Character Counter — X, Instagram, Meta & SMS Limits

Count characters for every platform at once

Every channel has its own length limit, and most of them count characters differently. This character counter shows the total number of characters, characters without spaces, words, lines and the size of your text in UTF-8 bytes, then compares it with common limits in one view: X (Twitter) posts, Instagram captions and bios, SEO meta titles and descriptions, LinkedIn posts and YouTube titles. Each bar fills up as you type and turns red when you go over, so you can trim a sentence before you paste it into the real app.

The main counter counts characters the way people see them. An emoji with a skin tone, a flag, or a letter with a combining accent is a single character on screen even though it is stored as several code points. Counting grapheme clusters avoids surprises when a platform says your text is longer than it looks. For X the tool applies the platform's weighted rules: links always count as 23, emoji and Chinese, Japanese or Korean characters count as two, and ordinary Latin or Cyrillic letters count as one.

SMS segments: GSM-7 versus UCS-2

Text messages are billed per segment, so the encoding matters. If every character belongs to the GSM-7 alphabet, one SMS holds 160 characters, and longer messages are split into segments of 153 because each part carries a small header that lets the phone stitch them back together. A few symbols such as €, [, ], {, }, ^, ~, | and the backslash are in the GSM extension table and take two slots each.

As soon as the message contains a single character outside GSM-7 — an emoji, a curly quotation mark, a Cyrillic or Polish letter — the whole message is sent as UCS-2. Then only 70 characters fit in one SMS and 67 in each segment of a longer message, which can double or triple the cost of a campaign. The counter lists exactly which characters triggered UCS-2, so you can replace a smart quote with a straight one and drop back to the cheaper encoding.

Private by design

Everything is calculated locally in your browser as you type. Drafts of tweets, ad copy, product descriptions and private messages never leave your device, and the page keeps working offline once it has loaded.