Alternatives
How Lua compares
An honest read on each one: what they do better, what we do better, and who should stay where they are.
Lua vs
Bitly
Bitly invented this category and still runs most of it: the links are fast, the brand is trusted, and a short link that says bit.ly needs no explanation. What it charges for is the part that comes after the click. The free plan caps how many links you can make each month and gives you no custom domain, analytics stop at a rolling window, and the click data older than that window is gone rather than archived. Lua is the same job with the reporting left switched on, and you can run it on your own server if you would rather the click data never left it.
See the comparisonLua vs
Dub
This is the comparison where the honest answer is least convenient for us. Dub is open source, self-hostable, developer-first, and well built. Most of the arguments Lua makes against a closed shortener do not land here, because Dub already agrees with them. What is left is a narrower question about scope and how much product you want around the link, and that is the question this page tries to answer rather than dodge.
See the comparisonLua vs
Short.io
Short.io took the right lesson early: the branded domain is the product, not the upgrade. Its free tier has long been unusually generous about domains, which is the opposite of how most shorteners are priced, and it deserves credit for that. Where the two part company is ownership. Short.io is a hosted service, so the click record lives on their infrastructure and the roadmap is theirs.
See the comparisonLua vs
Rebrandly
Rebrandly is aimed at organisations managing branded links at scale, with the workspace and permission machinery that implies. If you need approval flows across a large marketing department, that machinery is the product and it is worth paying for. Most teams are smaller than that, and end up paying for the org chart rather than for the links.
See the comparisonLua vs
TinyURL
TinyURL has outlasted almost everything in this category by doing one thing and not asking anything of you. Paste, shorten, done, no account. For a link you are about to send to one person, nothing beats it, and this page is not going to pretend otherwise. The comparison only matters once the link is something you publish rather than something you send.
See the comparison