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 (every Bitly plan in detail):

• 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 to read twice. Ten QR codes a month on a $29 plan, and a QR code is 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 (full plan details):

• 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 to check 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, device, browser, operating system and referrer breakdowns, plus a QR-versus-direct split, on every plan including the free one. What scales with price 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. Location data stops at country level on every plan, and CSV export starts on Pro.

Bitly's free plan is also, in their own words on the pricing card, "With ads". To a visitor that is a cookie consent request and an ad page before your link opens: why a Bitly link shows an ad. What else it leaves out has its own page: what the Bitly free plan includes.

Multi-user access is an Enterprise feature

Bitly's user management row is blank on Free, Core, Growth and Premium. User management, 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.

If your team gets around this by sharing one login, read what Bitly's terms say about sharing an account first.

What to check before you switch

• Estimate your clicks per month. Urlicer records clicks up to a monthly limit on each plan, and past it keeps redirecting without counting. The limits are on the pricing page.
• List the tools that create links for you. Urlicer has no native Zapier, Make or n8n connector, so those tools call the API themselves.
• 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, and export the list while you still have the plan that lets you. 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 a year from now.

We compare the Rebrandly and T.LY plans the same way, if those are on your list too.

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. Ask any shortener what it does about that. Here is what we do, mechanism by mechanism.

Unmetered QR codes and ten seats at $29. Start with a free account. Links in your workspace never expire, and every one gets a QR code and click analytics.

Want the numbers next to each other instead? See the plans side by side: free against free, Bitly Core against Pro, and Bitly Growth against our Team plan. Or start with a free account.