The Best Pretty Links Alternative: Switch to Linkjet for Free

A quick heads-up so you know where we stand: this article comes from us, the team behind Linkjet, in other words, the maker of the alternative. Even so, we are going to try to stay fair and not talk Pretty Links down, but honestly lay out which plugin is the better choice in which situation. If you are looking for a Pretty Links alternative, you will find the arguments you need here, including the cases where you should simply stick with Pretty Links.

Why are so many people looking for a Pretty Links alternative?

Pretty Links is widely regarded as one of the most popular WordPress plugins for creating, cloaking, and tracking affiliate and campaign links. It is common among affiliate marketers, and for good reason. Even so, many users eventually reach a point where they start looking for something else. The most common reasons:

• Pro paywall for certain features: There is usually a free version and a paid Pro tier. Some features (typically things like automatic keyword linking or advanced statistics) sit behind that paywall. If all you need is core short-link functionality, that quickly feels like paying for more than you use.
• A desire for data minimalism: Especially if you operate in the EU, you want to know where click data ends up and whether external services get called in the process. A GDPR-friendly, local solution with no outside calls has become more important to a lot of site owners.
• Automation and AI: If you manage a lot of links or want to automate your workflows, you need a clean, documented interface. Without API access, most of that work stays manual.

If any of this sounds familiar, it is worth taking a look at a lean, free alternative.

What Pretty Links does well

Let's be fair and start with what speaks for Pretty Links. The plugin is not popular for no reason. It reliably handles the core job: creating clean, memorable short links on your own domain, hiding destination URLs behind a tidy redirect (cloaking), and tracking clicks. There is a large community around the plugin, plenty of tutorials, and years of real-world experience behind it. For classic affiliate marketing, it is a well-proven tool, and the Pro version typically adds convenience features for power users that go beyond the basic package. If your setup is running fine and you are happy with what it offers, there is no reason to switch just on principle.

Linkjet as an alternative: what's different

Linkjet is a lean redirection and affiliate plugin that solves the same core problem, but with a clear stance: free, privacy-minded, and open. The most important difference up front: Linkjet Free is free of charge and released under GPLv2. Short links, click statistics, the 404 monitor, QR codes, and the full REST API are all in it. Linkjet Pro costs 49 euro a year for three sites.

What Linkjet actually brings to the table:

• All the important redirect types: 301, 302, 307, 308, and 410: choose exactly whether a redirect is permanent, temporary, or marks a page as "removed".
• Clean short links and cloaking: tidy links in the /go/… format on your own domain, including cloaking with rel="nofollow" or sponsored.
• GDPR-friendly statistics: Click statistics are IP-anonymized, include a bot filter, and work without any external GeoIP service. There are no external calls: your data stays on your own server.
• Local QR codes: a QR code for every short link, generated locally, with no third-party service involved.
• 404 monitor: shows you which dead URLs are being requested, so you can spot candidates for new redirects.
• Full REST API with OpenAPI: ideal for automation and AI-assisted workflows. You can create and maintain links through a script or an assistant.

Where Pretty Links is strong

So you can make an honest decision, here are the points where Pretty Links plays to its strengths:

• A very large, active community with plenty of guides and shared experience.
• Long-established and proven across countless setups, an established standard in the affiliate space.
• The Pro version offers power users convenience features that go beyond pure short-link management. Automatic keyword linking is the best-known of them, and it is the one feature where Linkjet Pro now matches it.
• If your existing setup is running smoothly, you have zero migration effort by staying put.

Where Linkjet scores

And here is where, in our view, Linkjet has the edge:

• Free version: statistics and every redirect type are included at no cost.
• Privacy by design: IP-anonymized statistics, a bot filter, no external GeoIP, no external calls.
• An open interface: a full REST API with an OpenAPI description for automation and AI.
• Built-in 404 monitor: track down dead links without a separate plugin.
• Lean and focused: its own database tables, no bloated backend.

Pretty Links and Linkjet side by side

The rows below are the points this article actually discusses. Where Pretty Links is ahead, it says so.

Switching in one click: the import wizard

The biggest thing holding people back from switching plugins is usually the fear of losing existing links and the click numbers they have painstakingly collected. That is exactly why Linkjet has an import wizard for existing Pretty Links, including click statistics. You do not have to rebuild your links by hand, and you do not start from zero either. You bring your history with you.

