7 Best YouTube Shorts Analytics Tools (2026)

The short answer: use YouTube Studio for your own Shorts. It's free and it holds the only real swipe-away data. Add a second tool for research on everyone else's Shorts: vidIQ or TubeBuddy if you already live in their YouTube extensions, Virlo or Shortimize if you need to track many accounts over time, and FYPNow if the question is why a particular Short went viral and which Shorts are overperforming in your niche right now.

Most "YouTube Shorts analytics tool" lists blur two different jobs. One is measuring your own channel: which Shorts got pushed into the feed, and how many viewers stayed instead of swiping. The other is researching other channels: what is working in your niche, and what exactly the winning Shorts do in their first few seconds. No single tool does both well in 2026, and the vendors who claim otherwise are usually doing the second job with a coat of paint on the first.

Disclosure: FYPNow is our product. We've placed it where it honestly fits, which is not first for everything. It doesn't connect to your YouTube account yet, so it can't show your own swipe-away data. Every vendor price and feature below was checked on the vendor's own site or help centre on 25 September 2026. Where a vendor doesn't publish something, we say so rather than guess.

YouTube Shorts analytics tools compared

"Your own channel's feed data" means the private metrics only the channel owner sees: how often a Short was shown in the feed and how often viewers chose to watch instead of swiping away. Everything else on this page works from public numbers.

1. YouTube Studio (best for your own channel)

Start here. It costs nothing, and it has the one number no outside tool can reach.

Open Analytics → Content and pick the Shorts view. According to YouTube's own help page for Shorts analytics, it shows:

• Shown in feed: how many times your Shorts appeared in the Shorts feed
• How many chose to view: the percentage of times viewers watched your Short instead of swiping away
• Views, likes and subscribers, each compared to your Shorts' typical performance
• Traffic sources and a Top remixed report

The chose-to-view percentage is the closest thing Shorts has to a hook score. YouTube describes the related "Stayed to watch" figure as the share of viewers who stayed past the initial seconds of a Short. If that number is low, the first second or two of the Short is the problem, and no thumbnail or title fix will rescue it.

Where it stops: Studio only shows your own channel. It tells you viewers swiped, not what was on screen when they did. And it can't tell you what's working for the channel next to yours. Best for: every Shorts creator, as the baseline. Nothing else on this list replaces it.

2. FYPNow (best for why a Short went viral, and finding viral Shorts by niche)

FYPNow started as a TikTok analytics platform and now takes YouTube Shorts in the same analyzer. Paste a youtube.com/shorts/…, youtube.com/watch?v=… or youtu.be/… link, and the Short gets the same AI breakdown as a TikTok. The model reads the footage and audio rather than the title and view count.

What you get per Short:

• The hook type and the exact hook text, quoted
• Content DNA: format, niche, visual style, energy and pacing
• Scene-by-scene timing and a sentence-level transcript
• Presenter and production signals
• The virality factors that carried it, plus specific improvement suggestions

The second half is discovery. On the Niches wall (Viral Trends → Niches), the curated niches and any custom niche you set up surface viral Shorts next to TikToks. They're ranked by a multiplier: views divided by the channel's subscriber count. A 600K-view Short from a 20K-subscriber channel ranks above a 2M-view Short from a 10M-subscriber channel, because the first one tells you something about the content and the second mostly tells you about the audience. A TikTok / Shorts / Mixed filter and a platform badge on each card keep the two apart, and Why it went viral works on Shorts cards the same way it does on TikToks.

Where it stops, plainly:

• No YouTube account connection yet. FYPNow can't see your Shorts' swipe-away rate, shown-in-feed count or subscriber sources. Use Studio for that.
• No YouTube channel tracking. Creator tracking, breakout alerts and the growth scorecard cover TikTok only today. For Shorts you analyze one link at a time and use the niche walls.
• No shares or saves on Shorts. YouTube doesn't publish them, so Shorts cards show views, likes, comments and the multiplier.

