Top URL Shorteners

The top Google URL Shortener alternatives

The 7 best URL shortener services

  • Bitly for the best all-around URL shortener

  • Rebrandly for an alternative to Bitly

  • Dub for a modern URL shortener

  • TinyURL for free, fast, and anonymous short URLs

  • BL.INK for business owners

  • URL Shortener by Zapier for automatically creating short links

  • Short.io for a great free plan

 

 


What makes the best URL shortener?

At its most basic, a URL shortener takes some long, unwieldy link and turns it into a shorter link. One advantage of this is that these short links are easier to share. For example, if you're making an ad for a roommate, you can take something like http://www.example.com/my-super-awesome-blog-about-squirrels/2022/10/23/live-with-a-squirrel-fan--they%27re-awesome/?utm_source=zapier&utm_medium=paid-social&utm_term=squirrels&utm_content=big-banner-a, and turn it into https://tinyurl.com/live-with-me.

This shortened link means whoever sees your ad has an easy-to-type URL to visit, rather than having to type some long, unintelligible string of text where they're almost guaranteed to make a mistake (and they certainly won't include your tracking information).

And it's not just for ads for roommates; URL shorteners allow you to provide a typeable link on a business card, print ad, podcast interview, or any other situation where someone can't just click on a nice hyperlink. (Most also allow you to create QR codes, which are even easier for this.)

While URL shorteners used to be useful for shortening longer links to fit character limits on social media and messaging apps, a lot of platforms take care of that for you. X-formerly-Twitter, for example, automatically shortens any shared links with its t.co shortening service (ironically, the now-rebranded company doesn't seem to own X.co, so it's still using the old Twitter shortening domain), while iMessage obscures any links behind a preview card. If you're just sending things to your friends, you only really need to worry about URL shortening if you're exclusively using SMS.

Instead, URL shorteners are most useful when you want to include additional information like tracking parameters, send deep links to different parts of apps, include complicated information like GPS coordinates, or even send people with different devices to different destinations—like the correct app store to download your app.