Character Counter

This free online character counter answers the question a plain count can't: not just how long a piece of text is, but whether it actually fits where it's going. Type or paste in a tweet, an SMS, a meta description, a title tag or a caption, and see it checked live against the real character limits of the platforms people write for most — X/Twitter, SMS, Google's search snippet, page titles, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn — each with its own progress bar that turns amber near the limit and red the moment it's exceeded.

Every limit matters for a different, very concrete reason: go over 280 characters on X and the post won't publish as typed; go over roughly 155-160 characters in a meta description and Google truncates it with an ellipsis in search results, often cutting off the exact sentence meant to earn the click; go past about 60 characters in a title tag and the same thing happens in the search results title. Checking against the actual limit while writing, rather than finding out after publishing, is the entire point of a character counter — a word counter alone doesn't tell you any of this.

SMS gets its own dedicated calculator, because text messages don't just have a length limit — they have a segmentation rule that determines how many messages (and how much cost, on some plans) a text actually becomes. This tool detects whether your message uses only standard GSM-7 characters (a single segment holds 160 of them, or 153 once a message needs to split across multiple segments) or contains anything outside that set — emoji, most accented characters, non-Latin scripts — which switches the whole message to Unicode encoding at a much tighter 70 characters per segment, or 67 once split. That's a real, accurate SMS segmentation calculation, not a rough guess, and it explains why a message with a single emoji in it can suddenly need twice as many segments as the same text without it.

A UTF-8 byte count is included alongside the character count too, since some systems — certain database fields, older APIs, some platforms' historical character-counting rules for CJK text — count bytes rather than characters, and the two numbers can diverge significantly for non-Latin text. Everything is calculated instantly, locally in your browser, with nothing you type ever sent to a server.