8 best Dub alternatives in 2026, hosted and self-hosted

The best Dub alternatives in 2026 are Short.io, Shlink, Kutt, YOURLS, invisit, Rebrandly, Bitly and Bl.ink, and the right one depends on which Dub limit you ran into. For tracked-click limits, Short.io’s Pro plan is the closest swap: $18 a month for unlimited links and unlimited tracked clicks, where Dub Pro gives you 1,000 new links and 50,000 tracked events for $30.

Here is the best pick for each reason to leave Dub, as of November 2026:

• Unlimited tracked clicks and a year of click data for little money: Short.io.
• Self-hosting without Dub’s six-account setup: Shlink, one MIT-licensed Docker container.
• The smallest self-hosted install: Kutt, Node.js and SQLite.
• Cheap PHP hosting and a large plugin directory: YOURLS.
• Link clicks in the same dashboard as your site analytics, billed like page views: invisit, the tool we build. It is web analytics with short links built in, not a link-management platform.
• Conversion tracking for less than Dub’s Business plan: Rebrandly Professional.
• Clicks that are never metered, plus landing pages: Bitly.
• QR codes on product packaging in a regulated enterprise: Bl.ink, now sold by Loftware.

Stay on Dub if you attribute leads and sales to links or pay affiliates. Dub’s Business plan follows a click to a signup and a purchase, and runs a partner program with automated payouts; nothing else on this list does the second at all. The last two sections cover when to stay and how to move your links without breaking a single one.

Why do people look for Dub alternatives?

People leave Dub over tracked-event limits, short analytics retention on the lower plans, price at volume, the effort of self-hosting, and having link clicks in a different tool from their site analytics. Each point below comes from Dub’s own pages and code, checked on November 3, 2026.

• Tracked-event limits. Dub’s pricing gives Free 1,000 tracked events a month, Pro 50,000, Business 250,000 and Advanced 1M. Clicks are not the only events: Dub’s code adds every lead and every sale to the same counter (track-lead.ts, track-sale.ts).
• What happens over the limit. Links keep redirecting and Dub keeps recording, but you must upgrade to see the analytics. Go past twice the limit (four times on Free) and the counter no longer resets at the start of the period, and Dub says excessive usage may get links disabled.
• Retention. Click data is kept 30 days on Free, 1 year on Pro, 3 years on Business and 5 years on Advanced.
• New links per month. Free allows 25, Pro 1,000, Business 10,000. Deleting a link does not give the slot back, and at the limit you cannot create links until the next billing period.
• Price at volume. Pro costs $30 a month, Business $90 and Advanced $300, or $27, $81 and $270 billed yearly. Conversion tracking starts at Business, and 1M tracked events a month means Advanced. Dub’s plan definitions add larger steps inside each plan, up to $900 a month for 3.5M events.
• Self-hosting. Dub’s core is AGPLv3, but the self-hosting guide needs GitHub, Tinybird, Upstash, a PlanetScale-compatible MySQL database, Vercel and Cloudflare R2 or AWS S3, and says Docker “is currently not supported”. Conversion tracking is an Enterprise Edition feature: its API routes sit in the (ee) folder, whose commercial license requires a paid Enterprise subscription for production use.
• A separate tool. Dub reports the click; the visit that follows lives in your web analytics. To join the two, Dub adds a dub_id parameter to the destination and its script stores it as a first-party cookie for 90 days by default (attribution docs), which in the EU is storage on the visitor’s device and a consent question.

What to look for in a Dub alternative

Judge a Dub alternative on what it meters and what it does at the limit first, because every tool here keeps redirecting past its limit and they differ on what happens to your data:

• What is metered: links created, clicks with visible data, or events shared with other tracking. Dub meters both links and events.
• What happens over the limit. Dub and Short.io’s free plan keep counting but hide the numbers, Rebrandly discards the click data, Bl.ink stops counting per link, and invisit records a first month over in full.
• How long click data is kept, and whether you can export it.
• Conversion tracking, and how it recognises the clicker later: a cookie, localStorage, a click id in the URL, or not at all.
• Custom domains and seats per plan.
• What happens to a query string added to the short link. That decides how UTM tags behave, covered in its own section below.
• For self-hosting: how many services you have to run, and whether there is an importer.