The process is deliberately simple: install and activate Linkjet, open the import wizard, pull in your existing Pretty Links along with their statistics, and you're done. Your short links keep working, and your past click numbers stay intact. That lets you switch at your own pace without losing your historical reporting.

One detail that tends to hurt during a move: Pretty Links changed its data model with version 4.0, and in practice installations get stuck halfway through that change. The values then no longer sit in the columns but in the meta table. So the import wizard first looks at which columns actually exist and fills missing field values in from that meta table. A row that has no target URL even there is deliberately not created, it is counted separately in the result instead. That way you know after the import how many leftovers you have to enter by hand, rather than finding them later in production. The same wizard can take over Redirection rules as well, in case both plugins are currently running side by side on your site.

The conflict guard: what a bulk import can break

Move hundreds of links across in one go and you can build yourself a collision faster than you would like. A short link is named exactly like a real page and hides it. Two rules overlap, and which one fires first is something you notice in your revenue rather than in your settings. Or a redirect lands on a path that simply has to keep working. That is why Linkjet checks before it saves and warns you when a redirect would hide an existing page, when it overlaps with another rule, or when it hits a critical path such as checkout, login or REST. Redirect loops it does not create at all, it refuses them.

This is not a comfort feature, it is damage control. A short link that accidentally occupies your checkout path costs you orders, and it keeps costing them until somebody happens to notice. For the same reason the guard runs a regex rule past two lists: the critical system paths and the exact short links you already have. It names the ones your pattern also matches and points out that the exact link wins there, so the rule has no effect on those paths. Whether a pattern really catches what you mean is something you check yourself beforehand: in the link form you enter a sample path and see at a click whether the rule matches and which target URL it resolves to. Which dead URLs turn up anyway is what the 404 monitor shows you. And if you want to go through your outgoing links for broken targets as well, our overview of the broken link checkers for WordPress lays out the options.

Automatic keyword linking, without touching your posts

This is the one feature that sits behind the paywall at Pretty Links and at Linkjet alike, so here is a closer look at what you get for it on our side. In Linkjet Pro you store a keyword and the link it should point to. Every occurrence in your post text is then linked by the plugin on its own. The rules behind it are deliberately narrow:

• Your posts stay untouched: the linking happens as the page is served, not in the database. Switch Pro off and the auto links are gone, with no orphaned HTML left behind in your posts.
• At most 10 auto links per post: a hard overall limit. On top of that you set per keyword how often it may be linked within a single post, and the default is once.
• No-go zones: nothing is touched inside existing links, in headings, in code and preformatted blocks, in buttons or in form fields.
• The longest keyword wins: if your list holds both "WordPress plugin" and "plugin", the longer match applies, not whichever one happened to be found first.
• Cloaking rules still apply: the rel="nofollow" or sponsored attributes come from the linked link itself. Whatever you set there also holds for the auto link.

The side effect is practical: you do not have to maintain your disclosure twice. How to label advertising links properly is covered in our post on affiliate link disclosure.

Which solution fits whom?

An honest conclusion belongs here too, even though we are not a neutral party. You should stay on Pretty Links if your setup is running smoothly, you have built your workflow around its Pro add-ons, and you have no real interest in switching. Never change a running system applies here too. Automatic keyword linking, by the way, is no longer a reason to stay: Linkjet Pro does that as well, even though the free version does not.

Switching to Linkjet is worthwhile if you do not want to pay just for basic functionality, you value GDPR compliance and local data processing, you want to automate your links through an API or AI, or you simply prefer a lean, focused plugin. Since the import wizard brings over existing links along with their statistics, the switch is low-risk, and free either way. And if you do want the Pro tier later on, our pricing sets out what that costs.

If you are still weighing up which redirect plugin best fits your site, take a look at everything Linkjet covers on its own product page: redirect types, cloaking, statistics, and the API are all explained there in detail. And if you want to get the basics of redirects right before committing to any plugin, that same page is the right place to start.

Two neighbouring topics, in case you are tidying up anyway. If your short links currently run through an external service, it is worth thinking about what happens when that service switches off one day, which is the subject of Bitly alternative: short links that still work in five years. And if you need your links mainly for affiliate marketing, the comparison in ThirstyAffiliates alternative is the better starting point than this one, because ThirstyAffiliates serves the same audience as Pretty Links.

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