Rebrandly vs. Bitly: In-depth comparison (2026)

Rebrandly and Bitly both shorten links and track clicks, but they’re built for different users. Rebrandly, a link intelligence platform, serves marketing teams, agencies, developers and enterprises that need custom branding, team collaboration, compliance certifications or an API that scales.

Bitly is a good fit for basic link shortening, and it’s one of the best-known names in the category. Below, you’ll see how Rebrandly vs. Bitly compares on features, analytics, AI, security, integrations and pricing, and which kind of team each one fits.

Key takeaways

• Bitly pairs short links with QR codes, simple landing pages and 60+ integrations.
• Rebrandly’s Conversion Tracking shows which links led to sign-ups, purchases and revenue, alongside detailed click analytics.
• Both platforms offer dynamic routing, but Rebrandly can route by more conditions, including city, language and time of day.
• Rebrandly is SOC 2, Type II and HIPAA compliant and signs BAAs, which makes it a strong fit for healthcare, finance and high-volume SMS.
• Bitly does the job if you want a clean and simple way to shorten links and track clicks.

Feature comparison: Rebrandly vs. Bitly

Enterprise features: Rebrandly vs. Bitly

For organizations with compliance requirements and mission-critical link infrastructure, both platforms offer enterprise features, and each puts its focus in a different place.

Compliance & security

Both platforms are SOC 2, Type II compliant, and both offer single sign-on for enterprise accounts. Rebrandly is SOC 2, Type II and HIPAA compliant, and it signs Business Associate Agreements (BAAs), the contract healthcare organizations need before a vendor can handle protected health information.

That’s usually where a security review starts, so Rebrandly comes with the rest of what procurement tends to ask for:

• SOC 2, Type II, GDPR and CCPA documentation in Rebrandly’s trust center, ready for security reviews
• SAML 2.0 single sign-on (SSO) and SCIM user provisioning with Okta, Microsoft Entra ID, Google Workspace and OneLogin
• View-only roles and workspace-level controls, so people only see and change what they should

Cochlear Americas, the US division of the cochlear implant maker, is a good example. Its 60-person marketing team uses Rebrandly’s branded links, QR codes and HIPAA compliance across presentations for surgeons, direct mail and promotional items, all on its own cochlear.us domain.

SMS and high-volume messaging

Healthcare, banking and retail teams also send a lot of links by text, and branded links help there in two ways. SMS providers charge by the 160-character segment, so turning a 50-character URL into a 15-character branded link can keep a message in a single segment.

Carriers also screen links in texts, and links on a domain you own are less likely to get caught in filters aimed at shared shortener domains. That’s a big part of why Rebrandly for SMS is built around branded domains and per-recipient tracking.

Wonder Cave, a text messaging platform that sends up to 10 million messages a day, generates a unique branded link for each recipient through Rebrandly. Its customers saw a 60% increase in click-through rates, and CTO Vinnie Rossi says Rebrandly can “create a crazy amount of volume with the highest deliverability and performance, more than a million links in a minute.”

For messaging platforms, Rebrandly’s API includes Real-Time Link Validation, which checks links at send time, using the kinds of signals carriers look at (like redirect chains and domain age), so you can catch a risky link before a message goes out.

API performance

That kind of volume comes down to the API.

Rebrandly’s API handles up to 100,000 calls per second. Bitly’s API allows 1,000 link creations per hour on paid plans and 10,000 per hour on Enterprise, with monthly request caps from 1,000 (Free) to 50,000 (Premium).

That makes Rebrandly a fit for high-volume bulk operations. Bitly’s rate limits work for moderate link generation, but they can bottleneck programmatic workflows that generate thousands of links quickly.

For developers, Rebrandly pairs its REST API with webhooks, developer documentation and a Python SDK, so you can create, update or expire links programmatically.

Integrations are the other half of fitting into your stack. Rebrandly offers 50+ app integrations (including Zapier), while Bitly has the larger library, with HubSpot, Salesforce, Shopify, Canva and Slack, which helps if your team already works in those tools every day.

Team collaboration

Once the tech checks out, the next question is usually who gets access. Rebrandly is built for teams, with multiple users, roles and separate workspaces, where each workspace has its own links, domains and analytics for a team, brand or client.

Rebrandly has five roles (Owner, Administrator, User, Guest and Reviewer). A Reviewer can see links and stats and leave notes but can’t change anything, which works well for a manager or client who only needs to check results.

Generation, a nonprofit that works in 17 countries, runs 18 Rebrandly workspaces and more than 10,000 links this way. Each country runs its own campaigns while following the same organization-wide standards.

