Short links are everywhere these days, and it’s no surprise: There are plenty of great ways to use short links to give your brand a boost.
Shortened links offer convenience, cleaner copy, and improved analytics—improving the user experience and empowering business decision-making.
Most businesses that use short links rely on one of several link shorteners or link management platforms to power the experience. Two of these platforms are Bitly and Cuttly.
Both link management platforms offer a set of similar functions, but there are plenty of places where the two brands take differing approaches.
Below, we’ll provide an in-depth analysis that compares the two link-shortening platforms so you can make a more informed decision about which one is right for you.
Bitly vs. Cuttly: A quick overview
Bitly and Cuttly offer similar or overlapping capabilities, but each platform has its own unique focus. Let’s start with a quick overview of both platforms.
Bitly: World-class link management platform
Bitly is a link management platform, a URL shortening tool, a powerful QR Code generator, and a Link-in-bio platform.
These three products blend into a powerful centralized Dashboard, giving users access to real-time data and analytics and providing a single interface for managing links and marketing campaigns. And with mobile apps for iOS and Android, Bitly gives users access to these management functions from anywhere.
With Bitly, users can create short URLs using either the bit.ly domain or branded domains of their choosing. Every Bitly link can include redirects to a destination URL, and short links can be reassigned or redirected at any time using the Bitly interface or mobile app.
One of Bitly’s strengths is its advanced link analytics which helps users analyze link performance and adjust their marketing strategies accordingly. This pairs well with Bitly’s campaign management features that allow users to track clicks and engagement on retargeted campaigns.
Bitly is ideal for businesses of all sizes. Startups and small businesses can use the Bitly Free plan, which covers organizations with small-scale needs. Businesses and agencies with heavier usage needs will find reasonable pricing for more advanced features.
Cuttly: Link management and advanced analytics tool
Cuttly offers some of the same general capabilities: It allows users to shorten links, including custom back-half and custom domain functions. There’s a QR Code utility and a “link in bio” microsite creator.
The major differentiator is its analytics. While not as robust as Bitly or some other competitors, with Cuttly, users can track several useful metrics: the number of times the link has been clicked on, charts of clicks sorted by the source of clicks, referrals, type of devices, operating systems, browsers, brands, languages, and countries (geolocation), and clicks by bots.
Cuttly offers a free service tier that’s ideal for individuals (bloggers, influencers, streamers, and so on) and small businesses with limited needs. Beyond the free tier are numerous pricing tiers that should accommodate businesses of nearly any size.
Link management and URL shortening
URL shortening is at the core of both services. This is the practice of taking a long URL and turning it into something much shorter (bit.ly/#### or cutt.ly/#### are the standard setups for each).
Of course, if you’re going to use such a service for more than a dozen links or so, you’ll need a way to keep it all straight. That’s where the link management capabilities come into play.
Bitly
Bitly Link Management provides users with best-in-class link management capabilities. From one central platform, you can shorten URLs at scale (up to 10,000 links/month with Bitly Enterprise), execute redirects, create custom-branded links using your own custom domain, and access detailed analytics data. You can manage all your short links in the same place and redirect or repurpose them from nearly any device.
Bitly’s URL shortening offering is one of the oldest, widest used, and most mature, so you can have confidence that many businesses have used the service successfully for over a decade.
Cuttly
With Cuttly, you can shorten links using its cutt.ly short domain, and you can produce branded short links at their [brand].link domain.
Cuttly advertises itself as more than a link shortener, calling its service a full link management experience. Cuttly allows for 99 branded domains at its Enterprise tier. Branded short links are unlimited starting from the Single tier.
Campaign management
Campaign management is absolutely vital to marketing growth: You can’t improve what you can’t keep track of.
Unfortunately, campaign management can also be a data-heavy, intensely manual slog (think spreadsheets upon spreadsheets—you get the idea). But it doesn’t have to be when you use the right tools.
Bitly
Bitly’s powerful campaign management capabilities outshine the competition, delivering powerful insights and tracking to campaigns of all shapes and sizes.
From a single easy-to-read Dashboard, Bitly users can track every link and channel, charting out the customer journey from start to finish. Bitly lets you track organic shares, giving you insight into how your content performs even when someone else is the one sharing it.
Every single link gives you data down to the local level, giving you powerful data that supercharges your decision-making.
Even better, Bitly includes dedicated support for monitoring multichannel campaigns.
Looking for a deeper dive into Bitly’s campaign management capabilities? Check out 5 Ways Brands Use Bitly’s Campaigns Feature.
Cuttly
Cuttly doesn’t have a specific campaign management feature. That said, it does offer link retargeting, allowing users to track clicks and engagement on retargeted campaigns, and link analytics that can tackle some of the same challenges—at least partially. (We’ll cover this platform in the next section.)
