Short.io

Review

Short.io

Short.ioTL;DR Summary

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Short.io

This is one of our top picks in the category so we recommend it over others (you're on the right page), read below to learn why we love and recommend it! ⤵

This is one of the better tools in its category, see below if this tool is right for you! ⤵

After trying various link shorteners, I found Short, which was basic but met my needs.

But I didn’t switch to Short.io because it was a great solution – I did it because it was just adequate enough to do the most basic of redirects. Case in point: I never once used it for reporting because it was a complete mess.

Then I tried Dub and was drawn to how simple/clean the UI/UX was. I switched over from Short and haven't look back. Oh, and I check my analytics in Dub now too as they have much more simple/user-friendly dashboards.

We believe there are better options available in this category, read below to learn what they do well, and what they could do better. ⤵

Short.io Review Features, Pricing, Pros & Cons

URL Shortener

Custom URL link shortener

In trying just about every link shortener on the market, in addition to using my own self-hosted solution (twice), I finally landed on Short, and at the time, it was pretty basic, but a solid solution for what I was looking to achieve with it. And I couldn't complain, they have a super generous free tier, for which you don't need to pay until you hit 50,000+ link clicks, which would never be hit for most individuals and businesses.

Features & Differentiation

Rating: _D

User Interface (UI)

Rating: _C-

They have a pretty basic UI that looks very much like any off the shelf templated dashboard interface. It's nothing special, and looks quite dated in-fact, especially when looking at the reporting.

User Experience (UX)

Rating: _D-

This is absolutely what drove us to leave Short in the end. They have such a difficult to use interface that is slow to load and extremely buggy. Simply trying to search or filter down your links to find what you're looking for is incredibly painful.

I think what is most clear here is that a back-end developer built this URL shortener, because the functionality of what it does has been quite solid, it's just interacting with the back-end is just frustrating and unbearable.

Mobile App

Rating: _B+

API & Integration

Rating: _B+

Pricing

Rating: _B

For the most part, you can get away with just the free tier for most usage. This is a positive and negative though. If they charged more, I think they'd actually be able to hire more engineers and designers to improve the product.

Competition

I've been looking for a link shortener that I'd actually enjoy using for over a decade at this point, and while Short is what I landed on the past couple years, I was never actually happy with it, keeping my eyes open the entire time.

Enter Dub, the URL shortener that was made by someone that is not only a super talented product person, but also a full-stack engineer that built it using the most modern tech stack. After using Dub, it's difficult to go back to a tool like Short.