URL and link shorteners are helpful tools that transform long URLs into manageable links under 20 characters.
They can help manage links, track click data, promote sharing on social media platforms, and even make money online.
But there are a ton of options. Bitly overall is my recommended choice for best url and link shorteners.
To help you find the best one, I’ve ranked and reviewed the leading and best link shorteners. These reviews are based on ease of use, features, support, pricing, and more.
Let’s get started.
Bitly Url Link Shorteners:
look at the video below
Bitly is a full-service, business-grade URL link shortener. If your needs are modest, you can use it anonymously to shorten long URLs and be on your way. But Bitly really stands out for its business offering. Part of the appeal is that Bitly is so simple and easy to use. It has a comprehensive dashboard where you can track over 20 real-time data points, including the location of your visitors, organic shares, and more. Tools for tracking campaigns are easy to use as well.
With Bitly’s free limited account, you can customize the back-half of your shortened URLs, track click rates, and get information about your top referrers, but only for 1,000 non-branded links per month. It’s a generous free plan and could very well be adequate for some small businesses. The Basic plan provides a free custom domain, allows you to create 1,500 links per month, and shows more data about who clicks your links. If you need more from Bitly, there’s an additional custom pricing tier for enterprise users.
Bitly is the best URL shortener for large businesses looking to brand and track links, and it’s a great choice for small businesses that want to generate short URLs and follow their stats for a modest number of campaigns.
Bitly price:
Free plan: Yes
Paid plan: From $35/month
Key Features:
- Auto Branding – Create custom links in bulk and get in-depth analytics about the performance of your content.
- Extensive Integrations – Integrate a multitude of business apps into your tech stack and workflow to keep things simple. You can also create mobile-friendly deep links through Sprinklr, HootSuite, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
- Powerful Analytics – Bit.ly’s real-time interactive dashboard tracks business-critical metrics like store visits, open-rate, and demographics.
Pros:
- Generate QR codes for your custom links with powerful tracking features.
- Save per-character fees on SMS with shorter links.
- Track metrics like organic link share and overall performance of your content.
- It offers an extensive resource library and knowledge.
- Automate the delivery custom branded links at scale.
- Bitly API offers powerful security and flexibility through the OAuth2 authentication workflow.
Tiny Url Link Shorteners:
Free URL link shortener TinyURL has been in the game since 2002, and for good reason. It’s a useful tool for when you’re in a hurry and need to create a short link that will never expire. TinyURL can suggest a shorter URL for you, or you can customize the result. TinyURL also offers a bookmarklet, a small piece of javascript you add to your web browser’s toolbar that generates a short link from a webpage with the click of a button. It then leads you back to TinyURL where you retrieve the link. Although TinyURL is entirely free and anonymous to use, it doesn’t contain any reports or information about your links and their popularity.
TinyURL price:
Free
Key Features:
- Clean User Interface – TinyURL offers a simple user interface. You just have to put the web link in the box and click on the “Make TinyURL” option. You’ll get your shortened URL right away.
- URL Types – It offers three URL types, including a long link, a short link, and a preview link.
Pros:
- Generate an unlimited number of short links for free.
- Compatible with all popular platforms and web browsers.
- It automatically disables spam or illegal links.
- It creates custom links with your personal branding.
Rebrandly Link Shorteners:
Rebrandly is a link management platform that helps you track, brand, shorten, and share short URLs using a custom domain name. It also lets you collaborate with multiple team members easily. Basically, you can create team-specific folders to collaborate and view a specific set of branded links without any confusion.
What’s more, it edits destination URLs and creates custom URL slugs. You can also create links with expiry and enable faster redirects.
Rebrandly is a complete platform to brand and manage links.
Here’s everything it can do for you:
- Branding – put your brand name on the links you share to enhance your brand’s visibility.
- Integrate – Integrate your links with your existing tools and workflows.
- Track – Monitor your complete social media and email marketing strategy.
