TinyURL is the name people reach for when they just need a short link, fast, no account. KooLink is what we built. Both do the core job. The differences matter if you share links at volume or work in an AI agent.
Price
TinyURL. Free, no signup, unlimited links. You can shorten as much as you want. There is a premium tier for features like branded domains and detailed analytics.
KooLink. Free forever. Unlimited links. No signup to shorten. Same no-account promise, but with honest click tracking when you do create one.
Signup
Both let you shorten without an account. TinyURL and KooLink are on the same side of that line — push a URL, get a link.
Click tracking
This is the first real difference.
TinyURL has no meaningful click analytics on the free tier. You get an anonymous short link and that is it. To see anything you need a (paid) account.
KooLink tracks views honestly — and filters out bot traffic rather than inflating your numbers. When you want to know whether a link is actually being clicked, you can, for free.
Link length
Both produce short slugs. Ours are 3–8 characters, so a kool.ink/xyz link fits a tweet, a print page, or a commit message. TinyURL links are comparable.
The difference that matters in 2026: MCP
This is what TinyURL does not have. KooLink is a hosted MCP server.
If you work in Claude, Cursor, Windsurf, or any MCP-native client, you point it at the server and it gets a shorten_url tool. The agent shortens the URL itself — no browser, no copy-paste.
https://mcp.kool.ink
As AI agents become where work actually happens, the shortener should be inside the agent. TinyURL does not offer this. Neither does almost anyone else — that is why KooLink's short list is short.
There is also a terminal one-liner:
npx @koolink/koolink https://example.com/very/long/path
# → https://kool.ink/xyz
Bottom line
- Quick anonymous link, nothing to measure → TinyURL works fine.
- A shortener that tracks clicks for free, is unlimited, and works inside an AI agent → KooLink.
Most people who share links regularly need more than a bare shortened URL — they need to know which links work, and increasingly they want the tool inside their agent. For that, KooLink.