Lynkarr vs Bitly
Bitly is the name everybody knows. What that name costs you is a monthly quota on the things you make and a clock on the data they produce — and neither exists here.
A link shortener that also issues QR codes, priced by how many of each you make per month.
The short version
“Bitly is the recognised name.”
Recognition is worth having on a link somebody reads aloud. It is worth nothing on a QR code, where the reader sees a pattern and a destination — and on a printed pack or a screen, the name people should recognise is yours, not your vendor's.
The factA custom domain is part of Business at $54 a month, so the codes and links carry your name from the first scan.
“We only need a few codes, so the cheap tier will do.”
Their allowances are a monthly issuance, not a holding. Core is five QR codes a month; the sixth is next month or a plan change, forever.
The factStarter is $19 a month with no code limit at all, and no month in which you run out.
“We just need the scan numbers.”
Then the question is how long you get to keep them. A printed code outlives the campaign that made it, and last Christmas is the comparison that makes this Christmas arguable.
The factCore keeps 30 days of click and scan data. We keep individual events for 400 days and daily rollups for seven years, on every paid plan.
“It is a link tool and we mostly need links.”
So do we — unlimited, on your own domain, editable after they are sent, with the same reporting. And when the campaign needs a landing page, a form, a digital card or a GS1 product code, it is the same account rather than a second subscription.
The factShort links, landing pages, forms, digital cards, GS1 Digital Link and a media library are all in the one product.
Side by side
| Bitly | Lynkarr | |
|---|---|---|
| Password-protecting a link | Not offered on any plan, including Enterprise. | Business and above, and the password is stored encrypted so an owner can read it back without it sitting in the clear. |
| Your own advertising tag on a hosted page | Not offered on any plan. | Business and above: Meta, Google Ads, TikTok or LinkedIn, and never fired for a link-preview robot. |
| Free plan | 5 links and 2 QR codes a month. | 2 dynamic QR codes and 5 short links, held rather than monthly, plus unlimited static codes. |
| First paid tier | Core, $10 a month: 100 links, 5 QR codes a month. | Starter, $19 a month: unlimited dynamic codes and unlimited links. |
| QR codes at $29–$35 a month | Growth: 10 QR codes a month. | No code limit on any paid plan, starting at $19. |
| How long scan data is kept | 30 days on Core, 4 months on Growth, 1 year on Premium, 2 years on Enterprise. | 400 days of individual events and seven years of daily rollups, the same on every paid plan. |
| Beyond links and codes | Links, QR codes and link-in-bio pages. | Also landing pages, forms with submissions, digital business cards, a contact pool with event badge scanning, GS1 Digital Link and a media library. |
| Contacts, from a scanned badge or business card | Not part of the product. | A badge or a personal business card is read by AI into a contact record, deduplicated against your existing pool, and tagged with the event it came from — not just a link click. |
| Custom analytics dashboards | 2 on Core at $10 a month, 10 on Growth. None on the free plan. | 1 on the free plan, 5 on Starter at $19, 50 on Business, unlimited on Enterprise. |
| Scans | Unlimited on every plan. | Unlimited on every plan, and never metered. |
Figures for Bitly read from bitly.com/pages/pricing on 31 August 2026. Ours were checked against the running product on the same day. Prices change — if you find one of these out of date, tell us and we will correct it.
A quota you meet is a plan you outgrow
Bitly's allowances are a monthly issuance: Core is a hundred links and five QR codes a month. That suits a team making new links continually. It suits nothing else — print twenty codes in one week for a product launch and you have spent four months of allowance, on a plan you pay for every month of the year.
Ours are a count of what exists, and on every paid plan that count is unlimited. There is no month in which you cannot make the thing you need to make, and no upgrade triggered by a busy fortnight.
Thirty days is not a memory
A code on packaging is scanned for years. The questions that make it worth having — is this line doing better than last year, which region responded, did the reprint help — all need the figures from before. On Core that window is thirty days.
We keep individual scan events for 400 days and the daily rollups for seven years, on every paid plan including the cheapest. Year-on-year comparison is the question a long-lived code is best placed to answer, and we built the retention to answer it.
One account, not four subscriptions
The campaign that needs a short link this week needs a landing page next week, a form to capture the interest, and a card for the person at the stand. With a link tool, three of those are somebody else's invoice.
Here they are the same account, the same analytics and the same campaign grouping — so the report says what the campaign did, rather than what one channel of it did.
Why Lynkarr
Choose Lynkarr if you want the codes and links to carry your own name, no monthly quota on how many you make, years of history rather than weeks, and the pages, forms and cards the campaign will need next — in one account at $19 a month.
One more thing, and it is a strength rather than a footnote: our analytics identify nobody. Country, region, hour, device and which code — no cookies on a scan, no IP address stored, nothing sold. For anybody in healthcare, legal, education or the public sector, that is the answer that gets a tool approved rather than the one that starts a review. The detail is here.