Other than this, Rebrandly enables you to manage 404 traffic and SSL right from the dashboard. You can also connect and manage multiple custom domains with your branding. It also allows you to build and schedule custom traffic reports to send to the concerned teams.
Key Features:
- Deep Linking – Easily route traffic to a specific landing page. Or direct them to your mobile app based on device, language, location, and other factors.
- Link Retargeting – Easily add traffic to retargeting list AdWords, Facebook, and Twitter. You can also send retargeting pixels directly through branded links.
- Domain Management – Manage custom SSL, 404 redirect management, SSL, main domain redirect, and multiple domain names.
Pros:
- Expedite the sign-up and sign-in process through a single sign-on (SSO).
- It offers use cases, product FAQs, and automatic updates.
- Powerful enterprise tool integration.
- Multiple access levels to manage large teams.
- Dedicated engineer support and email support.
Pricing:
Rebrandly offers five plans:
- Free: $0 per month
- Starter: $29 per month
- Pro: $69 per month
- Premium: $499 per month
- Enterprise: Custom Price
You also get a 30-day money-back guarantee with all the paid plans.
URL Shortener by Zapier:
Zapier’s URL link shortener automatically creates and saves short links, allowing you to create automated workflows. For instance, you can automatically shorten a link of a social media post and save it in Google Sheets simultaneously.
And if you want to share a link via SMS, Zapier’s URL shortener will automatically shorten your link. It also helps you save extra money on additional text characters.
Zapier also provides integration with over 2,000 applications, including Google Sheets, to add and post automatically shortened URLs.
Key Features:
- Automated Links – Add Zapier URL shortener in any workflow, and it will take automatically care of shortened links and tracking parameters.
- Extensive Integration – It offers integration with over 2000 applications, including social media apps, Google docs, email marketing tools, and survey forms.
- Unlimited Links – It comes bundled with Zapier for free. You can create an unlimited number of shortened links.
Pros:
- The free plan provides integration with 100 tasks per month.
- Include shortened links to personalized messages and emailers.
- Track the performance of links on different data points, including demographics and link clicks.
- It provides quick email support.
- You can also get personalized assistance by hiring a Zapier Expert.
Pricing:
Zapier’s URL link shortener comes for free with all the Zapier plans.
Firebase Dynamic Link Shorteners:
Firebase Dynamic Links is a new link shortener by Google. It helps you create dynamic, shortened links to generate more app installs. You can create links that help users open the same page on the mobile app that they were viewing on the mobile website. This will help you convert more mobile web app users into native mobile app users.
It provides several unique features like A/B testing, cloud messaging, powerful analytics, unlimited dynamic links, and more. The Google URL shortener also offers API reference for web, iOS, and Android to grow the app user base and generate more revenue.
Key Features:
- Efficient Marketing – Dynamic links enable users to see the exact marketing content in the app as in your desktop campaign.
- Migrate Desktop Users – Send links to smartphones via text message to install the mobile app.
- Fall-back URL – Automatically prompt the user to install the app if it’s not installed on the smartphone.
Pros:
- Easily track conversions and clicks on the Firebase dashboard.
- You can add your custom domain to reflect your brand in the link.
- Instantly add UTM parameters to track the marketing campaign.
- Track numerous metrics like first-opens, clicks, re-opens, and installs.
- Easily integrate it into your current app projects.
Pricing:
Firebase Dynamic Links is 100% free.
Bl.Ink Url Link Shorteners:
BL.INK is a full-featured URL link shortener service that can be used to not only turn long URLs into short ones, but also track the traffic coming from your links. Its dashboard shows trending links and general statistics, while an analytics page lets you dive into traffic by device, location, and referrers. You can also drill down into clicks by the time of day. Tags, which you can add to your shortened links, let you view your link traffic in new and custom ways and are perfect for tracking and coordinating campaigns.
