Linkette vs Bento: where to go now that Bento is shutting down (Feb 2026)

Bento.me shuts down February 13, 2026 — pages redirect to Linktree, data is deleted. Linkette is the design-first European destination for the migration.

Let us lead with the news that reframes this entire comparison: Bento.me is shutting down on February 13, 2026. Linktree acquired Bento in June 2023 and is now sunsetting the platform. After the shutdown date, Bento URLs redirect to Linktree and the underlying data — images, links, customizations — is permanently deleted. There is an export window until then. Reporting on the shutdown is collected by AlternativeTo (December 2025). As of this writing, navigating to bento.me already 301-redirects to linktr.ee.

If you are reading this comparison, you almost certainly arrived from a "Bento alternative" search and you have a deadline.

At a glance

What Bento was, and why this hurts

Bento was a Toronto-based, design-led link-in-bio launched in 2021. It won the Product Hunt Golden Kitty in 2022 and built a small, devoted following among creators who wanted something visually nicer than the standard Linktree button stack. The product had a Notion-like editor, custom blocks, and a refined aesthetic that felt intentional in a category mostly defined by sticker libraries.

In June 2023, Linktree acquired Bento. The product continued under its own brand for roughly two and a half years. In late 2025, Linktree announced the shutdown. The pattern is familiar — Linktree did the same thing with Koji, another competitor it acquired in January 2024, ending that product shortly after.

The honest read: Bento's design-led posture was the most direct match for what we are trying to do at Linkette, and the platform's disappearance leaves a real gap in the market for creators who valued aesthetic taste over feature breadth.

What you need to do before February 13, 2026

This is the practical part. If you have a Bento page:

1. Export your data. Log into Bento and download your archive (a zip of your pages, images, and link metadata). Do this before the shutdown date.
2. Take screenshots. Your visual customizations do not survive the export in a re-renderable form. Screenshot every page state you care about.
3. Decide your destination before the redirect. After Feb 13 your Bento URL points at Linktree, whether or not you have done anything. If you have not picked an alternative, the choice is made for you.
4. Update the link in your social bios. Instagram, TikTok, YouTube. Wherever your Bento URL is pasted today.

We are building a Bento importer at Linkette that takes a bento.me/<username> URL (while it still resolves) plus your export zip and re-creates the page structure as a draft. It will not perfectly preserve every visual choice — different design system, different blocks — but it gets you 80% of the way to a finished page.

Where Bento was better than Linkette (while it lasted)

We should name what Bento did well, because pretending the answer was always "use Linkette" would be dishonest.

1. Block-based composition. Bento's editor let you drag rectangular blocks of arbitrary aspect ratio and compose a wall — closer to a personal site than a button stack. Linkette v1 is more constrained (vertical list of links with a header). Multi-block layouts are on the v2 roadmap.

2. Embed depth. Spotify, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, custom HTML — Bento embedded a wider set of media types. Linkette v1 supports a tighter set deliberately.

3. Mobile editor. Bento had genuinely usable mobile editing. Linkette v1 mobile editor exists but the desktop editor is the primary surface.

Where Linkette wins (and where the gap is permanent now that Bento is gone)

1. We are not for sale. Bootstrapped. No Series A pressure to acqui-hire into Linktree. The reason your URL would not survive at Linkette is meaningfully different from the reason it did not survive at Bento.

2. EU data residency. Postgres on Supabase eu-west-3 (Paris). CDN through BunnyCDN (Slovenia). Email via Brevo (France). Analytics via Plausible (Estonia, cookie-free). For European creators, "where does my page actually live" has a one-word answer: Paris.

3. Mistral AI, not OpenAI. Every AI feature — onboarding, bio assistant, ghost-text — runs on a French model. Per-creator usage ledger you can inspect.

4. Editorial taste, not SaaS-modern. Cream paper (#FAF6EE), Fraunces variable serif, terracotta accents, warm near-black dark mode. This is the aesthetic neighborhood Bento occupied; we hope to be a worthy successor for the creators who chose Bento for that reason.

5. Cookie-free public pages. Zero tracking cookies on a Linkette page in a fresh browser session. Once your Bento URL redirects, that property is gone.

Honest alternatives we want to acknowledge

If Linkette is not the right fit, the design-conscious creators leaving Bento generally have three serious destinations to consider:

• Linkette (us) — EU sovereignty, editorial design, Mistral AI
• Cards.so / Wlo.link — design-first US options without the Linkette EU angle
• Self-host a one-page Astro / Next.js site — most flexibility, highest effort

We mention these because the right answer for a creator depends on what they valued about Bento. If it was the design system, several options exist. If it was the European-feeling restraint paired with the engineering quality, that is the position Linkette is trying to claim.

The recommendation

If you valued Bento's block-based editor and you need that workflow today — wait for Linkette's v2 multi-block release, or look at one of the self-hosting paths.

If you valued Bento because it felt designed rather than assembled, and you would also like your audience's data to stop being processed in the United States — pick Linkette. We are bootstrapped, EU-hosted, and built around the same conviction that drew people to Bento in the first place: a link-in-bio can be a small, considered object rather than a marketing stack.

Linkette is in private beta for EU creators, with Bento import support shipping in January 2026. Join the waitlist →