Open Source Alternatives
Open Source Link Management Alternatives to Bitly
Link shortening, QR codes, and click analytics under a branded domain. The free plan allows five links and two QR codes per month.
Bitly is a trademark of its respective owner.
Updated Sep 2026
What you gain
- ✓Unlimited short links instead of five per month on the free plan
- ✓Click history kept as long as you want, not 30 days on Core or one year on Premium
- ✓Custom domains without reaching the $29 a month Growth tier
- ✓Your redirect table is a database row you own
What you give up
- △You keep the redirect service running forever, because every published link dies the day it stops
- △No branded QR code designer with logo embedding and design templates
- △No hosted landing pages or link in bio builder
- △No mobile deep linking or app install attribution
Switching Cost
Bitly is the clearest lock-in case in this catalog and it has nothing to do with data export. Every bit.ly link already printed on a slide, a business card, or a conference flyer resolves through Bitly's servers, and no migration moves them. Branded links are worse, because custom domains start at the $29 a month Growth tier and downgrading takes away the feature that serves them. Standing up YOURLS or Shlink takes an afternoon and runs a few dollars a month. The honest plan is to switch everything going forward and treat the back catalog as sunk, because the alternative is paying Bitly indefinitely just to keep old links resolving.
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Drop-in Replacements
Ranked by feature coverage
shlink
7080% coverageThe definitive self-hosted URL shortener
Shlink is a URL shortener built API first. Every action goes through a documented REST API, which makes it the right pick when shortening a link is a step inside some other system rather than something a person does in a dashboard.
YOURLS
9070% coverage🔗 The 𝘥𝘦 𝘧𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘰 standard, self hosted, powerful and customizable, URL shortener in PHP
YOURLS has been the default answer to "I want my own short domain" since 2009. It shortens links under a domain you control, records click statistics, exposes an API, and takes plugins for nearly everything it does not do out of the box.
kutt
9070% coverageFree Modern URL Shortener.
Kutt is the easiest self-hosted shortener to actually get running. It defaults to SQLite, so there is no separate database server to provision, and Node 20 plus a single command puts you in business.