Character Counter

A character counter counts the number of characters in a piece of text, with and without spaces, and reports the related counts you usually need alongside it: words, sentences, paragraphs, lines, reading time and byte size. You paste or type your text and the numbers update on every keystroke, so you always know exactly how long the current draft is without pasting it into a word processor or counting by hand.

The reason character count matters more than word count in many places is that so many systems enforce a hard character limit. A post on X is capped at 280 characters, an SMS segment at 160, an Instagram bio at 150, and a search result truncates a title around 60 characters and a meta description around 160. Go one character over and the platform either refuses the text or cuts it off mid-word, which is why writers, marketers and developers reach for a character count far more often than a word count when the space is fixed. When the brief sets a word limit instead, such as an essay or an article target, the word counter is the better fit: it adds average word length and the most frequent words, with the same client-side counting.

This tool adds a live limits table on top of the raw counts. As you type it compares your current character count against the caps used by search engines and the major social networks, and shows for each one whether you are within the limit and how many characters you have left. That turns an abstract number into a direct answer to the real question, which is whether this text will fit where you intend to publish it. It also measures the exact UTF-8 byte size, which is what actually counts on systems that budget by bytes rather than characters, where an emoji or an accented letter costs more than one.

As a character counter for Twitter, it checks your draft against the X / Twitter Post row of that table. Paste "Shipping the new release today. Changelog and upgrade notes are in the docs." and the row shows 204 characters remaining of 280, because the post is 76 characters long. The same table makes it an SMS character counter, with a 160-character single-segment row, and a character counter for Instagram, with rows for the 2,200-character caption and the 150-character bio. The figures are raw text length, so a link or an emoji can count differently on the platform itself.

Everything runs in your browser. Nothing you type is uploaded, logged or sent anywhere, so it is safe for drafts, private notes and confidential copy. There is no signup and no limit on how much text you can paste, and once the page has loaded it keeps working with no network connection. The counter handles emoji and other astral characters correctly when measuring bytes, and treats a run of whitespace as a single separator so pasted text with irregular spacing still counts cleanly.