Dub alternatives compared: retention, domains, conversions, QR codes and price

As of November 2026, Short.io is the cheapest hosted tool with unlimited tracked clicks, the three self-hosted tools cost nothing but a server, and only Dub, Short.io and Rebrandly document conversion tracking per link.

Prices are monthly in each vendor’s own unit. Dub counts tracked events (clicks, leads and sales) and new links; Short.io counts total links and clicks with visible statistics; Rebrandly counts links a month and clicks with engagement data; Bitly counts links a month and never clicks; invisit counts page views, custom events, conversions and short-link clicks together. The self-hosted tools charge nothing, so their cost is the server and your time.

1. Short.io: best for unlimited tracked clicks on a small budget

Short.io is the Dub alternative for anyone who left over tracked-click limits. Short.io’s pricing gives Pro, at $18 a month, unlimited links and unlimited tracked clicks, and its free plan shows statistics for 50,000 clicks a month, fifty times Dub Free’s 1,000 events.

Short.io beats Dub on volume per dollar and on its free plan. Free includes 1,000 links in total, 5 custom domains and commercial use; country targeting starts on Hobby ($5), and password protection, expiry, click limits and link cloaking on Pro. Conversion tracking appends a clid click id that your page sends back through Short.io’s browser SDK (conversion docs), 50 conversions a month on Free and unlimited from Pro. Short.io stores EU customers’ statistics in Germany (storage policy).

Short.io is worse than Dub for teams and long histories. Pro has one user; a team needs Team at $48 a month for unlimited users, 50 domains, city targeting and deep links. Pro also caps links created through the API or bulk tools at 10,000 a year. Individual clicks are kept one year and aggregates 26 months, against 3 years on Dub Business, and there is no affiliate program.

At 1M clicks a month, Short.io Pro still costs $18 for one user, where Dub needs Advanced at $300. Moving from Dub is a CSV job: Dub’s link export has the short link and destination columns, and Short.io’s bulk create imports a CSV with the slug mapped by hand, or takes 1,000 links per API call.

2. Shlink: best for self-hosting with Docker and redirect rules

Shlink is the self-hosted Dub alternative with the most link features in one container. It is MIT-licensed, ships as one Docker image with SQLite built in, and runs on MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL or SQL Server in production (Docker guide). Version 5.1.8 was released on October 21, 2026.

Shlink beats Dub on running it yourself. One instance serves many short domains, and its rule-based redirects match device, language, query parameters, IP address, country, city and, since v5.0.0, a date. It forwards query strings to the destination by default, has a REST API, and its importer reads Bitly, YOURLS, Kutt, another Shlink and plain CSV (import docs). Every visit stays in your database for as long as you keep it.

Shlink is worse than Dub on everything beyond the redirect. There is no conversion tracking and no affiliate program, geolocation needs a free MaxMind GeoLite2 license key, and you handle TLS, backups and upgrades. Shlink removed QR code generation from the server in v5.0.0 on January 9, 2026; the Shlink Web Client and Shlink Dashboard generate them now.

Shlink costs nothing but the server. Moving from Dub took us one header rename and one import: we wrote a CSV in the format Dub exports, renamed its first two headers, and Shlink 5.1.8 imported every slug onto the same domain (the commands are in the switching section). Click history does not come across, and each link’s creation date becomes the import date.

3. Kutt: best for the smallest self-hosted install

Kutt is the Dub alternative to pick when you want a short-link server with no moving parts. It is MIT-licensed, needs only Node.js 20 or later, and stores everything in SQLite unless you point it at Postgres or MySQL; docker compose up starts it (Kutt’s README).

Kutt beats Dub on setup cost by a wide margin: one process against Dub’s six external accounts. It has custom domains, passwords, expiry times and descriptions on links, an admin page, OpenID Connect login, a REST API and a QR code for each link in the interface. Its statistics break clicks down by browser, OS, country and referrer, and its code skips bots with the isbot library before recording a visit.

Kutt is the thinnest tool on this list. There are no redirect rules, no UTM builder and no conversion tracking; a query string added to the short link is dropped, because the redirect goes to the stored target as is. Kutt’s README says HTTPS certificates for custom domains are yours to generate, and its charts cover the last day, week, month and year.

Kutt costs nothing but the server. It has no importer, so moving from Dub means one POST to its API per link with the old slug as the custom URL.

