Character counting matters whenever a system imposes a character-based constraint: a tweet, a meta description, an SMS, a password field, a database column, an API query string. While word counting measures the scope of your writing, character counting measures whether your writing fits. This character counter displays your total character count — with and without spaces — plus byte size in UTF-8 encoding, sentence count, paragraph count, and both reading and speaking time estimates, all updating live as you type. It runs entirely in your browser with no sign-up required. For a word-focused view with benchmarks on blog posts, speeches, and academic essays, see the Word Counter.
Characters with spaces is the number that matters for social platform limits — every space, tab, newline, and visible character counts toward the limit. Characters without spaces removes all whitespace and counts only visible characters: letters, digits, and punctuation. Some academic style guides — particularly for abstracts and journal submissions — specify character counts without spaces, and some URL shorteners calculate slug length on visible characters only. This tool shows both simultaneously so you never need to run two separate counts.
Platform Character Limits at a Glance — as of June 2026
Each platform enforces its own character limit rules. Use the dedicated counter for precision tracking:
| Platform / Field | Limit | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Twitter/X post | 280 | URLs count as 23; emoji = 2 each |
| SMS message | 160 | Drops to 70 per segment with emoji or non-GSM chars |
| Instagram caption | 2,200 | First 125 visible in feed before truncation |
| Facebook post | 63,206 | First 477 visible in feed; bio = 101 |
| LinkedIn post | 3,000 | First 210 visible; headline = 220; About = 2,600 |
| TikTok caption | 4,000 | First 120 visible in feed; bio = 80 |
| Meta description | 160 | Google shows 150–160 before truncation in search |
| SEO title tag | 60 | 50–60 chars before search engines truncate or rewrite |
Byte size — shown in the stats panel — is not the same as character count for multilingual or emoji-heavy text. In UTF-8 encoding, every standard English letter or digit is 1 byte, but accented characters like é are 2 bytes, most CJK characters are 3 bytes, and many emoji require 4 bytes. Platform limits are always stated in characters (code points or code units depending on the platform's implementation), not bytes — but if you are writing to a database column defined as VARCHAR(255) or hitting an API that limits request size in bytes rather than characters, the Byte size stat tells you the true storage cost of your text.