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
Hootsuite
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Hootsuite is a social media management platform for building brand awareness, engaging with customers, and driving business results. Users can schedule posts across multiple social networks (including Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and YouTube ), manage organic and paid social content together, keep track of customer conversations, integrate with over 200+ applications, and gain actionable real-time insights from social media to make critical business decisions from…
$149
per month Starts at 1 user, 5 social accounts
Pricing
Bitly
Hootsuite
Editions & Modules
Basic
$35
per month
Free
Free
Customized
Contact sales team
Standard
$99
per month (billed annually) Starts at 1 user, 5 social accounts
Advanced
$249
per month (billed annually) Starts at 1 user, unlimited social accounts
Enterprise
Custom Pricing
per year
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Bitly
Hootsuite
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
—
Plans can be paid monthly or annually, with a discount for annual pricing.
I use both Hootsuite and Bit.ly. They worked well together, and one didn't eliminate the need for the other, however I'd prefer if they merged and shared functionality. But using them both seperately seemed to be all that I needed. TinyURL I haven't really used since trying it, …
I use Hootsuite for scheduling social media posts, but it also offers a link shortener, which serves the same purpose as Bitly but with additional features like scheduling posts and monitoring your brand. If you're looking for something a bit more complex than Bitly, I would …
Simplicity of the tool is Bitly’s competitive advantage. It is is easy to use, create links and measure and report analytics. Though Hootsuite had other use cases such as social sharing, scheduling, etc. Bitly is great if you have to shorten links or give the links their own …
we have also evaluated and used other URL shortening and link tracking tools such as TinyURL, Ow.ly (Hootsuite's link shortener), and Rebrandly. Each of these tools offers similar features to Bitly, including URL shortening, link tracking, and analytics. However, we found Bitly …
Verified User
Team Lead
Chose Bitly
The functionality is very similar - but I find Bitly UI is more clear.
It's the easiest tool to use, it is free, and it has the most capabilities. I like how it tracks the link's performance among campaigns. You can customize the link and make it easier for your audience to type in and remember. Bitly is well designed and easy to use without much …
I prefer Bitly to TinyURL or any other URL shortening service by far. Simplicity, less known for having bogus/phishing links and higher integrity. Plus better reporting.
Bitly is more effective at shortening and tracking links. Also since Bitly is so common, people are less hesitant to click on a Bitly short link as opposed to other short links. Bitly has a really easy to look at management system of all your short links. You're able to use …
I used to use tinyURL - they had no analytics, and no customization options. Also, the link generated after the / was longer and took up more room. Bit.ly is better than Hootsuite's OW.LY because it's free. :)
Both options are free, and get the job done, but they do not provide a good overview of the link's performance. Also, these two alternative options do not provide an organized way to retrieve or view previously shortened links, which can require more effort, or simply making a …
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.
Hootsuite is a great place to bring all your resources into one system. Instead of using all of the native platforms, you can do most of it here. You can also track analytics without leaving the platform. We are also excited to use the social listening feature.
Scheduling of content. The ease of use for Hootsuite's planner abilities is top of the industry. It is simple and effective in posting content to different channels and accounts.
Analytics are superior on Hootsuite. Their custom reports allow you to view very specific KPI's that you can adjust for each channel or account. The reports are also exportable to be used for others in the company.
Inbox management. The inbox manager is superior to any in the industry. Hootsuite allows you to tag certain phrases or keywords to better filter messages based on importance or topic.
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.
Because of the way algorithms works, we would have loved to be able to automate making a post with no link and posting the first comment with a link (hello LinkedIn)
We would have loved an easy way to post from a main account and repost the post for other accounts we administrate, for instance a corporate post reposted by individuals for LinkedIn, or retweets from one main account by child accounts
At this time we are satisfied that Hootsuite offers the most of what we are looking for at the most reasonable price point. As the social media landscape and monitoring/scheduling software changes, so do our needs. We re-evaluate our tools semi-annually or as new tools emerge onto the market. If we find at any point that we aren't gaining an advantage, then we are open to switching products.
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
As previously mentioned, Hootsuite as a tool is very helpful in social media management, social listening & social media analytics. The tool saves a lot of time which was previously put team members in manually scheduling the posts on social media. The dashboard is very comprehensive & is very clear in the different segment analytics which it provides to us.
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.
Any outages are communicated in advance and have not been a problem. We let our clients know based on communications from HootSuite. Since we operate 24/7 with multiple shifts, planned outages can interfere with our operations, but we can always work around it.
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.
Hootsuite makes passing on articles from the web very easy- when it works! I have had a number of gliches with Chrome where it does not open properly and the solution (after some toing and froing with support) was to uninstall and reinstall. The support staff are always very helpful (which is great!) but the gliches..... well, they suck when you are already busy!
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!
I can manage all of my accounts on one site! It's absolutely amazing! The dashboard is helpful to see how you are doing as well. Still getting to understand the analytics and may need to reach out for help on this
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
The online training is decent; however, it takes a lot more time to search for answers to my questions. Having a training session with a live person was much more effective as they were able to quickly address the business needs I have.
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.
• Combination of vendor and internal. The vendor bumped up our account to the Enterprise version (quite simple and easy) and then set up our organization and team structure. We then had to log in and set up team members and assign members to social media accounts. This was pretty easy to do as they have a great user interface. We simply had to drag and drop people into the correct team giving them access to specific social media accounts.
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.
Compared to Later, Hootsuite offers greater flexibility in content creation and planning, allowing for more comprehensive and tailored strategies across various social platforms. Additionally, Hootsuite excels in providing a wider array of training resources and detailed analytics, empowering teams to make data-driven decisions and optimize their social media efforts effectively.
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.
I have been able to evaluate which posts, in general, do well and figure out what types of posts to make (content)
It's been harder however to compare on social medial platform compared to another because it's hard to duplicate a post with a new owly (I think you used to be able to) but more so, you also can't assign it a custom owly link so I can see at a glance which owly link was associated with what platform.