Link tracking and analytics
If managing campaigns efficiently is one shoe, then link tracking and analytics is the other. You need both to be powerful and accessible.
Bitly
Bitly gives its users a powerful set of analytics tools that let you check stats on every single Bitly link. You can measure your audience by channel or measure audience and performance across all your channels, thanks to Bitly’s superior support for multichannel campaigns.
Click tracking and click-through rate can help you focus your SEO efforts, and customizable UTM codes are fully supported in Bitly’s URL shortening service.
From the Bitly Dashboard, you can see several powerful metrics on every link, which can be filtered into specific date ranges:
- Total engagements (split by clicks by link, Link-in-bio, and QR scans)
- Link-in-bio analytics (views, total clicks, views over time, link activity, country and city, referrer, and devices)
- Engagement over time
- Technology (referrers such as direct, Twitter, or and devices)
- Locations (cities and countries)
- Past URL assignments, plus timespan and engagements (if redirected)
Bitly metrics can also be used in powerful ways with various social media platforms, including Instagram and TikTok. (Even though Instagram now allows multiple links in bios, you’ll still get better analytics and tracking when you use a Bitly link there.) You can add real data to your social analytics because Bitly tracks every click and categorizes it by source.
Cuttly
Cuttly offers a link analytics module as well. Their tool gives you insights into these elements:
- Total clicks per link
- Source of clicks (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, direct/other)
- Number of referrals
- OS clicks
- Browser clicks
- Geographic location (country level)
- Language localization
The experience on an individual link is fairly strong, but the lack of campaign management means you can’t track links as a group very easily.
User experience
You need the right set of features and capabilities to make a link management platform worth your time (and money). But features and capabilities aren’t the only things that matter; you also need a link management solution that’s actually pleasant to use.
Here’s how these two options stack up in terms of user experience.
Bitly
Bitly’s been at this a long time, so there’s been more time to develop a smoother user experience. Bitly’s interface is designed to be clean, intuitive, and user-friendly. The navigation is simple and organized, making it easy for users to find what they need no matter what device they’re using.
Bringing everything into a centralized dashboard helps users keep on top of links and campaigns, and the additional portals for Bitly Campaigns and multichannel tracking give users even more control.
In other words, Bitly saves you time and helps you stay organized.
Cuttly
The lack of a unified dashboard makes using Cuttly a little less streamlined, and because the platform doesn’t give you a native way to compare link performance or track campaigns, you’ll be forced to rely on another tool for those insights.
Mobile functionality
Mobile functionality for many businesses, especially for the teams and individuals responsible for link management. Here the two services diverge in significant ways.
Bitly
Bitly offers a feature-rich mobile app for both iOS (iPhones and iPads) and Android. Having a dedicated, full-service mobile app can be a difference-maker for many people and teams responsible for managing links. Some link management use cases (such as Instagram) are mobile-first, so it’s ideal for managing links from the same device you use to post content.
The mobile application is also indispensable for quickly and easily redirecting links. When you encounter a problem or broken link, you don’t want to have to wait until you get back to your desk or home office. Bitly’s mobile application lets you jump into action no matter where you are.
Cuttly
Cuttly does not have a mobile application available for its platform. You may be able to navigate certain functions from their mobile website, but there is no full-service optimized mobile app for iOS or Android.
Integrations
Today’s businesses rely on an increasing number of apps and platforms (enterprise businesses use an astounding 200 applications on average!), so you’ll want to make sure the link management platform you choose can integrate with the most important and relevant other tools you’re using.
Here’s how Bitly and Cuttly stack up in terms of integrations.
Bitly
Bitly offers 16 integrations and counting, including:
- Social media networks: Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn
- WordPress plugin
- Browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, and Edge
- Connectors to Zapier, IFTTT, Twilio, Slack, Google Sheets, and Salesforce
- Marketing automation tools: HubSpot, Buffer, Sprinklr, and Sprout Social
And, of course, Bitly offers a powerful API that lets customers with their own development capabilities build connectors to nearly any other tool or system.
Cuttly
Cuttly offers three direct integrations:
- Zapier, which lets you create simple connections to thousands of other apps and services
- Integromat, which lets you automate workflows
- Laravel, which is a Laravel API wrapper for Cuttly’s API
In addition, Cuttly provides both a regular and a Team API, which allows customers with the appropriate development capabilities to build their own connections and integrations.
Drive engagement with Bitly’s all-in-one platform
While both Bitly and Cuttly are viable options for link management and URL shortening, Bitly offers more features for paid plans, making it better suited for businesses needing detailed analytics and high volumes of branded links (like those running affiliate programs).
Cuttly does offer some similar functionality, but lacks the data insights, security features, and advanced campaign management features that Bitly offers. However, businesses with smaller digital marketing budgets and a lower volume of links to manage may find Cuttly sufficient.
Ready to see what an industry-leading link management platform can do for your business? Start your Bitly journey today.