Paste a caption to count its hashtags and characters, and see instantly whether it fits the platform you are posting to — including the limits people most often get wrong.
Most creators know Instagram’s thirty-hashtag cap and almost nothing else. These are the numbers that matter in practice:
| Platform | Hashtag limit | Caption / text limit | What to actually aim for |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30 | 2,200 characters | 5–12 tags — the cap is not a target | |
| TikTok | 5 (hard cap) | 2,200 characters | 3–5 tags, none of them #fyp |
| YouTube | 3 visible hashtags | 5,000 char description; 500 char tag field | 2–3 hashtags; 10–15 tags |
| No hard cap | 3,000 characters | 3 tags — more reads as unprofessional | |
| X | No hard cap | 280 characters (longer for premium) | 1–2 — tags compete with your words |
| Threads | Single topic tag convention | 500 characters | 3–5 relevant tags |
| 20 | 500 character description | 6–8 descriptive, keyword-shaped tags | |
| No hard cap | 63,206 characters | 1–3 — hashtags carry little weight here |
YouTube’s 500-character tag field. It is a total budget across all tags, not per tag. Long-tail tags eat it quickly, and anything past 500 characters is silently dropped — so the tags you cared about most may not be registering at all.
TikTok’s five-tag cap. It is enforced, not advisory. If you paste ten tags, only some register. Since #fyp and #viral carry no classification information, spending slots on them wastes a meaningful share of the budget.
Filling all thirty Instagram slots almost always means adding tags that do not describe your post, which dilutes the topical signal the recommendation system uses to decide who sees it. The useful number is however many tags you can write while every one is still honest.
Need the full tag set too?Tagly’s main generator returns ranked hashtags, keywords, captions, titles and a publish package for any topic — free, no login.Open the generator →Thirty per post, but five to twelve accurate tags typically outperform a padded block of thirty, because irrelevant tags dilute the topical signal.
Five, and it is a hard platform cap. Paste more and only some register, so spending slots on #fyp or #viral wastes part of a small budget.
500 characters total across all tags, not per tag. Long-tail tags consume it quickly and anything beyond the limit is dropped silently.
No. All counting runs in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, stored, or sent to a server.
3,000 characters, though posts truncate behind "see more" after roughly the first two lines, so the opening carries most of the weight.
Because the limits are ceilings, not recommendations. The tool flags when you exceed the count that actually performs well on that platform, which is lower than the cap on every platform.