BL.INK offers four tiers of paid plans to give small businesses, teams, and enterprises a variety of options based on the number of links you need to generate and track. Free account holders can generate 1,000 links, track up to 1,000 clicks per link, and create a custom domain to make branded links. If you’re a business in need of a full-service URL shortener and Bitly’s enterprise-grade plan seems like overkill, then BL.INK is one of your best options.
BL.INK price:
Free plan: Yes
Paid plan: Expert plan from $12/month, Small Business from $99/month, and Team plans from $299/month
Key Features:
- Branded Links – Easily create branded links with custom short domains.
- Advanced Analytics – Integrate BL.INK it with Google and Adobe Analytics to optimize your campaigns and track performance.
- Flexible Pricing – It offers multiple pricing tiers to ensure you pay only for the resources you use. For more features, you can instantly upgrade your subscription plan.
Pros:
- Dynamically route clicks through location, language, date, device, and time.
- Create branded links with tags and notes.
- BL.INK supports 301 and 307 redirects.
- It masks lengthy links to make sure only short links are visible in the address bar.
- Automatically delete a shortened link and its data.
Pricing:
BL.INK offers five pricing plans:
- Expert – $12 per month
- SMB – $99 per month
- Team – $299 per month
- Business – $599 per month
- Enterprise – Custom plan
You also get a 21-day free trial.
Adf.ly Link Shorteners:
AdFly is a free URL link shortening tool. It not only helps you shorten links but also monetizes those links.
All you have to do is just sign-up and create an account. After that, it will help you make money every time a user clicks on a shortened link. Finally, place your links on multiple social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn for more clicks and visibility.
You also get to advertise securely without any popup. Moreover, AdFly lets you track your links’ performance and metrics to make data-driven marketing decisions.
Key Features:
- Safe Advertising – It offers safe advertising through round the clock scanning of advertisements by anti-malware and virus servers.
- Fraud Filter – It ensures only genuine traffic gets routed to your links for better ROI.
- API – Instantly create Adf.ly links through the website, widget, or app by using its API.
Pros:
- You can withdraw your payout through PayPal after making a minimum of $5.
- Install simple scripts to get paid easily.
- AdFly provides service in ten languages, including English, Hindi, Spanish, French, Thai, and more.
- Easily sign-up through Google login.
- Track traffic through multiple data points.
Pricing:
AdFly is an open-source and free link shortener tool.
What is a URL and Link Shortener?
URL link shortening is a technique on the World Wide Web in which a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) may be made substantially shorter and still direct to the required page. This is achieved by using a redirect that links to the web page that has a long URL. … Often the redirect domain name is shorter than the original one.
Here are some key reasons why you need a link shortener:
- A short URL takes less character space. It means you can easily share it in a text message or tweet without exceeding the character limit.
- You can set parameters in a short URL to track key metrics like location, platform, geography, and demographics. It helps you monitor the traffic coming from a particular link.
- You can also connect your own custom domain to the URL shortener. You can use this custom domain as the base for short links. For instance, instead of using rebrand.ly or bit.ly, you can use your own branded domain name.
Features You Should You Look For in a Link Shortener?
- Powerful Analytics: In-depth analytical reporting will help you track the traffic coming through specific URLs. You can easily study your marketing campaigns’ performance through key metrics like the click-rate, geography, and demographics. Real-time tracking will also help you optimize your marketing campaign and achieve a better ROI.
- Branded Links – To have a better brand recall value, it’s essential to market with branded links. Thus, look for a URL shortener that offers custom branded domains for more personalized marketing.
- Extensive Integration – Easy integration with your CRM and other marketing tools will help you rebrand and shorten links more efficiently. Tools like URL Shortener by Zapier also help you automate the workflow.
- Domain Management – Large businesses often run multiple campaigns with several custom domains. Look for a tool that enables you to manage multiple domains like SSL, 404, and redirect domains.
- Free Plan – If you run a small business and don’t require advanced features, then you don’t always need to pay for your URL shortener. You can use free tools like TinyURL.
To Your Success
Juan Villar
