Character Counter
Count characters as you type and see at a glance whether your text fits common limits: an X post, an SMS, a search-result title or description, and more.
- Runs in your browser
- No sign-up
- Free to use
- Letters
- 0
- Digits
- 0
- Spaces
- 0
- Punctuation & symbols
- 0
- SMS
- –
Limits
How to use Character Counter
- Type or paste your text into the box.
- Read the character counts, with and without spaces, plus letters, digits and bytes.
- Check the limit bars to see how much room is left for each platform; a bar turns red when you go over.
- Enter your own limit in the custom field if you are working to a different maximum.
Character Counter features
Platform limit bars
Progress bars for X, SMS, meta title, meta description, Instagram captions and LinkedIn posts.
Emoji counted correctly
An emoji or accented letter counts as one character, the way people perceive it.
SMS segment calculator
Detects whether a message fits the GSM alphabet or needs Unicode, and how many message parts it will use.
Custom limit
Set any maximum and see characters remaining.
Detailed breakdown
Letters, digits, spaces, punctuation, lines and UTF-8 byte size.
Private
Text is counted locally and never sent anywhere.
When to use Character Counter
- Writing a post that must fit a social network's limit.
- Keeping an SMS campaign message within one segment to control cost.
- Drafting page titles and meta descriptions that will not be cut off in search results.
- Filling in forms and database fields with a maximum length.
Character Counter FAQ
Do spaces count as characters?
Yes, for almost every limit, including social networks and SMS. The tool shows both figures so you can use whichever your requirement specifies.
Why does an emoji use so much of my SMS?
Standard SMS uses a 7-bit alphabet allowing 160 characters. Any character outside it, including emoji and many non-Latin letters, switches the whole message to Unicode, which allows only 70 characters per message.
How long should a meta title and description be?
Search engines truncate by pixel width rather than a fixed count, but about 60 characters for a title and 155–160 for a description are safe working limits.
What is the difference between characters and bytes?
A character is what you see; bytes are how it is stored. In UTF-8, English letters take one byte, accented letters two, most Asian characters three and emoji four. Byte size matters for database columns and some APIs.
Does X count every character as one?
Mostly. X counts most characters as one but treats emoji and characters from some scripts, such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean, as two, and any URL as 23. The bar here is a close guide for plain text.
Why character limits exist
Limits come from technical constraints and from design. The 160-character SMS dates from the 1980s, when messages had to fit in spare capacity on the signalling channel of mobile networks. Longer texts are still split into segments and reassembled, and each segment is billed separately, which is why marketers care about staying under the limit.
On the web, limits are about presentation. A search result has room for only so much title and description before it is cut off with an ellipsis, and a truncated message is a wasted one. Writing to the limit means the most important words are the ones people actually see.