Short.io is one of the best-value utility shorteners around — a generous free tier, unlimited links cheaply, and yes, a click webhook at a lower price than ours. This page is honest about all of that. The real difference is what happens when delivery matters: signatures your systems can verify, retries when your endpoint is down, and a log that proves what happened.
Facts below cite Short.io's own pricing and documentation. Spotted something out of date? Tell us and we'll fix it.
| Feature | xengo | Short.io |
|---|---|---|
| Click/scan webhooks | From Pro (£39/mo): per-event, HMAC-signed, retried with backoff, delivery-logged | From Pro (~$18/mo): one webhook URL per domain, POSTed on each click [source] |
| Delivery guarantees | Signature headers, automatic retries (~45 min of backoff), per-attempt log, DLQs | Its docs describe the webhook URL and payload; signing and retry behaviour aren't documented [source] |
| Notification channels | 24 built-in (Slack, Teams, PagerDuty, Telegram, email…) — no receiver needed | Webhook per domain; Zapier/Make apps for link-creation events [source] |
| Analytics retention | Raw clicks 90 days; aggregated rollups kept indefinitely for reporting | Raw click data 1 year, aggregated statistics 26 months, then removed (all plans) [source] |
| Free tier | None by design — business-only, 14-day card-required trial | Generous: 1,000 branded links, 50k tracked clicks/mo, QR and API included [source] |
| Entry paid plan | £15/mo — custom domain, dynamic QR, email alerts | Hobby ~$5/mo; Pro ~$18/mo brings unlimited links and the webhook [source] |
| Positioning | Links + QR as real-time events for business operations | A capable, great-value utility shortener with a decade of history [source] |
Try it against your own workflow — start a 14-day trial (card required, cancel anytime), or see pricing.
If a dropped notification doesn't matter to you, Short.io's webhook is decent value. xengo's £39 buys delivery you can rely on: HMAC-signed payloads your systems can verify, automatic retries through outages, a per-attempt delivery log, and 24 no-code channels alongside the webhook.
xengo doesn't have a free tier — that's deliberate (business-only keeps the platform and its sending reputation clean). If you want free, Short.io's free tier is one of the most generous in the category and we've cited it accurately.
Per Short.io's storage policy, raw clicks are kept 1 year and aggregated statistics 26 months, then removed. xengo keeps raw click rows 90 days and aggregated rollups indefinitely, so long-term reporting keeps working.
Every Short.io fact links to Short.io's own pricing page, docs or help centre, verified on the date shown above. If something changes, email us and we'll fix the page.
Smart URLs, dynamic QR codes and a full API — branded on your own domain, safety-screened, and tracked. Build, re-point and measure it all in one place.
Start free trialBranded short links on a domain you control — editable, screened, and tracked.
Branded QR codes you can re-point any time — never reprint the poster again.
$ curl -X POST api.xengo.io/v1/links { "domain": "go.acme.com", "url": "https://acme.com/…" } → 201 go.acme.com/aB3xK▋
Create and manage links + QR at scale, straight from your own tools.
