the catalog · 📈 SEO & marketing
Dub
★ 21kModern link management with branded short links, analytics, and A/B testing.
Dub does the job of Bitly, self-hosted. It is AGPL-licensed, so a hosted fork has to publish its changes, and setting it up is an afternoon, not a weekend. Bitly bills $29 for it. 21k stars on GitHub.
Open-source replacement for Bitly.
- Licence
- AGPL-3.0
- Self-hosting
- Medium
- The paid one costs
- $29
- GitHub stars
- 21k
Is it actually a replacement?
We have written a verdict on what it replaces — what you lose, and why people still pay:
How Dub runs
Where it runs
Dub runs on your machine or their cloud.
Installing it
Hosted signup, or a source deployment assembled across Vercel, MySQL/PlanetScale, Tinybird, Upstash and Cloudflare R2/AWS.
Where your data lives
Dub Cloud stores links, users and analytics in Dub's infrastructure; the documented self-hosted stack keeps link/user metadata in PlanetScale-compatible MySQL, click events in Tinybird/ClickHouse, redirect cache and jobs in Upstash Redis/QStash, and assets in Cloudflare R2 or AWS.
What setup takes
Self-hosting is not one Compose file: the official guide requires accounts, credentials and configuration across GitHub, Tinybird, Upstash, MySQL/PlanetScale, Vercel and Cloudflare or AWS.
The catch compared with Bitly
Dub has richer attribution, but self-hosting depends on several external databases, queues, analytics, storage, email, and deployment services and still lacks Bitly's enterprise support and governance.
Dub questions
Is Dub open source?
Yes — it is released under AGPL-3.0.
Can Dub replace Bitly?
Our verdict on Bitly is YES. PostHog (30k stars), Umami (28k stars), Dub (24k stars) are mature open-source replacements for Bitly — self-host with real ops work and stop paying $35/mo.
Can I self-host Dub?
Yes — we rate it medium to self-host, and it runs on your machine or their cloud. Hosted signup, or a source deployment assembled across Vercel, MySQL/PlanetScale, Tinybird, Upstash and Cloudflare R2/AWS.