Tally - Word Counter is a free online tool to count the number of characters, words, paragraphs, and lines in your text. It can also show counts for different types of characters like letters, digits, spaces, punctuation, and symbols/special characters.

Tally runs entirely in your browser, with no accounts, ads, or privacy-invasive tracking. Unlike many tools, it supports multiple languages, computes counts in real-time, and offers a modern, themeable interface (including dark mode).

Make sure you have the right number of words for your essay or post by counting them instantly with Tally.

• 🧮 Text statistics: Analyze your text in multiple ways
  • View general counts: characters, words, sentences, paragraphs, and lines
  • View character counts by type: spaces, digits, letters, punctuation, and symbols/special characters
• 🚀 Real-time updates: Optimized for speed, Tally updates the counts in real-time as you type
• 🌍 Multilingual support: Accurate token segmentation and classification across many languages and scripts
• 🎨 Themes: Save your eyes with the built-in dark mode, or try one of the other included themes
• 🎛️ Options: Customize your experience with various options
  • Warn on large input text: Avoid accidentally pasting large amounts of text
  • Remember input text: Save your text locally to continue where you left off
  • Enable debug logging: Print debug logs to the console for troubleshooting purposes
• 🆓 100% Free & Ad-Free: Use the tool without distractions, privacy-invasive tracking, or paywalls — no ads, no sign-ups, no limitations
• 👨🏻‍💻 Open-source: Know how to code? Help make Tally better by contributing to the project on GitHub, or copy it and make your own version!

• 📚 Students & Educators: Check essay lengths and assignment limits quickly and accurately.
• ✍️ Writers & Bloggers: Track writing progress and optimize structure for readability.
• 📄 Legal & Business Professionals: Ensure documents meet required character or word counts.
• 📱 Social Media Managers: Stay within platform limits for tweets, posts, and bios.
• 🧪 Developers & Testers: Analyze input strings and view line counts for code and data.
• 🌐 SEO Specialists: Optimize content length for meta descriptions, headings, and body text.

Dark theme	Light theme

Teal theme	Dusk theme

Counting functionality is provided by the related tally-ts library. Refer to its documentation for more information on how the counting algorithm works.

1. Install Bun (we use Bun, but npm probably works too)

2. Clone the repository

   git clone https://github.com/twocaretcat/Tally.git
   cd Tally

3. Install dependencies

   bun install

4. Build & Serve

   bun run dev                       # Start the dev server, or
   bun run build && bun run preview  # Build for production & preview the build

You can access Tally at tally.johng.io. If your preferred language is supported, you will automatically be redirected to the appropriate page. If not, we'll show the English version, but you can always manually change the language later.

Typing or pasting type into the editor will update the counts in real-time. The output counts are currently separated into 2 sections:

• General: Counts for characters, words, sentences, paragraphs, and lines.
• Characters: Breakdowns for different character types like spaces, letters, digits, punctuation, and symbols

You can change the language with the language selector. Choosing a language changes the UI text to that language and adjusts the segmentation rules that determine how graphemes, words, and sentences are counted.

Locale selector - v4

Tally uses a browser API to perform segmentation, so the accuracy of your preferred language mostly depends on the browser's support for that language. Most languages follow similar segmentation rules, so even if your language is not officially supported by Tally, you can likely still get accurate counts by selecting a related language.

You can change the site theme using the theme selector. If you select Auto, the site will automatically switch between light and dark themes based on your system preferences.

Theme selector - v4

Option selector - v4

When you enable the Remember input text option, any text you enter is stored in your browser and restored on reload. When it is disabled, the editor stops restoring text (and erases any previously stored input text). This is disabled by default.

When you enable the Warn on large input text option, the app will show a warning when you try to paste or type a large amount or text (currently 1,000,000 characters). You can choose to either continue or cancel the operation.

It can take a while to process extremely large inputs, so this option helps you avoid accidentally freezing your browser. This is enabled by default.

When you toggle Enable debug logging, the application emits extra diagnostic messages to the browser console to help you inspect internal state changes and other info for debugging purposes. This is disabled by default.

You can prefill the editor and set options by adding query parameters to the URL. This is useful for sharing preconfigured counts, automating tests, or customizing Tally without having to save data to local storage.

For example, perhaps you want to use the Teal theme and disable the warning about large inputs, but you have your browser configured to clear the cache after every session. You could bookmark tally.johng.io/en?theme=teal&warnOnLargeInputText=false and your preferences will be restored every time the page loads.

Set input to a URL-encoded string to prefill the editor with this text.

Example: tally.johng.io/en?input=Whoa!+This+text+was+passed+via+query+params.

Set theme to a theme ID to apply that theme. You can find the full list of theme IDs in src/config/theme.ts (it is usually just the English theme name converted to camelcase).

Example: tally.johng.io/en?theme=catppuccinLatte

You can also set any of the supported options by passing query params. You can find the full list of option IDs in src/config/option.ts (it is usually just the English option name converted to camelcase).

Example: tally.johng.io/en?warnOnLargeInputText=false&rememberInputText=1&enableDebugLogging=0

Need help? See the support resources for information on how to:

• request features
• report bugs
• ask questions
• report security vulnerabilities

Want to help out? Pull requests are welcome for:

• feature implementations
• bug fixes
• translations
• documentation
• tests

See the contribution guide for more details.

Copyright © 2025 John Goodliff (@twocaretcat).

This project is licensed under the AGPL-3.0 License. See the license for more details.

Other projects you might like:

• 👤 Tally Chrome Extension: A Chrome extension to easily count the number of words, characters, and paragraphs on any site
• 👤 Mergist: An online tool to combine multiple PDF files into one. Mergist has no ads, no file size limits, and your files never leave your device
• 👤 Shared File Finder for Google Drive: An Apps Script that finds all files/folders on Google Drive that are shared with others and adds them to a Google Sheet

Projects used by this one:

• 👤 tally-ts: A TypeScript word counting library. Used by Tally to compute counts
• 👤 astro-snapshot: An Astro integration for generating screenshots of your pages automatically at build time. Used by Tally to generate social preview images

Find this project useful? Sponsoring me will help me cover costs and commit more time to open-source.

If you can't donate but still want to contribute, don't worry. There are many other ways to help out, like:

• 📢 reporting (submitting feature requests & bug reports)
• 👨‍💻 coding (implementing features & fixing bugs)
• 📝 writing (documenting & translating)
• 💬 spreading the word
• ⭐ starring the project

I appreciate the support!