shlink

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.

It runs on PHP 8.4 or 8.5 against MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, or SQLite, and official Docker images exist. The web dashboard is a separate project you deploy yourself, or you can point the hosted client at app.shlink.io toward your own server and keep the data local. Multi-domain support lets one instance serve several short domains at once.

Free under MIT, all of it, with no paid tier at all. This is more machinery than YOURLS/YOURLS, and in exchange you get real visit tracking, geolocation stats, QR code generation, and an API that came first rather than as an afterthought. Teams generating short links programmatically should start here.

The catch is that two piece deployment. Not realizing the dashboard is a separate install is the most common first hour confusion with this project, and the PHP 8.4 floor rules out a lot of older shared hosting that would happily run YOURLS.