Bitly (Bit.ly) is one of the most popular link shortening tools. The vendor says it shortens 1 billion links per month. The company is privately held, based in New York City, and was founded in 2008.
$35
per month
Branch
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Branch provides a cross-platform linking and attribution platform, offering solutions that unify user experience and measurement across devices and channels. Branch powers mobile links and cross-platform measurement to more than 3 billion monthly users across the globe. It provides cross-platform marketing, engagement and measurement solution for over 50,000 apps — including Reddit, Buzzfeed, Twitch, Groupon, and many more.
N/A
Pricing
Bitly
Branch
Editions & Modules
Basic
$35
per month
Free
Free
Customized
Contact sales team
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Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Bitly
Branch
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
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Our main platform is free to all. Some of the free products that most apps find useful are content sharing, custom onboarding, referrals and organic app search. We have specialized products (Journeys (Smart Banner), Deep Linked Email, Dynamic Ads and Data Integrations) which are typically priced by volume of a company.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Bitly
Branch
Considered Both Products
Bitly
No answer on this topic
Branch
Verified User
Vice-President
Chose Branch
Branch offers more than any of these tools considered individually. Moreover, cost-wise, it is much more effective as well.
It gets the job done and has a really good analytics tool. It links to Linkinbio and integrates with other apps as well. The redirect is a big pro for me since our URL are constantly changing but I don't want the short URL that I've marketing to be changing all the time.
Branch well suited: Branch links are perfecting for embedding into our email service provider (SendGrid), paid media channels (Facebook, Google, ASA), organic media (Instagram, Facebook, content marketing, referral) and push notification platform (OneSignal) to be able to evaluate actions taken from users that clicked on those branch links. No matter the data from these links, they are accurate and are easily exported to our database and CRM to determine ROI, and find weak points in our major funnels.
Click tracking: it integrated well with Facebook, Google, Clevertap, product, etc. to allow multiple stakeholders to use this one platform for tracking.
Sale attribution: it has a robust fraud detection and event deduplication in place to attribute sales correctly.
Smart URL: it offers different deeplinks to support basic user platforms, thus making the URL behavior smart and personalized for users.
Referrals: it's a ready-made platform to easily launch your refer and earn program, with all checks of fraud detection in place.
Social sharing: it offers various goats and cards for how a link will appear on various social media channels if shared, which is particularly helpful for marketing teams.
One thing I've noticed is that if you're shortening a link that you didn't create - for example shortening the link to a news article that you then want to share on Twitter - the analytics will continue to pull data from the original URL as a whole, and not just your unique Bitlink. It would be nice to be able to pull out the traffic that just my efforts are pulling to the site, and not every single source of traffic that site is getting.
Multiplayers redirection is important feature. In our marketing process for [our] Ace Tutor app https://www.acetutor.io, we have a referral reward campaign for which we want to aggregate clicks from lower level links to higher level links. For example, we created unique Branch Links for 10 marketing interns, and each intern wanted to create Branch Links for their own 10 delegates, the clicks of the Branch Links from these delegates would be automatically rolled up to the right intern's Branch Link, so we can make payment following the aggregation paths. Currently, Branch Links do not support this kind of multiplayer or multi-layer redirections.
It's very straightforward to use, and we were able to easily onboard business users that wouldn't normally engage with software of this type. There is somewhat of a learning curve with some of the administrative functions, but that is limited to one person on staff that has overcome it pretty easily
I've witnessed very little availability issues with Bitly. This includes very rare occurrences of application errors and unplanned outages, of which I very much appreciate. When there are application errors or outages, Bitly does a great job of handling the issues in a timely manner and I am rarely out of the site for long at all. This is great, considering I was using Bitly for nearly every link that was posted to our social media accounts.
I have used Bitly's service on a variety of computers, systems, and browsers. With this being said, I have not noticed much of a change at all between the browsers and computers, and Bitly's performance is top notch. Reports are also completed in a reasonable time frame, and I have had very little problem with lag time on loading different pages on the site. Pages tend to load quite quickly.
For us, Bitly is a Godsend an an almost perfect solution. I have no complaints and would recommend them to almost anyone. I guess I would hold back from a 10/10 because short URLs can sometimes look spammy. For us, and what we need it for, it's just about perfect!
We have never had any issue with support response yet. In fact, they have a local POC in our city too, who routes the urgent matters to their escalation matrix.
I did not receive any in-person training, as I felt that I didn't need this type of training in order to understand and learn Bitly. It was quite easy for me to explore Bitly and learn the features myself without needing a person to give me a demo or tutorial. Kudos to making a platform that is very straightforward.
I haven't experienced direct online training - However, several times while learning Bitly by myself I went to the main Bitly page to answer a few questions I had. This includes determining exactly what features I was receiving and then I would explore the website and find these features. Also, I went to the Enterprise tab when both deciding to purchase that upgrade, as well as after I purchased this upgrade. It was very helpful in learning exactly what came with that package and after the upgrade, I was able to look there and learn some of the aspects of the upgrade that I was missing
Very excited to use bitly for link tracing - I was very excited to begin using Bitly for this company, and I've had very favorable impressions of using Bitly in the past for a variety of different jobs. Knowing the amount clicks on each link is important for our overall strategy.
We use Pretty Links for custom URLs from our Word Press website. When that is not possible because the URL doesn't originate from the website, we use Bitly. It definitely has a purpose in our day-to-day operations. We also appreciate the information you receive like total clicks, top referrer and top location.
Branch's links are the most consistent in the mobile space. They work across desktop and mobile, where AppsFlyer and Deeplink's didn't consistently perform in both places. Branch's measurement is more consistent across all customer touch points as well, which gives our marketing and growth teams the answers they need without any struggle.
Bitly's scalability is great. When I began using it, I only used it once in a while to promote blog articles from our WordPress site on Twitter. This was due to Twitter's character limit and URL shortening was necessary. However, once I became more familiar with it and started seeing the benefits of many of Bitly's features, I began using it for nearly every link I posted across all of our social media accounts. This increased the workload I filtered through Bitly, and we also upgraded from free to a paid account. This growth was handled very well by Bitly and I was very pleased with its ability to scale so easily.