Pricing: from $19/month on Creator, with a 7-day trial on monthly Creator and Starter (card required, no charge until day 8). A Short counts as one analyzed video, the same as a TikTok. There's no free tier for analysis; the free part of the site is the tools. Best for: creators who post to both TikTok and Shorts, and anyone who wants to reverse-engineer a competitor's Short rather than stare at its view count. The YouTube Shorts analyzer page lists exactly what the breakdown contains, and how to analyze a YouTube Short walks through a real one.

3. vidIQ (best for quick outlier checks while you browse)

vidIQ is still a YouTube-first tool built around its browser extension, and its Shorts features sit inside that.

Verified on vidIQ's help centre:

• The Shorts Scorecard appears in the extension when you watch a Short and shows total views, an outlier score comparing the Short to typical view counts, a views graph (24 hours, 7 days, 28 days or all time), upload date, views per hour and engagement rate.
• According to vidIQ's features and credits by plan page, the Shorts Scorecard is on every plan, including Free. Outliers search is capped at 8 results per search on Free and unlimited on paid plans. Competitor tracking allows up to 3 channels on Free, 20 on Boost and 50 on Max.
• Clipping turns long videos into vertical Shorts with captions, charged in AI credits (9 credits per minute of input video, per the plan page).

Pricing: vidIQ's pricing page blocked our automated check, and the help centre lists plans (Free, Pro, Boost, Max, Coaching) without prices. Check vidiq.com/pricing before you buy. Where it stops: the Scorecard tells you a Short is an outlier, not why. You still have to watch it and work out the hook yourself. Its centre of gravity is long-form YouTube SEO: keywords, titles and tags. Best for: YouTubers who already use the vidIQ extension and want outlier context without leaving the Shorts player. If you're weighing a switch, read our vidIQ alternatives roundup or the head-to-head FYPNow vs vidIQ comparison.

4. TubeBuddy (best for turning long-form into Shorts ideas)

TubeBuddy's Shorts angle is repurposing. Its Suggested Shorts tool "identifies the most engaging parts of your YouTube videos using proprietary AI" and recommends those segments as Shorts ideas, with title, description and tag advice. You open it from the Chrome extension inside YouTube Studio. TubeBuddy's tool page lists it as limited on the free level and full on Pro.

Pricing: the pricing page lists Pro, Legend and Enterprise licences, but the prices load dynamically and weren't readable when we checked. It does offer 50% off for channels under 1,000 subscribers with the coupon RisingStarBuddy. Where it stops: Suggested Shorts works from your long-form library. It won't tell you what's going viral in your niche on Shorts, and it doesn't analyze other creators' Shorts. Best for: long-form YouTubers who want to cut Shorts from videos that already held attention.

5. Virlo (best for tracking Shorts, TikTok and Reels together)

Virlo's Shorts analytics page pitches exactly the gap Studio leaves: niche-wide tracking with every Short "scored against the creator's baseline performance", filters for outlier multipliers (3x, 5x, 10x+), trending-format clustering by topic and hook type, and side-by-side comparison with TikTok and Reels. Pricing (virlo.ai/pricing): Starter is $49/month for 2,000 credits, Pro is $199/month for 12,000 credits, and Enterprise is custom. Virlo's Shorts page advertises a 7-day free trial. Credits are spent by actions in the app, including research agent runs, so model how often you'll refresh before you commit. Where it stops: the credit meter. Breadth across three platforms is worth paying for only if you publish on three platforms. Best for: agencies and multi-platform operators who need continuous tracking across Shorts, TikTok and Reels. Its outlier idea is the same one FYPNow's multiplier uses; the difference is that Virlo tracks accounts over time, while FYPNow's Shorts coverage today is per-video analysis plus the niche walls. Our FYPNow vs Virlo comparison goes through the rest.

6. Shortimize (best for tracking many accounts at scale)

Shortimize is an account-tracking tool across short-form platforms, with YouTube Shorts, TikTok, Instagram Reels, Facebook and Snapchat account analysis listed in its product menu.