4. YOURLS: best for cheap PHP hosting and plugins

YOURLS is the self-hosted Dub alternative that is easiest to host: it runs on PHP 8.1 or later with MySQL 5.5 or MariaDB 10.0, behind Apache with mod_rewrite or Nginx, and its readme says any shared hosting will do unless you open it to the public at scale. It is MIT-licensed, and version 1.10.6 came out on August 30, 2026.

YOURLS beats Dub on hosting cost and extensibility. Its stats cover historical clicks, referrers and visitor location, it has a simple API (yourls-api.php with action=shorturl), and the plugin directory, awesome-yourls, lists plugins for what the core leaves out: QR codes, password-protected links, expiry, query-string forwarding and CSV import.

YOURLS is worse than Dub on nearly every modern link feature. One install serves one domain (YOURLS_SITE in the config; multi-domain is an unofficial hack), the core ignores query strings on a short link, and each missing feature is a third-party plugin you have to vet and keep updated. There is no conversion tracking, and no device or country routing in the core.

YOURLS costs nothing but hosting. Moving from Dub means a CSV import plugin, or one API call per link with keyword set to the old slug; if you later outgrow YOURLS, Shlink imports it.

5. invisit: best for link clicks next to your site analytics

invisit, the tool we build, is web analytics with short links built in. It fits when the reason you left Dub is that your link clicks and your site’s traffic lived in two tools: invisit’s link report, its Campaigns report and your page views share one dashboard, one REST API and one MCP server. It is not a link-management platform, and if you manage thousands of links it is the wrong tool.

invisit beats Dub on how clicks are counted and kept. A click that reaches a destination is billed as one event from the same allowance as your page views, there is no limit on new links on paid plans, and click data is kept forever. Clicks from bots, crawlers, uptime probes, headless browsers and link prefetches still redirect but are not recorded; in our test on a development stack, three browser clicks counted and a Googlebot request did not. Links redirect even when a workspace is over its event limit, and only the click analytics pause (billing). A plain invisit short link sets no cookie and adds no click id to your URL.

Each link can carry up to 20 rules that send visitors from chosen countries, device types or operating systems to another address, or block them; a password; an expiry date; a click limit; a fallback address for when the link is expired, used up or disabled; and its own social preview. The link report shows clicks and unique visitors over time, by referrer, country, region, city, device, browser and OS, and the REST API and MCP server create, edit and archive links.

invisit is worse than Dub as a link tool, by a lot. There is no conversion tracking per link, no affiliate program, no bulk import, no tags or folders, no A/B tests, no deep links, no link cloaking and no click webhooks. QR codes are a plain black-on-white SVG of the short link, and a scan counts as a click with no way to tell the two apart. The free plan allows 10 links at a time and only the shared invisit.cc domain; custom link domains need a paid plan. A click is not joined to the visit it starts on your site; if the link carries UTM tags, that visit shows up under them in Campaigns, beside your other traffic. There is no self-hosting.

As of November 2026, the free plan covers 20,000 events a month, and paid plans cost $14 for 100,000 events, $49 for 1M and $199 for 10M (pricing), with a 14-day trial and no card. If your links get 50,000 clicks and your site 50,000 page views and events a month, that is Starter at $14. If your links draw far more clicks than your site draws views, a link-only tool such as Short.io is cheaper. Moving from Dub means creating each link through the REST API with its old slug and domain; invisit cannot import Dub’s CSV. If you want the same idea self-hosted, Umami added short links in v3.0.0 (Umami vs invisit).

For clicks on links that leave your own site, you need no short link at all; see outbound link tracking.

6. Rebrandly: best for conversion tracking below Dub Business prices

Rebrandly is the Dub alternative for click-to-conversion reports without paying for Dub’s Business plan. On November 3, 2026, Rebrandly’s pricing listed Professional at $39 a month, or $32 a month billed yearly, with conversion tracking, 1,500 links a month and 3 custom domains; Dub’s conversion tracking starts at $90.

Rebrandly beats Dub on price for conversions and on messaging. Professional adds 50 password-protected links, expiry, traffic routing by location or device, social previews and two teammates; clicks themselves are unlimited on every plan, and parameter forwarding is on every plan too. Its conversion tracking appends rbly_click_id, stores it in localStorage, credits the last click and counts conversions within an attribution window of 30 days by default, adjustable from 1 to 90. Rebrandly also sends links by SMS and has an MCP server.

