Character Counter
Count characters live against Twitter/X, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, SMS and SEO limits — free, instant, no signup needed.
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Characters
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Platform Character Limits
About This Tool
The TulTek Character Counter tracks your text length in real time and checks it against the character limits of the platforms and formats you actually publish to — X (Twitter), Instagram captions and bios, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube titles and descriptions, SMS messages, and SEO meta descriptions and title tags. Each row shows a live progress bar that shifts from teal to amber as you approach the limit, and turns red the moment you go over — so you always know exactly how much room you have left before you hit publish.
Why Character Limits Matter
Every platform enforces character limits for a reason, and going over them has real consequences. X truncates or rejects posts beyond 280 characters. Instagram cuts off captions in the feed after roughly two lines and hides the rest behind a "more" link, and its bio field hard-caps at 150 characters with no exceptions. LinkedIn posts get collapsed behind a "see more" prompt well before the 3,000-character ceiling, which quietly kills engagement if your hook is buried past the fold.
SEO fields are just as unforgiving, but for a different reason: search engines measure pixel width, not character count, then truncate with an ellipsis. A title tag over roughly 60 characters and a meta description over roughly 160 characters typically get cut off in Google's results, which can hide your call-to-action or make your snippet look incomplete right when a searcher is deciding whether to click. Staying inside these limits keeps your full message visible in the search results page.
SMS works differently again. A single SMS segment holds 160 characters when using standard GSM-7 encoding. Go one character over and most carriers don't reject the message — they silently split it into two segments and, on many plans, bill it as two messages. If you send bulk SMS campaigns, staying under 160 characters isn't just about neatness, it directly affects cost and deliverability.
YouTube is more forgiving on paper — titles allow 100 characters and descriptions allow 5,000 — but practical limits are tighter. Titles get truncated in search results and suggested-video thumbnails well before 100 characters on mobile, and only the first couple of lines of a description show above the "show more" fold, so the characters that matter most are the ones at the very start.
Because every platform truncates differently and updates its limits from time to time, checking your text against all of them by hand is tedious. This tool does it instantly, live, as you type, entirely inside your browser — nothing you paste is ever uploaded or stored, so it's as fast and private as counting characters gets.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is my text stored or sent anywhere?
No. All counting happens locally in your browser using JavaScript. Your text is never uploaded, logged, or sent to any server.
Why do some platforms count characters differently than I expect?
Most platforms count every character including spaces, emoji, and punctuation as one unit, though some emoji and non-Latin scripts can count as two or more characters on certain platforms due to Unicode encoding. This tool counts raw JavaScript string length, which matches how most Western platforms count.
What happens if I go over a platform's limit?
The progress bar turns red and the counter shows how many characters you're over by. Depending on the platform, going over either truncates your text, blocks submission, or (for SMS) splits your message into multiple billed segments.
Why are the SEO limits (title tag, meta description) approximate?
Google truncates search snippets based on pixel width, not a fixed character count, so the exact cutoff varies slightly by character width. 60 characters for title tags and 160 for meta descriptions are safe, widely used benchmarks that keep your text visible in almost all cases.
Can I use this for languages other than English?
Yes. The counter supports any Unicode text, including Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Cyrillic, and emoji.