Redirection services Comparison

Web Sites That Shorten Long URLs

The free web sites below can take a long URL and give you back a shorter URL without requiring registration. Since these sites forward a click from one link to another, they are also known as URL forwarders and some do subdomain forwarding. Any of these services will do a decent job, but if you want to study them before you pick one, here is an informal survey of the competitive landscape.

Descriptions of the various attributes are provided after the table. You can click on the service name in the table heading to visit the web site.

	300online.com	metamark.net	snipurl.com	tinyurl.com	notlong.com
Default Length:	11	18	24	25	27
Expiration:	Never	5 years*	Never	Never	Never
Direct Redirect:	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Private:	Yes	Manual*	Manual*	No	Yes
Pick Your Own:	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Statistics:	Yes	w/Reg*	w/Reg*	No	Yes
Editing:	No	No	w/Reg*	No	Yes
Batch:	No	No	Yes	No	No
Subdomain:	No	No	No	No	Yes
Path Forwarding:	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Handles Short:	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
Nondeterministic:	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes
URL Checking:	No	Yes	No	No	Yes
Perl API:	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
IRC bot:	No	Yes	No	No	No
BBS/Forum:	No	No	No	Yes	No
Languages:	English	English	English	English, Japanese, Mandarin, Spanish	English
Comments:		*Never expires if used occasionally. *Private available by adding password. *Statistics available with registration.	*Private available by adding password. *Statistics and Editing available with registration.

So, by the results:

1st place is http://300online.com/

2nd place is http://tinyurl.com