Rebrandly is worse than Dub on the click data itself. Professional records engagement data for only the first 25,000 clicks a month (Growth, at $179 or $149 yearly, records 150,000), and once you pass the limit the click data is discarded for good. Conversion data stays visible 6 months on Professional and 1 year on Growth, destination edits are capped at 50 a month on Professional, and Rebrandly’s docs say no conversion is recorded when localStorage is blocked or the conversion happens on another domain.

At 50,000 clicks a month with full data, Rebrandly means Growth, or an add-on for data on more clicks. Moving from Dub works through bulk link import, available from Professional.

7. Bitly: best for unmetered clicks and landing pages

Bitly is the Dub alternative that never counts clicks against you: every plan, free included, has unlimited clicks and QR scans (Bitly’s pricing). Dub against Bitly comes down to this: Dub meters clicks and gives you more links and longer data, while Bitly meters links, never clicks, and adds landing pages.

Bitly beats Dub on unmetered traffic and on the extras around a link. Plans include landing pages (2 on Free, 20 on Premium), QR code styling, Bitly Assist from Core for creating links and reading performance with AI, and mobile deep linking on Premium. Enterprise adds SSO, group permissions and a 99.99% uptime commitment.

Bitly is worse than Dub on nearly every limit. Free allows 5 links a month and, per Bitly’s support article updated January 12, 2026, shows visitors an interstitial page with an ad before the redirect. Click data is kept 30 days on Core, 120 days on Growth and 1 year on Premium. Branded links and the one complimentary custom domain start on Growth, multiple users need Enterprise, no conversion tracking is listed on any plan, and forwarding a query string from the short link to the destination is an Enterprise add-on.

As of November 2026, Growth costs $29 a month billed yearly ($348) for 500 links a month, and Premium $199 a month billed yearly ($2,388) for 3,000. Matching Dub Pro’s 1,000 new links a month therefore means Premium. Moving from Dub: Bitly creates links in bulk from a CSV from Growth, so Dub’s export needs reshaping into Bitly’s upload format first.

8. Bl.ink: best for enterprise QR codes on product packaging

Bl.ink is the Dub alternative only for a large, regulated brand putting QR codes on packaging. Loftware bought Bl.ink on April 10, 2025, and on November 3, 2026 Bl.ink’s homepage and pricing page redirected to Loftware’s Connected Packaging page, which offers a consultation form and no prices.

Bl.ink beats Dub on enterprise packaging work: Loftware’s Connected Packaging sells QR codes that follow the GS1 Digital Link standard, managed alongside product labels. Bl.ink’s help center still lists self-serve plans from Expert+ at $48 a month to Business at $599, with every plan’s redirects unlimited.

Bl.ink is worse than Dub for almost any Dub user. Its plans cap tracked clicks per link (7,500 on Expert+, 60,000 on Business), after which the link still redirects but clicks are no longer counted, and its website no longer shows a price or a way to sign up. Ask Loftware’s sales team before you plan a move.

Which open-source link shortener has click analytics?

All four open-source link shorteners here record clicks, and they differ in depth. Dub’s AGPL edition records the most per click, Shlink the most you can run in one container, and Kutt and YOURLS the basics:

• Dub records country, city, device, browser, OS, referrer, UTM parameters and whether a click came from a QR code (attribution docs), stored in Tinybird’s hosted ClickHouse, which the self-hosted edition still needs.
• Shlink stores each visit with its referrer, user agent, a potential-bot flag and, with a GeoLite2 key, country, region and city, in your own database (Visit.php).
• Kutt counts clicks by browser, OS, country and referrer over the last day, week, month and year, skipping bots.
• YOURLS shows historical clicks, referrers and visitor location, and plugins add the rest.

Umami, an open-source web analytics tool, also creates short links that report clicks, unique visitors, referrers and location (Umami’s links docs), which puts link clicks next to page views on your own server if you self-host Umami.

How do Dub alternatives handle UTM parameters on a short link?

Every tool here can store UTM parameters in the destination when you create the link; they differ on what they do with a query string someone adds to the short link itself. Dub, Short.io, Shlink and Rebrandly forward it, Bitly forwards it only on Enterprise, and invisit, Kutt and YOURLS drop it.

Sources: Dub’s get-final-url.ts, Short.io’s merging docs, Shlink’s feature docs, Kutt’s redirect handler, a YOURLS plugin’s description of core behaviour, Rebrandly’s pricing page and Bitly’s parameter passing article.