On Bitly, multiple users and group permissions are part of the Enterprise plan, with User, Group admin and Account admin roles.

Support

Rebrandly offers 24/7 support for enterprise accounts, with dedicated account managers. Bitly gives Enterprise customers priority support and an assigned customer success manager, with basic support on its other paid plans.

When links break during a campaign, response time matters. Rebrandly’s enterprise support includes direct access to technical teams.

Features Rebrandly has that Bitly doesn’t

Beyond enterprise controls, a handful of everyday features only show up on the Rebrandly side:

• Password-protected links let you gate content for client previews, internal documents or exclusive offers. Bitly doesn’t offer password protection.
• When someone shares your link on social media, the preview shows an image and description, and Rebrandly’s AI helps you customize both. Bitly shows whatever the destination page provides, and you can’t edit it.
• View-only roles let stakeholders see analytics without being able to edit links.
• Your team can add private notes to links, like campaign details, approval status, client names or internal tracking info. Bitly doesn’t support notes.
• Conversion Tracking connects each link and QR code to the sign-ups, purchases and revenue it drives. Bitly doesn’t track conversions on your site directly.
• You can route by city, language, date, day of the week and hour of the day, on top of the country, region and device options both platforms share.

Link management and custom domain support

Branded links get up to 39% more clicks than generic short URLs, and that difference affects click-through rates across email, social media, and SMS campaigns.

A branded domain (also called a custom domain) swaps the generic part of a short link for your own name, so bit.ly/3xYz9 becomes something like acme.co/spring-sale. People are more likely to trust a link when they can see who it’s from.

Rebrandly includes custom domains on all plans, starting with the free tier. Bitly requires upgrading to a higher plan for branded links.

Links on Bitly’s free plan stay on bit.ly, and according to its help center, they now show a preview page with an ad before sending people to the destination. If you later move to a plan without a complimentary domain, Bitly won’t renew that domain, and links on it stop working once it expires.

Rebrandly treats domains as something you’ll add to over time. You can connect a domain you already own or register a new one inside Rebrandly, and run several side by side (one per brand, region or client).

Dynamic traffic routing

Once your links live on your own domain, you can also control where each click goes. Rebrandly routes traffic based on device, location (down to the city), platform, language and time, so one link can send mobile users to your app and desktop users to your website.

You can also route visitors from different countries to localized landing pages, or send traffic to different destinations depending on the day of the week.

Bitly also offers dynamic routing, and its help center lists up to 10 rules per link based on country, region, device type and iOS or Android. That covers the most common app-download and regional campaigns, while Rebrandly’s extra conditions help with things like sending each city to its local store page.

Both platforms also support deep linking, which opens content inside a mobile app (like a product page in your shopping app) instead of a mobile browser. Rebrandly supports deep links as part of its routing, and Bitly offers them on its Premium plan through its own SDK.

QR codes

Routing works for QR codes too, since a dynamic QR code is a short link underneath, which means you can change where it goes after it’s printed. When I tested Bitly, its QR code builder was one of my favorite parts, with templates, pattern styles, gradients, frames and a Canva integration for designers.

Bitly counts QR codes separately from links, though (its Growth plan includes 10 QR codes a month alongside 500 links). In Rebrandly, any link can have a QR code with your colors and logo, and scans show up next to direct clicks in your analytics.

That’s how Three Rivers Park District gets more than 1 million scans a year from QR codes on trail signs. When a vendor migration changed hundreds of destination URLs, the team updated them through Rebrandly’s API and avoided replacing more than 300 physical signs.

Bulk operations

Updates like that are where bulk tools earn their keep. Both platforms support bulk link creation through their APIs, and Rebrandly includes:

• Bulk link creation and editing for campaigns with thousands of URLs
• Custom URL slugs to create memorable, keyword-relevant link text
• Full API integration for bulk link generation

Bitly handles basic bulk operations, but with tighter rate limits (1,000 link creations per hour, or 10,000 on Enterprise, vs. Rebrandly’s up to 100,000 calls per second).

You can still upload links and QR codes in bulk on Bitly’s paid plans, and every link keeps a change history, which is handy when several people edit the same campaign. Just know that Bitly only lets you delete links that have never been edited, so you can only hide most of the links you change.

Data analytics and link tracking

All those links only pay off if you can see how they perform. Both platforms track link performance, but the depth of detail differs.

If tracking is your deciding factor in Rebrandly vs. Bitly, Rebrandly gives you more detail on every click, plus Conversion Tracking.

