01
Why the same text has different lengths
A "character" isn't the same thing everywhere. X gives most letters a weight of 1 but counts every emoji and every CJK character as 2, and turns every link into 23 characters, however long it is. YouTube limits the description to 5,000 bytes, so an accented letter costs 2 and many emoji 4. TikTok counts UTF-16 units, so emoji and styled "fancy" letters usually count as 2.
That's why this counter shows a separate number for each platform, measured in that platform's unit, rather than one total.
02
The limits, platform by platform
X: 280 weighted characters on a standard account. Threads: 500 characters, and a longer post fails to publish rather than being cut. Instagram: 2,200 characters and 30 hashtags. TikTok: 2,200. YouTube: a 100-character title and a 5,000-byte description. LinkedIn: about 3,000, Pinterest: 500 and Snapchat: 160, from secondary sources.
The Instagram, TikTok, Threads, YouTube, Pinterest and Snapchat numbers are the same ones Uplonic applies when it publishes, so the counter and our caption preview always agree.
03
What the extra numbers mean
Characters is what you see: a family emoji or a flag counts as one. Bytes is the UTF-8 size, the unit YouTube measures. Hashtags counts every #word, useful because Instagram stops at 30.
Over the X limit? The thread maker splits long text into numbered posts at sentence boundaries.
Sources and methodology
Numbers checked on October 17, 2026.
X uses the weighting from its developer documentation (twitter-text v3: links 23, emoji and CJK 2). Bare domains like example.com count as links when they end in a common ending (.com, .io, .hu and others); this is close to X's rule, not its full list. The other limits match Uplonic's publishing rules. Everything runs in your browser.
- Counting characters — X Developer Platform, October 17, 2026
- IG User Media — Reel specifications — Meta for Developers, October 8, 2026
- Content Posting API — Direct Post reference (title: 2,200 UTF-16 runes) — TikTok for Developers, October 17, 2026
- Videos resource (title 100 characters, description 5,000 bytes) — YouTube Data API, October 17, 2026
- Threads Posts (text posts are limited to 500 characters) — Meta for Developers, October 17, 2026