We tested two of these on November 3, 2026. A Shlink 5.1.8 link stored with utm_source=newsletter, opened as /launch?utm_source=twitter&ref=bio, redirected with utm_source=twitter and ref=bio. An invisit link on our development stack, opened with ?utm_source=twitter&foo=1, redirected to its saved destination with utm_source=newsletter, and the query string was gone.

The difference decides how you tag. With a forwarding tool you can share one link and add ?utm_source= per channel when you post it, but anyone can also rewrite your tags by editing the address. With a tool that drops the query string, create one link per channel. In invisit, the UTM fields apply to the main destination only: the address a country or device rule sends visitors to gets exactly what you typed. Tools with conversion tracking also add their own parameter (dub_id, clid, rbly_click_id), and Short.io’s docs warn that its clid can break signed URLs such as file downloads.

When should you stay on Dub?

Stay on Dub when the link is where your revenue reporting starts. Dub is the strongest tool in this field for that, and it is the better choice in these cases:

• You attribute leads and sales to links. Dub follows a click to dub.track.lead() and dub.track.sale(), with first-click or last-click attribution, and its code ships integrations for Stripe, Shopify and HubSpot.
• You pay affiliates or creators. Business includes up to $30,000 in partner payouts a year at a 5% payout fee, with up to 500 partners; Advanced raises that to $180,000. No tool on this list has a partner program.
• You need A/B tests, deep links, folders, tags, a real-time event stream and click webhooks in one place.
• Your volume fits Pro: 1,000 new links and 50,000 tracked events a month with a year of history, for $30, and 3 seats where Short.io Pro has one.

If retention is your only complaint, exporting your analytics every few months keeps the history without a move. If self-hosting is the goal and you do not need conversions, Shlink is a far smaller system to run than Dub’s open-source edition.

How do you switch from Dub without breaking links?

Export everything first, then recreate every slug on the new tool under the same custom domain before you move the domain’s DNS. Links on your own domain can move with no visitor noticing; links on dub.sh cannot, because Dub owns that domain.

1. Export your links. In Dub, open Links, then ⋮, then Export as CSV. The default columns are short link, destination URL, clicks and created at; tags and geo targeting are optional columns worth ticking.
2. Export your analytics while your plan still shows its full history: Dub’s analytics export downloads a zip with one CSV per report. No tool here imports Dub’s click history.
3. List the links on dub.sh and other Dub-owned domains. Cancelling a paid plan moves the workspace to Free rather than deleting it, per Dub’s pricing FAQ, so keep that workspace for them.
4. Import the slugs into the new tool on the same domain, as below for Shlink. Recreate passwords, expiry dates and device targeting by hand, because the export has no columns for them.
5. Move conversion code. Remove Dub’s script and dub.track calls, or switch them to the new tool’s click id (clid for Short.io, rbly_click_id for Rebrandly).
6. For a week or two, create new campaign links in the new tool while Dub serves the old ones, and compare click counts on similar links. Expect small differences, because each tool filters bots its own way.
7. Point the custom domain’s DNS at the new tool, then check every exported link answers with a redirect.

The Shlink import we ran on November 3, 2026 took a CSV in Dub’s export format, renamed its first two headers to the ones Shlink’s CSV importer reads, and imported it into a running container:

# dub-links.csv is Dub's "Export as CSV" with the default columns.
sed '1s/^Short link,Destination URL/Short URL,Long URL/' dub-links.csv > shlink-links.csv
docker cp shlink-links.csv my_shlink:/tmp/links.csv
# Asks for the file path (/tmp/links.csv) and the delimiter (comma).
docker exec -it my_shlink shlink short-url:import csv

# After the DNS change: each exported short link should redirect from the new tool.
tail -n +2 dub-links.csv | cut -d, -f1 | tr -d '"' | while read -r link; do
  curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code} $link -> %{redirect_url}\n" "$link"
done

Before you leave Dub

• Links exported as CSV, with every column you need.
• Analytics exported while your plan still shows the full history.
• Links on dub.sh listed and left in a Dub workspace on Free.
• Every slug recreated on the new tool under the same domain, with rules, passwords and expiry re-entered.
• You know whether the new tool forwards or drops a query string on the short link, and your UTM tagging matches.
• Conversion code moved off dub_id and dub.track.
• DNS switched and check-links.sh shows a redirect for every link.
• Paid plan cancelled.