The two leading open-source url shorteners projects, compared on the signals that predict whether a dependency survives: commit cadence, release history, licence and health.
YOURLS is the safer default: actively maintained maintenance, 124 commits in the last twelve months and a health score of 78/100, against 18 commits and 56/100 for Kutt. Licence still decides the commercial question — YOURLS ships under MIT, Kutt under MIT. Both are URL Shorteners projects; the category scores 28/100 on saturation with 9 open-source implementations tracked.
| Metric | YOURLS | Kutt |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | 12k | 11k |
| Maintenance status | Actively maintained | Actively maintained |
| Commits (12 months) | 124 | 18 |
| Commits (3 months) | 30 | 9 |
| Active months / 12 | 12 | 5 |
| Last commit | 2026-08-15 | 2026-07-05 |
| Last release | 2026-05-23 | 2026-07-05 |
| Licence | MIT | MIT |
| Licence family | permissive | permissive |
| Health score | 78/100 | 56/100 |
| Replaces | — | — |
| Repository | yourls/yourls | thedevs-network/kutt |
Repository metadata refreshed August 2026. Stars never decay — read the maintenance rows first.
YOURLS is a set of PHP scripts that will allow you to run Your Own URL Shortener. Features include password protection, URL customization, bookmarklets, statistics, API, plugins, jsonp.
Modern URL shortener with support for custom domains and custom URLs.
On maintenance signals, YOURLS leads: 124 commits in the last twelve months across 12 active months, versus 18 commits and 5 active months for Kutt. Star counts (12k vs 11k) reflect historical popularity, not current health, so read them second.
YOURLS is licensed under MIT (permissive) and Kutt under MIT (permissive). Permissive licences (MIT, Apache, BSD) allow closed commercial products. Copyleft (GPL) triggers on distribution and AGPL triggers on network use, which covers SaaS. Source-available licences usually forbid competing hosted services outright.
Kutt is marked actively maintained with its last commit recorded 2026-07-05 and 9 commits in the last three months. It still qualifies as having momentum, so it is a viable dependency.
The URL Shorteners category is rated open at 28/100, with 4 maintained implementations. In a crowded category every prospect can find a free version in minutes, so your wedge has to be something maintainers structurally will not build: compliance, SLAs, managed scale or a workflow they reject.
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Two maintained free tools already own this category. IdeaProof scores your idea against live competitors, market size and 1,000+ documented failures in about two minutes.
Validate your idea freeSearch this database by category and by the commercial product you would replace. It covers 1665 projects across 130 categories, each mapped to the paid tool it substitutes. If your category shows a "Crowded" verdict, a maintained free version almost certainly exists and your positioning has to account for it.
No. It means free is your price anchor. Plenty of large companies were built next to a good open-source project — the ones that failed were the ones selling the same job at a price the free tool made indefensible. Find the part of the job the project deliberately does not do, and sell that.
Each category gets a 0–100 score built from three inputs: how many implementations exist, what share of them are still actively maintained, and how far ahead the leading project is compared with the category median. 62+ is Crowded, 38–61 Contested, under 38 Open. 11 categories are Crowded and 88 are Open.