Paste a draft and the ring gauge fills in real time, no button press, no page reload. Switch platforms from the dropdown or the quick-pick chips and every number updates instantly: characters used, characters remaining, and a colour shift from the platform accent to amber at the warning threshold and red when you go over.
Thirteen platforms are built in, from a 60-character SEO title to a 5,000-character YouTube description. The limits are the current published values: X at 280, LinkedIn posts at 3,000, Instagram captions at 2,200, a single SMS segment at 160, and meta descriptions at 160. None of these require a login or an API call. The whole tool is a lookup table and a text.length comparison.
Below the main gauge a second panel shows how the same character count fares against every platform at once. Clicking any row in that table switches the active platform, which is the fastest way to decide which version of a message fits where.
What Each Column Shows
- Ring gauge: fills proportionally from 0 to the limit, capped visually at 125% so the overflow is visible without hiding the number. The colour transitions from the platform accent to amber when you cross the
warningAt threshold (typically 80–90% of the limit) and to red when you exceed the limit. - Status line: reads 247 remaining, Limit reached, or 13 over limit. Only one state is shown at a time, and it updates on every keystroke.
- Chars / No Spaces / Words / Lines / Sentences: five secondary counts in the strip below the textarea. These update alongside the ring and do not depend on the selected platform.
- Left / Over pill: the highlighted pill mirrors the status line in compact form and turns red with a minus prefix when you exceed the limit.
- Platform comparison table: appears as soon as you type. Each row shows a mini progress bar and the remaining count for that platform. Rows that are over show the overage in red; rows past the warning threshold show amber.
Format Notes: Each Platform and Its Published Cap
- X / Twitter Post: 280 chars. The limit applies to the composed text. URLs are shortened to 23 characters by Twitter's t.co wrapper regardless of their actual length, but this tool counts the raw pasted characters.
- LinkedIn Post: 3,000 chars. Only the first 210 characters show before the see more truncation on desktop feeds.
- Instagram Caption: 2,200 chars. Only the first 125 characters show in the feed before truncation.
- SMS (single segment): 160 characters for a standard GSM-7 message. Once you cross 160, carriers split it into multiple segments of 153 characters each. This tool counts one segment only; multi-segment billing is outside scope.
- SEO Meta Title: 60 characters. Google truncates longer titles with an ellipsis in search results. Pixel width is the true constraint (about 580 px), but character count is the practical proxy.
- Custom: set any limit from 1 to 100,000 characters. The warning threshold stays at 85% of whatever you enter.
Tricky Inputs: Emoji, Newlines and Invisible Characters
- Emoji count as multiple characters in JavaScript's
String.length. A single 🦊 is 2 code units; a family emoji with ZWJ sequences can be 8 or more. Twitter's own counter treats most emoji as 2 characters regardless of code-unit length, so this tool may differ by 1 to 2 characters from what Twitter's composer shows. - Newlines count as 1 character each (
\n), so a tweet with two line breaks has 2 extra characters toward the 280 limit. - Zero-width joiners, soft hyphens, and other invisible Unicode code points count toward
text.length and therefore toward platform limits. Copying text from a rich-text editor may carry invisible characters that platforms will count. - Pasting text with Windows line endings (
\r\n) adds 2 characters per newline instead of 1. The tool normalises the Lines count but not text.length, so the ring count may exceed what you expect for multi-line pastes from Windows. - The textarea itself imposes no character limit. You can paste a 100,000-character document; the ring simply shows 100,000 / limit and the over-limit banner appears immediately.