Vyrl vs Bitly Link-in-bio for affiliate creators

Pick Bitly if you already use it for short links and QR codes and want a simple landing page in the same account, especially for a business or campaign. Pick Vyrl if you're a video creator who earns from affiliate links and wants to see which video and which link made the sale. Bitly counts clicks well, but it doesn't track commission at all.

Vyrl and Bitly Pages side by side

Bitly's figures come from its pricing page and support center as of October 2026.

Tracking affiliate sales

Bitly is built around the click. Every short link and Page records clicks or scans, and paid plans add history, referrers, locations and devices. That's genuinely useful for marketers, and it's the same data you get for the buttons on a Bitly Page.

What Bitly doesn't do is follow the visitor past the click. It has no connection to Amazon Associates, Impact, CJ, Awin or Everflow, and no way to receive a postback when a sale happens. So you can see that a button got 500 clicks, but not whether it earned $5 or $500.

Vyrl adds that second half. When you connect a network, Vyrl gives you a postback URL to paste into the network's settings. On every click, Vyrl adds the network's sub ID parameter with its own click ID (subId1 for Impact, sid for CJ, sub1 for Everflow, clickref for Awin, ascsubtag for Amazon). When the sale happens, the network calls the postback and Vyrl credits the commission to that exact click. For Amazon, which has no postbacks, you upload the Earnings report CSV and Vyrl matches rows by Sub Tag. The CJ setup guide and Impact setup guide show the steps.

Sales by video

A common workaround with Bitly is one short link per video. It works for clicks, but it gets messy fast: 60 videos means 60 links, each with its own destination to update, and the free plan only allows 5 new links a month.

Vyrl does this with one page. Each video gets a word, like vyrl.at/yourname/storm, and visitors land on your full page. Every click and every sale from that visit is credited to that video. Share links add where you posted it, such as vyrl.at/yourname/storm/yt for YouTube. The dashboard shows commission and earnings per click by video, by link and by place.

A quick example with numbers: two videos each send 250 clicks. With click data alone they look equal. With sales data you might find one earned $90 (EPC $0.36) and the other $12 (EPC $0.05). That tells you which topic to make more of. The earnings per click guide explains how to read EPC.

Page speed and privacy

The page weight and tracker numbers above this text are measured automatically from live Bitly Pages, so check them there rather than trusting a figure written by hand.

Vyrl pages are plain HTML with no JavaScript, served from Cloudflare's edge cache, and typically under 50 KB. They set no cookies and load no third-party trackers. Unique visitors are counted with a daily-changing salted hash, and IP addresses are never stored.

One more thing worth knowing: Bitly says free accounts now show an interstitial page with a preview of the destination and an ad before a short link opens. If your fans tap a free Bitly link to reach a product, that's an extra step between them and the purchase. Paid Bitly plans remove the ads.

Pricing

Bitly has a free plan and four paid tiers. Core is $10 a month but billed yearly only, at $120. Growth is $29 a month billed yearly or $35 monthly and adds a complimentary custom domain, branded links and 4 months of click data. Premium is $199 a month billed yearly. The tiers are sized by how many links, QR codes and pages you can create.

Vyrl's Creator plan is $4 a month or $3.20 billed yearly in the US, and cheaper in many countries, as low as $2 a month. It includes revenue per video, affiliate postbacks, a custom domain, giveaways, the AI agent, CSV export and the daily revenue email. The free plan has unlimited links on one page. See pricing.

When Bitly is the better choice

• You need short links and QR codes at scale. Bitly is a link management platform first. If you print QR codes, run campaigns or share many links outside your bio, it does far more than a link-in-bio tool.
• You're a business, not a creator. Bitly's templates, digital business cards and team features suit brands, shops and organizations.
• Your team already uses Bitly. One account for links, QR codes and pages is simpler than adding another tool.
• You don't earn from affiliate links. If clicks are the whole story, Bitly's analytics cover it.

Vyrl is the better fit when your bio link exists to earn commission from your videos, and you want each sale tied to the video that drove it.

How to switch from Bitly to Vyrl

1. Create a free Vyrl page and add your links. Use each network's clean affiliate link and leave out the sub ID parameter, because Vyrl adds its own.
2. Connect your affiliate networks and paste the postback URLs into their settings. Tap your own Vyrl link and send a test conversion. It shows in revenue within a minute.
3. Make share links for each place you post, such as /tt and /yt, and put them in your bios in place of your bit.ly/m/ address.
4. Give each new video a word and say it on camera or add it to the description. The video links guide has examples.
5. If you have old Bitly short links in video descriptions, you can keep them, but any sale through them won't be matched to a video. On paid Bitly plans you can change where a link points, so you could redirect them to your Vyrl page.

Going forward, share only Vyrl links. A raw network link, or a short link from another service, can't be matched to a click or a video.