Why people look for a Dub alternative
Dub's developer-first, open-source design is exactly right for an engineering-led team building links into a product — and exactly the reason a broader team, or one that also wants QR codes and a bio page, often ends up looking elsewhere.
What Dub does that's worth acknowledging
Open-source availability and the option to self-host are genuine, specific capabilities that most competitors — including Shorter.gg — don't offer. If data residency or infrastructure ownership is a hard requirement, that alone narrows the alternatives worth considering to essentially one, and it's worth confirming that requirement is real before ruling out otherwise-strong hosted platforms on principle.
If you want QR codes and a bio page included
Shorter.gg is the clearest fit if the reason you're looking elsewhere is wanting QR codes and a bio page in the same account as your links, accessible to a non-technical team member as easily as an engineer. See the full Shorter.gg vs Dub comparison for the complete breakdown.
If self-hosting is the actual requirement
Short.io's self-hosted deployment option is the most direct match if what drew you to Dub was specifically the ability to run link infrastructure on your own servers, rather than the open-source code itself.
If you want strong API access without self-hosting
Rebrandly and Bitly both offer solid developer APIs for teams that want programmatic link creation but don't need — or want — the responsibility of self-hosting.
What you give up by leaving Dub
Be honest about the tradeoff: none of the alternatives above are open-source, and only Short.io offers self-hosting. If either of those is a hard requirement rather than a nice-to-have, staying on Dub — or negotiating its hosted tier — may still be the right call.
Migrating your existing links
Because Dub is open-source, exporting your existing link data tends to be more transparent than migrating off a closed-source competitor, and most alternatives support bulk import to speed up recreating your link structure elsewhere.
Weighing self-hosting against the maintenance it requires
Before choosing an alternative based on self-hosting alone, it's worth being clear-eyed about what that commits your team to: patching, uptime, and infrastructure cost that a hosted platform otherwise absorbs. If your organization doesn't have dedicated infrastructure capacity, a hosted platform with strong data-handling practices may serve the underlying need — control and trust in the provider — without the ongoing operational burden.
Evaluating API quality beyond "does it have one"
Every alternative listed here has a developer API, but quality varies — documentation depth, rate limits, and how many product areas the API actually covers. Before committing, it's worth testing the specific endpoints your integration will actually call rather than assuming API availability alone makes two platforms interchangeable.
Who benefits from Dub's specific approach
Dub tends to reward teams that already think in code — infrastructure-as-configuration, links created through CI pipelines or internal tools rather than a dashboard. If that's not how your team actually works day to day, a platform built around a dashboard-first experience, with an API as an option rather than the primary interface, is likely to feel more natural regardless of which alternative you choose.
The honest bottom line
None of the alternatives above are open-source, which is worth stating plainly rather than glossing over — if that specific property matters to your team's values or compliance posture, it may be worth staying on Dub even if a competitor otherwise fits your feature needs better. For everyone else, the decision comes down to how much of your team works through code versus a dashboard, and whether QR codes and a bio page are worth adding to the toolkit.
Testing before a full commitment
Every alternative here offers a free tier or trial substantial enough to test its API against your actual integration needs before fully migrating — worth doing regardless of which one you're leaning toward, since documentation quality and edge-case behavior are hard to judge from a features page alone, and a platform that looks equivalent on paper can still feel meaningfully different once your own code is calling it.