requirements, one of the platforms above fits better.
How to actually make this decision
Almost every comparison of link shorteners is a feature table, and almost every feature table is useless, because the features are near-identical. All of these tools shorten a URL, all of them count clicks, and most of them generate a QR code. Picking on feature count means picking at random.
Four questions separate them in practice. Can you publish on a domain you own, and on which plan? Can you export the click data, or only look at it? Is there an API, and would you enjoy using it? And what happens to your live links the day you stop paying? That last one is the one people discover too late.
If you want the head-to-head rather than the survey, we wrote Bitly vs OctoURL. If price is the whole question, start with the free tier comparison.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do people look for a Bitly alternative?
Three reasons dominate: the cost of a plan whose features go mostly unused, wanting links on their own domain without an enterprise tier, and wanting a tool small enough to understand in an afternoon. Occasionally it is the opposite - they outgrew a simple tool and Bitly is the alternative.
Will my existing bit.ly links keep working if I switch?
Yes, as long as your Bitly account stays active - those URLs resolve through Bitly, not through whatever you switch to. Nobody can migrate a bit.ly URL, because the domain is theirs. This is the strongest argument for publishing on a domain you own.
What should I actually compare on?
Whether you can use your own domain and on which plan, whether the click data can be exported rather than only viewed, whether there is an API you would enjoy using, and what happens to your links if you stop paying. Feature-count tables are mostly noise.
Is a free shortener good enough?
For links you do not need to measure, usually. Once the link matters to a campaign, free tiers tend to be where link expiry, ownership, and data-retention surprises live. We wrote about that in more detail on our free URL shortener page.