Best URL shortener in Europe: six services compared (2026)

The best URL shortener in Europe depends on what you need the link to do. A school that shares one form link a month needs something else than a retailer that prints short links on 40,000 receipts. This guide compares six services with European roots or a European data cluster, using only what each vendor publishes about itself. All facts were checked on 28 October 2026. Prices change, so check again before you sign up.

EUQR is one of the six, and we make it. We have tried to apply the same six questions to every service, including our own, and we say where others do better.

How we compared the six services

Every service gets the same six points:

1. Operator: the company behind the service and where it is based.
2. Hosting: where the service says it stores and processes link and click data.
3. Entry price: the cheapest paid plan and its currency, or free.
4. Link limit: how many links the free or entry plan allows.
5. Redirect: what the vendor says about cookies, pixels or IP addresses when someone clicks.
6. Cancellation: what the vendor says happens to your links when you stop paying.

Where a vendor does not publish an answer, we write that, instead of guessing. Bitly is left out of the list because its pricing page gave us inconsistent figures on the day of checking; our post on Bitly's free plan limits and the EUQR and Bitly comparison cover it separately.

The six services, point by point

EUQR

• Operator: Nexo IV Grupo SL, a Spanish company.
• Hosting: scan data and short-link data are hosted in Amsterdam.
• Entry price: Starter at €0.99 per month or €9.90 per year, excluding VAT.
• Link limit: 50 short links on Starter, 250 on Pro, 1,000 on Business, 5,000 on Agency. The pricing page names no cap on clicks.
• Redirect: no tracking cookies, raw IP addresses are never stored, analytics are aggregate counts.
• Cancellation: links fall back to your branded Recovery Page for 90 days, then to a generic EUQR page.

The weak spot: links run on the shared domain qreu.eu. A custom domain is only available on Enterprise. Details are on the EUQR short link page.

Short.io

• Operator: Short.cm Inc., according to the footer of its privacy policy, which gives no postal address.
• Hosting: an EU cluster on Amazon Web Services in Frankfurt and a US cluster that is moving to bare metal servers in the Dallas area, with Cloudflare in front, per the Short.io privacy policy.
• Entry price: the comparison table on the Short.io pricing page lists Hobby at $5 per month; the plan cards themselves showed "$..." when we checked. Paid plans include a 7-day trial.
• Link limit: 1,000 branded links on the free plan, with statistics visible for the first 50,000 clicks.
• Redirect: the privacy policy lists IP address and cookie identifiers among technical data in general and does not describe the redirect separately.
• Cancellation: the account moves to the free plan and its limits.

Rebrandly

• Operator: RadiateCapital Limited, trading as Rebrandly, registered in Dublin.
• Hosting: the Rebrandly privacy policy does not name a hosting location and says data may go to service providers outside the EEA, including the United States, under standard contractual clauses.
• Entry price: the free plan costs nothing. The paid prices on the Rebrandly pricing page were not clearly mapped to monthly or annual billing when we checked, so we do not quote them.
• Link limit: 10 links per month on the free plan, with one custom domain plus the rebrand.ly domain.
• Redirect: "The IP address is immediately programmatically hashed", after the country is extracted.
• Cancellation: the pages we read do not say.

Cuttly

• Operator: Web Room Studio Patryk Rumiński in Gdańsk, Poland, named as controller in the Cuttly privacy policy of 19 May 2026.
• Hosting: not stated. Processors named include Cloudflare in the United States.
• Entry price: on the Cuttly pricing page, Starter is $12 per month and Single $25, shown with a dollar sign and no currency code.
• Link limit: 30 short links per month on the free plan, 300 on Starter.
• Redirect: if the link owner enables retargeting pixels, they load after the click and before the visitor reaches the destination.
• Cancellation: the pricing page does not say.

cut2.eu by EuroMetrics

• Operator: EuroMetrics, which describes itself as "Hosted in Europe & Made in Portugal".
• Hosting: "All data is processed and stored on our servers in Paris, France", according to the EuroMetrics URL shortener page.
• Entry price: free.
• Link limit: 10 links per day without an account, unlimited for EuroMetrics users.
• Redirect: "Anonymous short links set no cookies", build no profiles and add no parameters.
• Cancellation: no subscription to cancel; the page says links are permanent and do not expire.

URLR

• Operator: URLR, a French service.
• Hosting: the URLR homepage says data is hosted in France.
• Entry price: URLR does not publish prices on the pages we could read; its pricing page returned an error. A 14-day trial without a payment method is offered.
• Link limit: the free plan is described as meeting "occasional and simple needs", without a number.
• Redirect: not covered on the page we could read.
• Cancellation: not covered on the page we could read.

Winners per criterion

A ranking with one overall winner would hide the trade-offs. Here is one winner per question instead.

• Lowest cost: cut2.eu. It is free, and unlimited for EuroMetrics users.
• Free custom domain: Short.io, with five custom domains on its free plan. Rebrandly and Cuttly each include one.
• Largest free link allowance: Short.io, with 1,000 branded links.
• Cheapest paid entry plan: EUQR at €0.99 per month, against $5 for Short.io Hobby and $12 for Cuttly Starter.
• Counted clicks without cookies: EUQR, which states no tracking cookies and no stored raw IP addresses for its analytics.
• A documented plan for stopping: EUQR, because it says what visitors see for 90 days after you cancel and what comes after.

Notice what is missing. No service wins every row, and EUQR does not win on custom domains or on price for people who need no statistics at all.

What a comparison table does not show

Two services in one city can still differ in how much they tell you. Short.io names its data centres and its providers. Rebrandly explains how it hashes IP addresses but not where its servers are. Cuttly names its processors but not its hosting. Read the privacy policy, not only the pricing page, and look for a city, a provider and a transfer mechanism.

Shared domains matter too. A link on rebrand.ly, cutt.ly, cut2.eu or qreu.eu shares its reputation with every other customer of that domain. That is fine for most marketing, but email filters and phone carriers judge a domain by its worst users. If your links go into SMS campaigns or bank-style notifications, a domain you control is worth paying for.

Finally, think about the printed link. A short link on a poster or a receipt lives longer than a campaign. If the provider disappears or your subscription ends, the printed link is the first thing to break. The TinyURL comparison and the Rebrandly comparison go deeper into that risk for two of the larger services.

Which is the best URL shortener in Europe for your team?

Take a bicycle rental shop in Ghent with three locations. It prints a short link on every rental contract, posts links on Instagram and sends a booking reminder by email. It wants to know which location brings the most clicks, and it does not want a cookie banner on its booking page because of a link.

For that shop, cut2.eu covers the basics for free but does not give the per-location statistics it wants without an account. Short.io gives five custom domains for free, which is attractive, but the shop then needs to choose and check its cluster. EUQR gives counted links from €0.99 per month, hosted in Amsterdam, and a Recovery Page if the shop ever stops paying, at the cost of using qreu.eu instead of its own domain.

A different team gets a different answer. An agency with 40 client brands probably needs custom domains and will look at Short.io or an Enterprise plan. A teacher who shares one link a week can use cut2.eu without an account.

Five checks before you choose

1. Find the city. A provider that names where data sits is easier to assess than one that says "in the EU".
2. Read the redirect. Ask whether cookies, pixels or full IP addresses are involved when someone clicks.
3. Count links, not only clicks. Monthly link caps run out faster than click caps for most small teams.
4. Price it in your currency. Dollar plans move with the exchange rate and may add VAT on top.
5. Ask what happens when you stop. Printed links should land somewhere useful, not on an error page.

The European URL shortener overview explains how EUQR handles each of these points, and the EUQR plans list the limits per plan in euro.