Pricing (shortimize.com/pricing): Launch is $99/month (unlimited account tracking, 1,000 videos stored, 24-hour refresh, 1 seat). Scale is $249/month (5,000 videos, 12-hour refresh, 3 seats). Enterprise is custom. API, webhooks and MCP access are add-ons on Launch and Scale. There's a free trial. Where it stops: it's a tracker. It tells you how accounts and videos are performing, not what's inside the videos. Best for: brands and agencies running UGC or creator programmes where the job is counting views across dozens of accounts. The FYPNow vs Shortimize comparison sets campaign tracking against creative analysis in more detail.

7. Shorta (best for scoring one Short at a time)

Shorta's YouTube Shorts analyzer takes a Shorts URL or an uploaded video file and returns hook scoring, retention mapping, pacing feedback, clarity checks and timestamped suggestions. It offers one full analysis free, with no login and no card. Pricing: paid plan prices aren't listed on the analyzer page. Where it stops: it's a single-video tool. There's no niche discovery showing you which Shorts to analyze in the first place. Best for: checking your own draft before you post it.

Which YouTube Shorts analytics tool should you pick?

Answer one question first: are you measuring your own Shorts, or studying someone else's?

If you're measuring your own channel: YouTube Studio, full stop. Watch shown-in-feed and the chose-to-view percentage on every Short for its first few days. Add vidIQ or TubeBuddy only if you want their extension workflow on top. If you want to know why a Short went viral: FYPNow or Shorta. Shorta scores a single Short and is quick for a draft. FYPNow quotes the hook, times every scene, transcribes it and names the virality factors, and it finds the Shorts worth analyzing for you on the Niches wall. That makes it the better fit when the Short you're studying belongs to a competitor. If you need to track dozens of accounts over time: Virlo or Shortimize. Virlo leans towards research and outlier formats; Shortimize leans towards counting views across a creator programme. If you post the same video to TikTok and Shorts: FYPNow or Virlo, since both put the two platforms side by side. FYPNow's per-video breakdown is the same for a TikTok and a Short. If you're still deciding where to put your effort, our TikTok vs YouTube Shorts comparison covers reach and monetization.

A setup that covers most solo creators: YouTube Studio for your own numbers, plus one research tool matched to the job above. Before paying for anything, run a Short through the free YouTube engagement rate calculator to see where its likes and comments per view land.

Which Shorts metrics actually matter

A tool is only as useful as the numbers it shows. For Shorts, these are the ones worth your attention, in roughly this order:

• Chose to view (viewed vs swiped away). The share of feed impressions where someone watched instead of swiping. It's your hook score, and it's private to your channel.
• Average percentage viewed. How much of the Short people watched. Shorts loop, so a Short that gets rewatched can go past 100%.
• Average view duration and the retention graph. Where exactly viewers leave. A sharp drop at one timestamp usually points to one scene.
• Subscribers gained. Whether the Short turned viewers into followers, which is what makes the next Short start with an audience.
• Views ÷ subscribers. The only public outperformance measure, and the one to use on other channels' Shorts. A Short with many times more views than the channel has subscribers was carried by its content.
• Likes and comments per view. Public engagement you can compare across channels. Shares and saves aren't published for Shorts.

The first four live in YouTube Studio for your own channel. The last two are what every research tool works from.

What to look for in a Shorts analytics tool

• Does it say where its data comes from? Public data (views, likes, comments, subscribers) is available to any tool. Feed impressions and swipe-away are only available to tools you connect to your channel. A tool that shows a competitor's swipe-away rate is estimating it.
• Does it rank by outperformance? Raw views reward big channels. A views-to-subscribers ratio surfaces small channels whose content did the work, which is far more useful when you're deciding what to make next.
• Does it look inside the video? Metrics tell you a Short worked. Only a tool that reads the footage can tell you the hook landed in the first second and where each scene cuts.
• Is it honest about shares and saves? YouTube doesn't publish them for Shorts. Treat any Shorts "share rate" from a third-party tool as a guess.

Related reading

• How to analyze a YouTube Short: the analyzer, step by step
• How to find viral YouTube Shorts in your niche
• The best TikTok analytics tools, if TikTok is your main platform
• 8 best vidIQ alternatives
• FYPNow vs vidIQ