Bento is gone. The platform shut down on 13 February 2026, a little over two years after Linktree acquired it, and the announcement came from co-founder and CTO Mugeeb Hassan in a sunset post published on 18 December 2025. Two sentences from that post are the ones that matter now: user and profile data would be deleted, and Bento pages would redirect to Linktree.
Seven months on, people are still searching for a Bento.me alternative, and most of them are not starting from a blank page. They have a URL printed on something, a link in an old article, and a profile that now points somewhere they did not choose.
This guide covers what the shutdown actually did to your links, what to carry over into a new page, and how to set the replacement up so the next platform change is somebody else's problem rather than yours.
What the redirect really does
The sunset post says Bento pages redirect to Linktree. It is worth being precise about what that means, because it is not a redirect to your Linktree.
Every bento.me path now returns a 301 to linktr.ee, the Linktree marketing homepage. We checked several profile-style URLs in September 2026 and each one landed in the same place. So a visitor who types the address from your business card, scans an old flyer, or clicks the link in a two-year-old interview does not reach your page or any page of yours. They reach a sign-up page for a product they were not looking for.
That is the part worth acting on first. Anywhere your old address still exists offline or in someone else's content, the traffic is currently being handed to Linktree's marketing team.
What you can still recover
If you exported before February, you have your content. If you did not, the page itself is not coming back: the sunset post was explicit that profile data would be deleted after the shutdown.
What usually survives is everything Bento was pointing at. The links were yours, the images live in your camera roll or your brand folder, the copy is in old captions. A bio page is a short document. Rebuilding one is an evening, not a project, and most people take the opportunity to cut the four links nobody clicked.
Before you rebuild, search your own name plus bento.me and check where the old address is still published: interviews, directory listings, podcast show notes, a partner's site. Those pages send real traffic to Linktree's homepage today. A short email asking for the URL to be updated recovers more visits than a new theme does.
What to look for in the replacement
The lesson of the past three years is not that Bento was a bad product. It is that a page you rent can be closed by the company that owns it, and Bento is not the only one. Linkpop was discontinued by Shopify in July 2025 and Koji shut down in January 2024 after Linktree acquired it. Two of those three closures ended with the same company.
So the checklist changed. What matters now is how much of your setup survives the next move.
A link in bio page still does the visible work: product cards with prices, video, maps, text blocks, social icons, and theming, with branding removal on paid plans. The setup on the profile side is the same one described in the Instagram bio link guide.
What sits behind the page matters more. If the individual destinations on your page are short links that you control, you can repoint them without touching the page, and you can move them to any page builder later without asking your audience to update anything.
Print the link you can repoint
The Bento shutdown was survivable for anyone whose printed material pointed at a link they still controlled, and expensive for everyone whose flyer said bento.me/name.
A short link with your own slug, in linx.ly/yourname format, stays editable after it is published. Point it at the bio page today, at a campaign page in November, at a different platform entirely in two years. The address on the poster does not change and the QR code on the packaging does not need reprinting.
Every link created on Linxly gets a QR code generated automatically, with your colors and logo on paid plans, and scans are counted separately from clicks. A URL shortener and the bio page sitting in the same account is also the difference between one dashboard and two.
Where the numbers live
Bento reported page views. A replacement should tell you more than that, and it should not put the reporting on a higher tier.
On Linxly every paid plan reports the same breakdown: country, city, device type, device brand, operating system, browser and referrer, with QR scans split out from link clicks. That split matters the moment a printed campaign and a social campaign run in the same week and you need to know which one moved.
If you already moved to Linktree
Plenty of ex-Bento users took the migration offer, and for a profile that needs a list of links and nothing else, that is a reasonable place to sit.
The reasons people keep looking are usually the same three: the campaign layer, the price at the tier where analytics unlock, and the fact that the page is the only thing the tool does. If you are weighing that up, the Linktree alternative breakdown covers what changes when short links, deep links and per-link reporting are part of the same account, and the Linktree vs Linxly page has the row-by-row version.
Frequently asked questions
When did Bento.me shut down?
On 13 February 2026. The closure was announced on 18 December 2025 by co-founder and CTO Mugeeb Hassan, roughly two years after Linktree acquired Bento.
Where do bento.me links go now?
To linktr.ee, the Linktree homepage. Profile URLs return a 301 to that address rather than to a specific page, so anyone following an old bento.me link does not reach your content.
Can I still get my Bento page or data back?
No. The sunset post stated that user and profile data would be deleted after the shutdown and advised exporting anything you wanted to keep beforehand. What you can recover is the material the page pointed at, which is usually enough to rebuild in an evening.
What is the best Bento.me alternative?
It depends on what the page has to do. If you only need a list of links, most bio page tools are interchangeable. If the page is one of several places you publish links, and you want the destinations to stay yours through the next platform change, a tool that combines the bio page with short links, device-based routing, QR codes and click analytics covers more of the job. Linxly starts at $0.99 a month with a 7-day trial that unlocks the full feature set.
Do I have to use Linktree because Bento redirects there?
No. The redirect is a decision made by the company that owned Bento, not a migration you agreed to. Nothing stops you from building the page elsewhere and updating the link on your profile, which takes about a minute.
How do I stop this happening again?
Publish an address you control. If the link on your printed material, your podcast notes and your email footer is a short link you can repoint, the page behind it can move as many times as it needs to without anything going dark.
The short version
Bento closed on 13 February 2026, the data went with it, and every old bento.me address now delivers your visitors to Linktree's homepage. The first job is finding where that address is still published and replacing it.
The second job is building the replacement so it survives the next closure. That means a bio page you can rebuild quickly, destinations behind short links you can repoint, and reporting that tells you which of them people actually used. Related reading: how to choose a link in bio tool, 10 link in bio examples, and the Taplink alternative comparison.