WordCounter vs Character Count Online vs MyTools, Compared

You have a word count to hit — a 1,200-word brief, an 80,000-word manuscript, a tweet that has to fit — and you want a number you can trust in the next ten seconds. Type "free online word counter" and the same two names dominate the results: WordCounter.net and Character Count Online. Both are good. Both are also built around the same idea: paste your text into a box. That's fine until the words you need to count live inside a stack of PDFs and Word files, which is where a third option, MyTools, takes a different approach. Here's an honest look at all three so you can pick the one that fits the job in front of you.

What a Word Counter Is Actually For

Counting words sounds trivial, and for a single paragraph it is. The friction shows up around the edges:

You're held to a hard limit. A journal caps the abstract at 250 words, a client pays per 1,000, a scholarship essay rejects anything over 500. Being "roughly under" isn't good enough — you need the exact number, counted the same way the person on the other end will count it.
The text isn't in a text box. It's a thesis chapter in DOCX, a contract in PDF, a draft in Markdown with # headings and **bold** markers that you don't want inflating the total.
There's more than one file. Twelve chapters, thirty student essays, a folder of blog drafts — and you want both the per-file numbers and the combined total without adding them up by hand.

People reach for an online tool instead of Microsoft Word's built-in counter for the usual reasons: nothing to install on a locked-down work laptop, a one-off job that doesn't justify opening a heavy app, or a file format the app on hand can't read.

WordCounter.net

WordCounter.net is the best-known name in this category, and it has earned the spot. At its core it's a writing editor: you type or paste into the page and the word, character, sentence, and paragraph counts update live, with an estimated reading time alongside.

What it gets right

Keyword density. It surfaces your ten most-used words in a sidebar, which is genuinely useful if you're writing for SEO and want to see whether you're leaning on a phrase too hard. Neither of the other two tools here matches this.
It's a writing aid, not just a counter. Optional grammar, spelling, and style suggestions, plus auto-save that holds your text if you close the tab and come back. For drafting in the browser, that's a real workflow, not just a number.
No signup for the basics. You can paste and count immediately, free, without an account.

Where it falls short

One document at a time. It's an editor, so there's no batch — you can't drop twelve chapter files in and get a combined total. You'd count each one and tally them yourself.
Files go up to a server. There's an upload button for PDF/DOC/DOCX, but the processing happens on their side, which matters if the document is a contract or an unpublished manuscript you'd rather not send anywhere.
Ad-supported and busy. The page carries advertising and a lot of surrounding features, which is the trade-off for "free and full-featured."

Character Count Online

Character Count Online is the opposite design philosophy: one box, instant numbers, almost nothing else. Paste your text and it shows characters, words, sentences, paragraphs, and whitespace, with a configurable keyword-density readout if you dig into the options.

What it gets right

Fast and frictionless. No signup, no setup, no waiting — the counts appear the instant you paste. When all you need is "how many characters is this," it's hard to beat for sheer speed.
Character-first. It leads with the character count, which is the number you actually want when you're trimming a meta description or a social caption to a strict limit.
Completely free. No paid tier gating the basic counts.

Where it falls short

Paste-only in practice. It's built around the text box, so a real document workflow — open a PDF, get its page count, count a DOCX — isn't what it's for.
No batch and no export. One block of text at a time, and no CSV or report to hand off; you read the number off the screen.
A dated, ad-supported interface. It does the job, but it looks and feels like the older generation of single-purpose web utilities, ads included.

MyTools

The MyTools Word Counter starts from the file, not the text box. You drop in up to twenty documents — PDF, DOCX, TXT, Markdown, and most other plain-text formats — and see each file's word count, character count, and reading time in a list, with a combined total at the top. There's still a paste box if you want it, but the document workflow is the point.

What it gets right

PDF, DOCX, and plain text in one place, in batch. Drop a folder of chapters or a stack of essays and get per-file stats plus the aggregate at once — up to twenty files, where the paste-box tools handle one.
Real PDF page counts, read from the file. Most counters estimate pages by dividing words by ~250, which is wrong for image-heavy or long-line PDFs. This one reads the actual page count from the PDF's metadata, and it flags a scanned PDF that has no extractable text instead of inventing a number.
Nothing is uploaded. PDFs are parsed with pdfjs-dist and DOCX with mammoth.js right in your browser, so a draft contract or unpublished thesis never leaves your laptop. There's also a Markdown mode that strips # and * from the count, and CSV/JSON export when you need the numbers in a spreadsheet.

Where it falls short

No keyword density or grammar help. It counts; it doesn't analyze your writing. If you want the top-ten-words readout or spelling suggestions, WordCounter.net does that and this doesn't.
It doesn't remember your work. No auto-save, no account, no saved drafts — close the tab and the session is gone. That's the flip side of storing nothing.
Hard limits on the batch. Twenty files, 50 MB each, no OCR for scanned PDFs, and no support for the old .doc or for .xlsx. For most jobs that's plenty; for a 200-file archive it isn't.

At a Glance

	WordCounter.net	Character Count Online	MyTools
Free, no signup	Yes	Yes	Yes
Live as you type	Yes	Yes	Yes (paste box)
Batch files	No	No	Up to 20
PDF / DOCX files	Upload (server)	Paste-oriented	In-browser, no upload
Real PDF pages	Estimated	Estimated	Read from the file
Keyword density	Yes	Yes	No
Grammar / style	Yes	No	No
Export report	No	No	CSV / JSON

Which One Should You Pick?

If you're drafting in the browser and want feedback while you write — keyword density, grammar nudges, a number that updates as you type and saves itself — WordCounter.net is the right tool. It's the most complete writing companion of the three.

If you just need a fast character or word count on a chunk of text you already have, and you want it with zero ceremony, Character Count Online is the quickest path. Paste, read, done.

If the words you need to count live inside files — several PDFs and Word documents at once, with real page counts, an honest flag on scanned pages, and the certainty that a confidential draft stays on your machine — MyTools is the one built for that. It's the weakest of the three as a writing editor and the strongest as a document counter.

Ready to count words across a stack of documents without uploading a thing? Open the MyTools Word Counter →