Text to Base64 Encoder Online - Free and Instant

Type in the left box and the Base64 string appears in the right box as you type. No button to press. Copy it or save it as a text file.

It handles accents, emoji, Arabic, Cyrillic and CJK by converting to UTF-8 first. Everything happens in your browser, so nothing you type is sent anywhere.

How to Convert Text to Base64

1. Click the left box and type or paste your text.
2. The encoded string fills the right box straight away.
3. Hit Copy To Clipboard or Download Text.

Base64 Is Not Encryption

This is the single most common mistake with Base64, so it is worth saying plainly. Base64 hides nothing. There is no key, no password, no secret.

Anyone who sees the string can decode it in one step. Every browser has atob() built in. Every language ships a decoder in its standard library.

So never use it to protect a password, an API key, a card number, or anything private. If you need the content kept secret, you need real encryption, not an encoding.

It Makes Text Bigger, Not Smaller

The other common myth. Base64 packs every 3 bytes into 4 characters, so the output runs about 33% larger than what you put in.

It is not compression and it never saves space. What it buys you is safety in transit: the output uses only 64 plain characters that survive systems which would mangle raw bytes.

Where Text to Base64 Actually Helps

Real jobs where you will meet it:

1. Basic auth headers - Authorization: Basic takes a Base64 of user:password. Note this is exactly why basic auth needs HTTPS.
2. Data URIs - inlining a small SVG or CSS snippet straight into a page.
3. Email headers - MIME encodes non-ASCII subject lines this way.
4. JWT tokens - the header and payload are Base64url, which is why you can read a token's contents without any key.
5. Config files - passing a certificate or a multi-line value through a single-line field.

Accents, Emoji and Other Languages

Plain btoa() in a browser only accepts characters up to code point 255. Feed it an emoji or a Chinese character and it throws an error.

This page converts your text to UTF-8 bytes first, then encodes those. So every script works. The catch to know: one emoji becomes 4 bytes, which becomes 8 Base64 characters. Non-Latin text grows faster than English does.

Encoding Files Instead of Text

Need a file rather than typed text? File to Base64 takes any type and returns both the data URI and the raw string.

For pictures specifically, image to Base64 adds ready HTML and CSS snippets, and PDF to Base64 adds an embed block.