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.

Looking for an open-source alternative to Grammarly, QuillBot, or GrammarChecker? Tally also includes a grammar checker that can help you find and understand spelling mistakes and grammatical errors in your text.

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.

• 🧮 Counting: Compute various counts for your text.
  • General: Count characters, words, sentences, paragraphs, and lines.
  • Characters by type: Count spaces, digits, letters, punctuation, and symbols/special characters.
• 📚 Grammar checking¹: Find and understand spelling mistakes and grammatical errors.
• 🚀 Real-time updates: Watch text statistics update instantly as you type.
• 🌍 Multilingual support: Work accurately with text in 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 grammar checking: Check your text for spelling and grammar errors.
  • 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!

¹ Grammar checking support is limited to English for now.

• 📚 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 - v4.15.0	Light theme - v4.15.0

Teal theme - v4.15.0	Dusk theme - v4.15.0

Counting functionality is provided by tally-ts, an in-house library for computing text statistics. 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 text statistics in real-time.

Tally supports grammar checking, powered by Harper. This feature is enabled by default, but you can disable it in the options.

Popup for a spelling issue - v4.15.0	Popup for a repetition issue - v4.15.0

When enabled, any spelling or grammar errors will be highlighted in the editor. Clicking on an underlined word will show a popup with an explanation of the error.

Output counts are currently separated into 2 sections.

This section contains counts for characters, words, sentences, paragraphs, and lines.

General counts - v4.15.0

This section shows breakdowns for different types of characters like spaces, letters, digits, punctuation, and symbols.

Character counts - v4.15.0

You can find various options in the page footer that allow you to customize the behavior of Tally.

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 - v4.15.0

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 - v4.15.0

Option selector - v4.15.0

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 100,000 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 enable the Enable grammar checking option, the app will use checking to highlight potential grammatical errors in your text. 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.

Grammatical rules can vary from dialect to dialect (ex. British English vs. American English). This option lets you select the region you want to use for grammar/spell checking. By default, we try to guess your region based on your browser's language settings, but if you notice something is not correct, you can change it manually here.

Grammar checking region selector - v4.15.0

The options available here will change based on the site language.

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 © 2026 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
• 🌐 harper.js: An open-source grammar and style checking engine. Used by Tally to provide grammar suggestions

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!