URL shorteners in 2026
3 commercial products, ranked by how many people read about each, or about its maker, on Wikipedia's mobile site. Of those with an article of their own, Bitly has the most readers, about 16k a month. 30 open-source projects, ranked by GitHub stars and how recently each was worked on. YOURLS leads with 12k stars, ahead of Kutt. 18 had code pushed in the last three months. Most common licenses: MIT (19), AGPL-3.0 (8) and GPL-2.0 (1).
Commercial URL shorteners
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1
Bitly Bitly
Bitly makes it easy to create, share, and track short links and QR Codes. Find what
Complete system Production-ready Marketing teams need branded short links and QR codes with click analytics across campaigns.
16k readers a month Since 2009 Commercial -
2
Rebrandly Rebrandly
Best link shortener for marketing teams. Create branded short URLs, track campaign performance, and boost clicks with custom domains. Start for free.
Complete system Production-ready You care most about branded domains for links and want a cheaper option than Bitly's higher tiers.
Commercial -
3
Short.io Short.io
Free URL shortener with custom branded domains, analytics, and QR codes. Create up to 1,000 branded short links at no cost. No credit card required.
Complete system Production-ready A small business wants branded short links on its own domain at low or no cost.
Commercial
Open-source URL shorteners
Complete systems you can adopt 7
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1
YOURLS YOURLS
π The π₯π¦ π§π’π€π΅π° standard, self hosted, powerful and customizable, URL shortener in PHP
Complete system Production-ready You want branded short links on your own domain on cheap PHP and MySQL hosting.
β 12k MIT PHP Active, pushed today -
2
Kutt thedevs-network
Free Modern URL Shortener.
Complete system Production-ready You want a modern self-hosted Bitly alternative with a clean interface.
β 11k MIT JavaScript Active, pushed 15 days ago -
3
Sink miantiao-me
β‘ A Simple, Speedy, Secure, and Serverless Link Shortener with Analytics, Running Entirely on Cloudflare.
Complete system Usable You already use Cloudflare and want branded short links with analytics at near-zero hosting cost.
β 7.2k AGPL-3.0 TypeScript Active, pushed 7 days ago -
4
Shlink shlinkio
The definitive self-hosted URL shortener
Complete system Production-ready You need an API-first shortener for marketing or product links on your own infrastructure.
β 5.4k MIT PHP Active, pushed today -
5
Rustypaste orhun
A minimal file upload/pastebin service.
Complete system Production-ready You want a 0x0.st-style upload endpoint on your own server for sharing logs, snippets and files from the terminal.
β 1.2k MIT Rust Active, pushed 2 days ago -
6
Chhoto URL SinTan1729
A simple, blazingly fast, selfhosted URL shortener with no unnecessary features; written in Rust
Complete system Usable You want short links on your own domain with as little resource use and as few features as possible.
β 997 MIT Rust Active, pushed yesterday -
7
Url-Shorten-Worker xyTom
A URL Shortener created using Cloudflare worker
Complete system Usable You want personal short links on Cloudflare's free tier with almost no setup.
β 1.8k MIT JavaScript Slowing, pushed 8 months ago
Building blocks for your own system 1
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1
JSONCrush KilledByAPixel
Compress JSON into URL friendly strings
Building block Usable You want to store small app or game state in a URL without a backend.
β 1.7k MIT JavaScript Slowing, pushed 9 months ago
Integrations 1
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1
Shlink-web-client shlinkio
A React-based client application for Shlink
Integration Production-ready You run Shlink and want a graphical admin, either at app.shlink.io or self-hosted.
β 401 MIT TypeScript Active, pushed 2 days ago
Templates and starters 1
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1
Suri surishortlink
Your own short links as an easily deployed static site
Template or starter Usable You want personal short links on your own domain with no server or database.
β 396 MIT JavaScript Active, pushed 13 days ago
Compared head to head
Looking for an alternative to
Open-source licenses
- Permissive: 20. Use it anywhere, including in closed products. You keep the copyright notice; Apache-2.0 also grants patent rights.
- Network copyleft: 8. Like GPL, and running a changed version as a web service counts as distributing it, so its users get the source too.
- Strong copyleft: 2. If you distribute the program or anything built on it, you must release the whole source under the same license.
Languages
TypeScript 7, PHP 5, JavaScript 4, Rust 3, Python 2, Go 2, HTML 2, SCSS 1, Ruby 1, Svelte 1, C++ 1 and Vue 1.
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