Rebrandly’s analytics

Rebrandly tracks unique clicks without duplication. If the same person clicks your link five times, Rebrandly counts one unique click and five total clicks.

That tells you how big your audience really is, on top of how often people engaged. Rebrandly’s analytics include:

• Browser type, operating system and device category
• Geographic data (country, region and city)
• Referrer sources (social platforms, email, direct traffic)
• Language
• Peak activity times to identify when your audience engages
• Click patterns over time

You can also schedule automated reports, export data through the API and create custom dashboards.

Conversion Tracking

Clicks only tell you so much, which is where Conversion Tracking comes in (and a big part of why Rebrandly calls itself a link intelligence platform now). You add one script to your site and pick the events that count as conversions, like sign-ups, purchases or downloads.

From there, each link and QR code shows clicks, conversions, revenue and drop-off in one dashboard. So instead of knowing a newsletter link got 400 clicks, you can see how many of those people signed up and which campaign brought in the most revenue.

Bitly’s analytics

Bitly takes a simpler approach, tracking clicks and scans side by side in real time, with custom dashboards to view them. Its analytics include:

• Device type and referral channels
• Geographic data (country, with city-level and device data on Premium)
• Engagement metrics
• Real-time click tracking
• Weekly Insights, an automatic weekly summary inside the app

Free plans don’t include click analytics, and detailed breakdowns require Bitly’s higher tiers. You can export data manually, but there’s no scheduled report delivery.

Analytics was one of the biggest drawbacks we noted in our Bitly review, and click history is part of that. Bitly keeps data for 30 days on Core, 4 months on Growth, 1 year on Premium and 2 years on Enterprise, so teams analyzing seasonal campaigns or year-over-year trends end up doing manual exports or paying for Premium.

AI features: MCP server and Claude connector

AI assistants can now handle some of that analysis, and both companies have built for it. Rebrandly and Bitly each offer an MCP server and a Claude connector, and Bitly also has an in-app assistant called Bitly Assist.

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is a standard that lets AI tools like Claude connect to your other apps and take actions in them. With the Rebrandly MCP server, you can manage links by typing what you want in Claude Code, Claude Cowork, Cursor, VS Code with Copilot, Gemini CLI or Amazon Q.

That turns a lot of tedious dashboard work into a single request, like these:

• Update destinations and tags on 30 campaign links at once
• Move every link tagged “old-campaign” from your Marketing workspace to an Archive workspace
• Find links with zero clicks, or links still pointing to an old domain

The Rebrandly Claude connector is built for questions about your data. Once you connect your account, you can ask questions like, “Where did clicks on my launch link come from last week?” and get answers in plain language.

Bitly Assist, meanwhile, answers questions about your links from inside the Bitly dashboard, and the company’s MCP server works with Claude, ChatGPT and other AI tools. It’s worth noting, though, that when I tested Bitly Assist, I ran into some issues with accuracy in its responses.

Rebrandly vs. Bitly pricing comparison

On price alone, Bitly vs. Rebrandly is close at every tier, and both platforms have a free plan:

One of the main differences is that Rebrandly includes custom domains starting on the free plan, while Bitly requires upgrading to Growth ($29/mo) for branded links. If you need branded links right away, that changes your entry cost.

Rebrandly’s paid plans also make room for more custom domains as you grow, while Bitly includes one complimentary domain until Enterprise. Bitly’s plans include landing pages with Bitly Pages, and Rebrandly’s include Link Gallery, a link-in-bio page.

Another important distinction is the number of QR codes you get at each plan level. Rebrandly gives you a QR code for each short link, but Bitly doesn’t. For instance, Bitly’s Growth plan gives you 500 links but only 10 QR codes. Rebrandly’s similarly priced plan gives you 1,500 links and 1,500 QR codes per month. So you get a lot more value for your money.

If price matters to you, check our Bitly pricing breakdown before you choose.

