Linktree vs link2l.ink

One year of Linktree Pro at list price

$180One year of Linktree Pro at list price

Five years of Linktree Pro

$900Five years of Linktree Pro

link2l.ink Pro, published one-time price

$49link2l.ink Pro, published one-time price

The comparison people make in their heads is $15 against $49, which makes Linktree look cheap. The comparison that matters is $15 every month, forever against $49 once. Pro pays for itself against Linktree in under four months and then keeps not costing anything.

Annual billing changes the numbers a little and the shape not at all. At roughly $12 a month on the annual plan, Linktree Pro is $144 a year and $720 over five years. Premium on annual billing is around $28 a month, so $336 a year.

The part the pricing page does not show you

If you sell anything, the subscription is not your biggest cost. Linktree takes 12% on the free plan and 9% from Starter through Pro, dropping to 0% only on Premium at $35 a month. Sell $800 in a month on the free plan and you have paid $96 in fees to avoid a $15 subscription.

Linktree's free plan gives you lifetime click counts. That single design decision is why so many people upgrade, and it is worth understanding what it costs you.

A lifetime click count tells you a link has 4,120 clicks. It cannot tell you whether those clicks arrived last week or eighteen months ago, whether they came from Instagram or from your newsletter, or whether the number has been flat since March. Every question that would change what you do next needs a time series, a referrer, or a device split. Those start at $15/mo a month.

We put referrer and device breakdowns in the free tier on purpose, with a 30 day retention window. It is the single most useful thing a bio page can tell you and it is the thing the category paywalls hardest. The retention cap is where the honesty is: free gets 30 days of event-level detail, the published Pro tier gets 24 months rolling with aggregates kept indefinitely.

• Both give you: total views, total clicks, per-link click counts.
• Linktree free withholds: the time series, referrer, device, and any per-link trend.
• link2l.ink free includes: per-link click-through rate, referrer source, device split, and hour-of-day patterns for the last 30 days.
• Neither is magic: in-app browsers strip referrer data constantly, so a chunk of your traffic will read as direct on both products. The Instagram guide explains why.

Everything above is a pricing argument. This is the product argument, and it is the only reason to build another link-in-bio in 2026.

On Linktree, the order of your links is a decision you made once, probably months ago, and it stays that way until you remember to change it. That is true of every product in this category. The page is a static artefact of a decision you have stopped thinking about, while the thing it is pointing at (your newest video, your tour, your current offer) changes weekly.

Behaviour-driven ordering is the alternative. Every link gets scored from the events your own page generates, and the order follows the score. The specifics matter, because a naive version of this is worse than doing nothing:

1. Recency weighting. Clicks decay with a 14 day half-life, so a link that went viral two months ago stops holding the top slot on the strength of history.
2. Smoothing. Click-through rate is shrunk toward a prior worth roughly 20 views at 5%, so a link with two clicks from three views does not leapfrog a link with three hundred clicks from four thousand.
3. A newness allowance. New links get a small exploration bonus that decays over about a week, because a link nobody has seen yet cannot earn its way up from the bottom of the page.
4. A sparse-data guard. Below roughly 50 page views in 90 days, the engine renders your manual order and says nothing. Sorting noise is worse than not sorting.
5. Pins that always win. A pinned link stays on top in every mode. The owner outranks the algorithm, permanently.

Linktree's AI work goes the other way. The insights chat explains your analytics to you in plain language on the paid tiers, which is genuinely useful, but the output is a sentence rather than a change. You still have to open the editor and drag something. The loop stays open.

Two of the loudest complaints about Linktree have nothing to do with features.

The first is the public suspension page. When an account is taken down, the URL serves a page announcing that the account has been banned, which every follower who taps the link in your bio then sees. Whatever the moderation decision, publishing it to your audience is a choice, and it is the most emotionally charged complaint in the category. Our position is that a takedown should be a quiet 404 and a message to the owner.

The second is billing. Surprise renewals and charges after cancellation come up repeatedly across review sites for several products here. A one-time purchase does not fix bad billing on principle, it just removes the surface: there is no renewal to be surprised by.

On exports, plan for the worst on either product. Screenshot or export your click data before you cancel anything, because none of it transfers between tools and most of it disappears with the account.

1. You need to be recognised. A linktr.ee URL in a media kit needs no explanation. 70M+ users is a real asset, and being unfamiliar is a real cost for us.
2. You use the integrations. Linktree's marketplace connects to more services than anything else here. If your page depends on a specific embed, check it exists before you move.
3. You want to sell from the page today. Linktree has a working checkout for digital products. We do not have one at all.
4. You want to buy something finished. Linktree is a mature product with a support organisation. We are early, the paid checkout is not live, and some of what we describe is still rolling out. If that is a dealbreaker, it should be.

If you already pay Linktree $15 a month and you use the analytics, you are getting something for the money. The question is whether a report you read is worth more than a page that reorders itself, and whether it is worth $900 over five years.

If you are on Linktree's free plan, the comparison is easier, because the free plan is deliberately blind. You can have referrer and device data for nothing on our free tier and decide from there whether the rest interests you.

Worth reading next: the full alternatives comparison if Linktree is not the only product you are weighing, the pay-once options if the subscription is the whole objection, and the Beacons head-to-head if you want the everything app instead.