Shlink

Shlink is a self-hosted URL shortener that gives you full ownership of your short links and the analytics attached to them. You pick a short domain, deploy the server, and all link creation, management, and tracking stays on your infrastructure.

Every click generates a visit record with anonymized geolocation data, device type, referrer, and timestamp. The analytics show how links perform without sending that data to a third-party service. For teams with privacy requirements or compliance obligations, this is the main reason to choose Shlink over Bitly or a similar hosted service.

Shlink is API-first. A REST API handles all operations: creating short URLs, listing them, updating destination URLs, and querying visit statistics. A separate companion web app provides a browser-based management interface on top of that API. Command-line access is available for scripting and automation.

Multi-domain support lets you run several short domains from a single Shlink instance, useful for organizations managing links across multiple brands or projects.

The MIT-licensed codebase is actively maintained and runs on PHP with MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, or SQL Server. Docker Compose deployment is the standard path. The scope is deliberately narrow: Shlink does URL shortening and visit tracking, and does both well. The API makes it straightforward to pipe data into whatever analytics setup you are already running.