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
Short.io
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Short.io (formerly Short.cm) is a custom domain URL shortener used to create, customize, and share short branded links. The vendor boasts advanced features like country/region/mobile targeting; set up UTM-tags, link expiration/cloaking; apply API for developers; free email and online support. Users can manage short links with colleagues by using the Team option. The integrations with Google Analytics, GTM, Segment, Zapier, and Facebook Pixel are also available.
N/A
Pricing
Bitly
Short.io
Editions & Modules
Basic
$35
per month
Free
Free
Customized
Contact sales team
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Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Bitly
Short.io
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Bitly
Short.io
Considered Both Products
Bitly
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Short.io
Verified User
Director
Chose Short.io
I used Bitly many years ago. I prefer Short.io because it's a bit easier to use and set up. Plus it's free on the tier that we need.
Short.io is much more versatile compared to Bitly, in addition to having the option to change the language to Spanish, Short.io has better accessibility, and more options to provide people looking for a page that provides them with information as vital as the clicks on the …
Our security officer said Short.cm's security practices were better than the others. I like Short.cm more than the others because of its interface and statistics dashboard.
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.
Short.cm is best suited where you need to type something with a character limit and you can't afford to add long links. Instead, you can shorten the link using Short.cm and paste it into the messaging app. Example: Twitter has a character limit for tweets. Short.cm is less appropriate for apps like Gmail, Slack, etc that have an inbuilt hyperlinking mechanism making Short.cm's usage is very minimal. (My personal experience).
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.
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!
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.
Short.io is much more versatile compared to Bitly, in addition to having the option to change the language to Spanish, Short.io has better accessibility, and more options to provide people looking for a page that provides them with information as vital as the clicks on the links, being the strongest reason to choose short that has Spanish language and is easier to use.
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.