When to choose Rebrandly

Rebrandly is usually the better fit for:

• Healthcare, finance or regulated industries requiring SOC 2, Type II + HIPAA compliance
• Marketing teams managing multiple branded domains
• Agencies running separate workspaces per client
• Teams routing traffic by device, location, language or time
• Organizations needing 99.99% uptime for mission-critical links
• Businesses tracking unique clicks and detailed audience data
• Teams using password-protected links for gated content
• Companies that want QR codes on the same branded domain and analytics as their links
• Teams that need to show which links led to sign-ups, purchases and revenue
• Developers who need to create, update or expire links programmatically at high volume
• SMS platforms and high-volume senders that need a unique branded link per recipient
• Teams that want to manage links and pull reports through Claude or other AI tools

When to choose Bitly

Bitly makes sense for:

• Individuals and small teams with basic link shortening needs
• Teams that prefer a simpler interface without advanced routing or collaboration features
• Users who value Bitly’s landing page builder and want to create simple destination pages without external tools
• Designers who build QR codes in Canva and want detailed design options
• Shopify stores that want orders and revenue for each link
• Teams already relying on Bitly’s HubSpot or Salesforce integrations

How to switch from Bitly to Rebrandly

If you already use Bitly, it helps to know what carries over before you start. Your existing bit.ly links keep pointing through Bitly, and links on a domain you own keep working once that domain points to Rebrandly.

Bitly’s complimentary domains are different, since Bitly’s help center says they can’t be transferred, so links on one of those would need a new domain.

Self-serve migration

1. Export your existing Bitly links as a CSV file.
2. Edit the CSV to match Rebrandly’s import format.
3. Connect your domain to Rebrandly, but skip the DNS update for now so your links keep working on Bitly.
4. Upload the CSV to create all your links in Rebrandly at once.
5. Point your domain’s DNS to Rebrandly’s servers (your links keep working while DNS updates).
6. Add titles, tags and other details to the imported links.

You can find detailed steps in our migration guide.

Enterprise migration support

For larger accounts or custom migration needs:

1. Review Rebrandly’s pricing page to find the right plan.
2. Book a demo with our team to discuss your migration strategy and any custom needs.
3. Work with your dedicated account manager to plan and run the migration.

During DNS propagation, your links keep working. Some visitors reach Bitly while others reach Rebrandly until the transition finishes.

Rebrandly vs. Bitly: Make the right choice for your team

Choose Rebrandly if you need custom branded domains (available on the free plan), compliance certifications like SOC 2, Type II or HIPAA, team collaboration features, dynamic traffic routing, a high-volume API for developers and detailed analytics with unique click tracking. It’s also the better fit if you need to prove which links drive revenue.

Choose Bitly if your needs are mostly basic link shortening and you prefer a lower entry price for casual use.

The decision comes down to what you need from your links. For businesses where brand trust, security compliance and scale matter, Rebrandly provides the infrastructure.

Ready to make the switch? Check out our pricing page for options.

FAQ

Which platform is better for enterprises?

Rebrandly offers SOC 2, Type II and HIPAA compliance, multiple branded domains, SSO, and team roles and workspaces. Bitly provides enterprise features like SSO and user permissions, but with more limited domain options.

Which is cheaper for casual use?

Bitly’s Core plan starts at $10/mo (and is only available on an annual plan), while Rebrandly’s Essentials is $11/mo on an annual plan or $16/mo month-to-month. If you want your own domain without paying, Rebrandly’s free plan includes one.

Is Rebrandly cheaper than Bitly for teams?

Often, yes. Bitly includes multiple users and group permissions only on its Enterprise plan, while Rebrandly includes teammates, roles and workspaces on its self-serve plans, so your team doesn’t need an enterprise contract just to add logins.

Can I use multiple custom domains?

Yes, on both. Rebrandly supports multiple custom domains, with more available as you move up plans, and Bitly includes 1 custom domain starting at the Growth tier, with multiple domains on Enterprise.

Do both platforms track unique clicks?

Rebrandly tracks unique clicks with deduplication, so you can see how many people clicked and how many times. Bitly’s analytics focus on total engagements, and it shows unique clicks too. However, it doesn’t filter out bot clicks like Rebrandly.

Can I edit links after I create them with Bitly or Rebrandly?

Both platforms let you change a link’s destination after you share it, with a monthly limit on edits that depends on your plan.

How long does each platform retain analytics data?

Rebrandly's data retention varies by plan but extends significantly longer than Bitly's limits. Bitly keeps data for 30 days (Core), 4 months (Growth), 1 year (Premium) and 2 years (Enterprise).

How long do Rebrandly links last?

Rebrandly links don’t expire unless you set an expiration date or delete them. They keep working as long as your account is active (even on the free plan after a downgrade) and, for branded links, as long as your domain is renewed and still points to Rebrandly.

Does Rebrandly have a mobile app?

Yes. Rebrandly and Bitly both have iOS and Android apps, so you can create and check links from your phone.

Who are Bitly’s main competitors?

Rebrandly, Short.io and TinyURL are the names that come up most. Our roundup of the best URL shorteners compares them side by side, and our list of Bitly alternatives matches each one to the kind of team it suits.