Self-hosted URL Shorteners software

URL shortening is the action of shortening a URL to make it substantially shorter and still direct to the required page. Before hosting one, please see disadvantages of URL shorteners.

11 apps, ranked by GitHub stars weighted by maintenance health.

Alternatives to Bitly

YOURLS

Set of PHP scripts that will allow you to run Your Own URL Shortener. Features include password protection, URL customization, bookmarklets, statistics, API, plugins, jsonp.

Actively maintained ★ 12.3k MIT ~$5/mo

Kutt

Modern URL shortener with support for custom domains and custom URLs.

Actively maintained ★ 11.2k MIT 🐳 Docker~$5/mo

Shlink

URL shortener with REST API and command line interface. Includes official progressive web application and docker images.

Actively maintained ★ 5.4k MIT 🐳 Docker~$5/mo

Chhoto URL

Simple, lightning-fast URL shortener with no bloat (fork of simply-shorten).

Actively maintained ★ 996 MIT 🐳 Docker~$3.5/mo

bit

Fast, lightweight, resource-efficient, compiled URL shortener.

Actively maintained ★ 109 MIT 🐳 Docker~$3.5/mo

snowshare

File and link sharing platform with URL shortening, code snippet sharing, and file uploads, featuring customizable expiration, privacy settings, and QR codes.

Actively maintained ★ 91 CC0-1.0 🐳 Docker~$5/mo

Flare

Nonbloated, modern, and highly configurable file/screenshot vault server with support for ShareX, Flameshot, and Spectacle. Offers OCR search and more.

Maintained ★ 138 MIT 🐳 Docker~$5/mo

Simple-URL-Shortener

KISS URL shortener, public or private (with account). Minimalist and lightweight. No dependencies.

Slowing down ★ 60 MIT ~$5/mo

clink

Super-minimal link shortening service written in pure C, focusing on small executable size, portability, and ease of configuration.

Health unknown AGPL-3.0 ~$3.5/mo

Flink

Create QR Codes, embeddable link previews for your website and crawls/scrapes metadata.

Health unknown MIT 🐳 Docker~$5/mo

rs-short

Lightweight link shortener written in Rust, with features such as caching, spambot protection and phishing detection.

Health unknown MPL-2.0 ~$3.5/mo