cutt.ly vs cutty.dev — they are not the same, explaining the difference

There is a moment that almost everyone who has ever searched for something by ear knows. Someone drops a name in a conversation, you catch it, type it into a search engine, and click on the first sensible result. You create an account. You shorten the link. And after two days, you realize that it wasn't actually the site your friend was talking about. Just something very similar to it.

This happens all the time with the pair cutt.ly and cutty.dev. People treat one as a typo of the other. "But it's the same thing, just written differently by someone." Well, no. These are two separate projects, made by two different companies, with completely different ideas about what to do with the data flowing through them. And that is exactly why the question cutt.ly vs cutty.dev returns so often that it is worth breaking it down into its component parts.

Why do we even confuse these two names

Say them out loud. "Katli". "Kati". Do you hear how close they lie to each other? Both stem from the same English root, from the verb "cut", so when someone recommends a trimmer to you over the phone or dictates an address from memory, the probability of a mistake is significant. It's nobody's stupidity. It's a collision of brands, quite ordinary, like the many found on the internet.

Only the similarity ends with the sound. Underneath, it is not one service spread across two domains. These are two tools that, while solving the same problem (too long, ugly links), approach it from two different sides of the barricade.

To put it simply. cutt.ly is a veteran. It has been operating for years, has grown, and has developed an extensive set of marketing tools, paid plans, and numerous integrations. A classic SaaS with a strong tilt towards analytics, where the essence is how much data you can squeeze out of every click. cutty.dev is a younger project, with a different weight distributed from the start: servers and processing in the European Union, privacy not as an add-on in the pricing plan, but as an assumption built into its foundation. Less of a combine harvester, more of a scalpel.

If I had to fit this into one sentence on a wall: cutt.ly targets the marketer who wants to know everything about their audience. cutty.dev targets someone who wants to shorten a link and, at the same time, not put the profile of the people clicking that link up for sale.

The essence lies where no one looks: in the data

Every shortener, literally every single one, positions itself in the middle. Between the person who clicks and the page that person wants to reach. From this position, everything is visible. Who clicked, at what time, from which device, and roughly from where. This is not an option that can be turned off. It is the nature of a shortener. The only real question is: what the tool owner does with this knowledge.

And here the paths diverge for good.

At cutty.dev, the infrastructure is located in the EU, so your data does not travel across the ocean by default before you even have time to think about it. The IP addresses of clickers are not stored in raw form, but are hashed, meaning they are converted into a string from which you cannot reconstruct a specific person. You still receive statistics. You know how many clicks there were, roughly from where, and how they are distributed over time. It simply ends at the level of a number, rather than an individual name. And there is no profiling machine behind it for advertisements or background data trading.

It is a difference in philosophy, not just settings. One school says: let's collect everything we can, because data is fuel, and you can never have too much fuel. The second: let's collect exactly as much as needed for the tool to work, and not a single byte more. cutty.dev stands on the latter side. You may disagree with this; you may believe that a marketer simply won't be harmed by more data. But it is worth knowing that you are choosing between these two attitudes, rather than between a "better" or "worse" logo.

A trifle that turns out to be not so trivial

Account. In a typical SaaS model, to do anything beyond the simplest shortening (custom domain, statistics, editing), you must register, and often immediately enter a paid plan. cutty.dev allows you to shorten a link without creating an account. Registration is an option, not a gate at the entrance.

It sounds trivial until you find yourself in a situation where you just want to drop one link in a comment under someone else's post or on a flyer for a local announcement. And suddenly you have to leave an email for another service, confirm it, set a password. For one single link. Sometimes the best feature is the one that isn't there: the lack of compulsion.

A feature you will appreciate only in hindsight

There is something in cutty.dev that looks insignificant at first glance, but can save a lot of nerves and money. You can change the link's destination after it has been created, without touching the short address itself.

I will show it with numbers, because that is how it is best seen:

cutty.dev/promo-lato  →  początkowo: /landing/oferta-czerwiec
                          po miesiącu: /landing/oferta-lipiec

Imagine you are printing a thousand flyers with the address cutty.dev/promo-lato and a QR code. Let's say the printing cost you 280 PLN. After a month, the June offer ends, the July one begins, and the landing page is different. In the ordinary world, you throw these flyers away and print new ones, which means another 280 PLN down the drain. Here, you simply go into the panel, redirect that same address to a new page, and that's it. The flyers still work. The QR still scans correctly because it leads to the same short link, only now that link points somewhere else. To top it off, there is a branded suffix so the address doesn't look like random gibberish, and a QR code generated from that same link.

(As a side note: most people don't think of a link as something that can live longer than a campaign. And then a site reorganization comes along, subpage addresses change, and suddenly half of the printed materials lead nowhere. A permanent address that can be rerouted in the middle is a small insurance policy for the future, which you only remember when its absence starts to hurt.)

Which one to finally choose

No beating around the bush. If you live by performance marketing, need pixels, integrations three screens down, and analytics that breaks every click into atoms, then cutt.ly is a mature and feature-rich tool, and will most likely do what you expect from it. However, if you care more about audience data staying with them, about everything being located in the EU, and about being able to shorten a link without creating an account and then freely redirecting it to a new page, then you are talking about a different tool. It is called cutty.dev and you can find it here.

The stupidest thing you can do in the cutt.ly vs cutty.dev dispute is to convince yourself that one is objectively better. It isn't. These are two different projects with different priorities, built for different people.

And finally one personal thought, because I have been thinking about this for a long time. For years we were taught that "more data" is always a plus, that the more we know about clickers, the smarter we act. The longer I look at it from the outside, the less certain I am of this. Sometimes knowing that a specific person clicked a link at 23:47 from a phone on a bus does not make anyone smarter. It only makes someone's database thicker. And maybe that is exactly what this whole choice is about: not which of these two addresses you enter, but what kind of internet you want to be a part of.