Bitly Alternatives (2026): The QR and Seat Limits, Compared

Bitly is the default answer to "which URL shortener should I use", and for a single link it is a perfectly good one. The reasons people go looking for an alternative are consistent, and they are all about limits rather than quality.

Almost everything is metered per month

Bitly counts short links, custom back-halves and QR codes against a monthly allowance, and the allowances are smaller than most people expect. From their published pricing:

• Free — 5 short links a month, 3 custom back-halves, 2 QR codes.
• Core, $10/mo — 100 links, 100 back-halves, 5 QR codes, 30 days of data history.
• Growth, $29/mo — 500 links, 10 QR codes, 120 days of history, one included custom domain.
• Premium, $199/mo — 3,000 links, 200 QR codes, 1 year of history.

The QR line is the one worth reading twice. Ten QR codes a month on a $29 plan — a QR code being a picture of a link you have already created. Print a menu, a poster and a packaging insert for the same campaign and you have spent three of them; redesign any of the three and you have spent three more.

For comparison, Urlicer on monthly billing:

• Free, $0 — 500 links a month, unlimited QR codes you can style, 25k tracked clicks, 30 days of history.
• Pro, $12 — 5,000 links, unlimited QR codes, 2 custom domains, 3 seats, 90 days.
• Team, $29 — 50,000 links, unlimited QR codes, 10 domains, 10 seats, 365 days.
• Business, $99 — 500,000 links, unlimited domains and seats, 730 days.

At the same $29, that is 500 links and 10 QR codes against 50,000 links and no QR limit at all.

Where the analytics actually start

The other limit worth knowing before you pick a plan is which numbers you get. On Bitly's comparison table, city-level data and device data appear only on Premium at $199. Country-level data starts on Core, as a top-ten list. Exporting your data starts on Growth.

Urlicer gives country, city, device, browser and referrer breakdowns, plus a QR-versus-direct split and CSV export, on every plan including the free one. The thing that scales with price here is how long we keep the history — 30 days free, 90 on Pro, a year on Team, two on Business — not whether you are allowed to see where the clicks came from.

Bitly's free plan is also, in their own words on the pricing card, "With ads".

Multi-user access is an Enterprise feature

Bitly's user management row is blank on Free, Core, Growth and Premium — it, group permissions, SSO and the activity log all appear only on Enterprise, which is a sales conversation rather than a price. So the moment a second person needs to create or edit links, the answer is "contact us", at any budget below that.

This is the single biggest structural difference between the two products. Urlicer includes 3 seats at $12 and 10 at $29, because a marketer, a designer making the QR codes and someone in support pasting help-center links is an ordinary team, not an enterprise.

What Bitly does better

Three things, honestly. Click tracking is unlimited on every plan, including the free one — Urlicer meters tracked clicks (25k on free, 250k on Pro, 2.5M on Team), and past the cap links keep redirecting but stop being counted. The brand is the brand: a bit.ly link is recognised and rarely blocked, which matters in email and on social platforms. And its integration list is long — if your workflow depends on a specific one, check before you move.

What to check before you switch

• Where do your existing links live? Links on bit.ly cannot move. Links on your own custom domain can. Plan that before you cancel anything — see why short links should never expire.
• Count your QR codes, not just your links. It is the limit people discover after the design is at the printer.
• Check the data history you actually need. 30 days on a $10 plan means last quarter's campaign is not there to compare against.
• Count the seats you will need in a year, not today.

All Bitly figures above are from their published pricing page as of September 2026 — check bitly.com/pages/pricing for the current numbers.

The risk nobody prices in

Every shared short domain carries the same structural risk: one stranger’s phishing campaign can get the whole domain flagged, and then your links stop resolving — including the ones already printed. It is worth asking any shortener what it actually does about that. Here is what we do, mechanism by mechanism.

Unmetered QR codes, ten seats at $29, and links that never expire. Shorten a link free. No signup, and every link gets a QR code and click analytics.