TikTok vs Instagram Statistics 2026: Users, Reach and Engagement

Instagram ads reached 1.74 billion users worldwide in January 2025, according to Meta’s own ad-planning tools aggregated by DataReportal. TikTok’s ad reach in the same month was 1.59 billion, according to figures published in TikTok’s own ad tools. The 150-million-user gap is smaller than it looks, and on some measures TikTok has already pulled ahead. Kepios’ analysis of February 2025 data shows TikTok’s global ad reach is now just 0.1% lower than Instagram’s, and TikTok’s reach for users aged 18 and above is now meaningfully greater than Instagram’s for the same demographic.

Those two headline reach figures rest on different age bases. DataReportal measures Instagram’s against everyone aged 13 and above, and TikTok’s against adults aged 18 and above. The parity reading above also comes from a later snapshot than the two reach totals, so the two describe different moments.

Key Takeaways

• Instagram‘s global ad reach hit 1.74 billion users in January 2025, up 5.5% year over year as Meta’s ad-planning tools recorded steady growth across every world region.
• TikTok‘s global ad reach reached 1.59 billion users in the same month, growth of only 2.0% year over year, a narrower gap in absolute change (31.2 million vs Instagram’s 90.8 million).
• TikTok’s reported reach for users aged 18 and above has already overtaken Instagram’s for the same demographic, per Kepios’s cross-platform analysis of Meta and TikTok ad-planning tools.
• TikTok’s active Android audience spent an average of 1 hour 35 minutes per day scrolling short videos in their feeds, the highest daily time-per-user Similarweb tracks across any social app.
• Meta Q2 2026 posted Family daily active people of 3.60 billion and revenue of $60.80 billion, up 28% year over year, with ad impressions across the Family of Apps climbing 14% YoY.
• Pew Research’s 2025 US-teens survey found 61% of teens use TikTok daily, 55% use Instagram daily, and 21% describe their TikTok use as “almost constant” versus 12% for Instagram.
• US adult usage in Pew’s November 2025 survey showed 50% on Instagram vs 37% on TikTok, but among 18-29-year-olds, roughly half use TikTok at least once a day compared with just 5% of adults 65 and older.

Editor’s Choice

• Instagram ads reach 26.9% of everyone aged 13 and above worldwide, climbing to 33.3% once China is excluded.
• TikTok’s eligible-adoption rate is 34.3% of adults 18 and above outside China, slightly higher than Instagram’s ex-China figure.
• Instagram’s largest single market is India with 414 million active Instagram users, where TikTok has been banned since 2020.
• TikTok’s largest single market is the United States with 136 million active TikTok users, compared with 172 million for Instagram.
• TikTok’s quarterly ad reach decreased by 96.1 million (-5.7%) between October 2024 and January 2025.
• Meta Q2 2026 ad impressions rose 14%, and the average price per ad rose 12% year over year.
• Instagram remains the top social channel for brand research, with 62.3% of Instagram users citing brand or product research as a reason for using the platform, as reported by DataReportal.

Global Ad Reach: TikTok Closes in on 0.1% of Instagram

• Instagram’s ad reach as of January 2025: 1.74 billion users per Meta’s own ad-planning tools.
• TikTok’s ad reach as of January 2025: 1.59 billion users per TikTok’s own ad-planning tools.
• Kepios reports TikTok’s global ad reach now sits just 0.1% below Instagram’s on a headline basis, measured on February 2025 data in DataReportal’s Digital 2025 Global Overview.
• Instagram ads reached 28.8% of the world’s adults aged 18 and above in January 2025.
• TikTok ads reached 27.5% of the world’s adults aged 18 and above in the same month, and higher once China is stripped out of the denominator.
• Kepios’s analysis places Instagram at 31.3% of the world’s internet users and TikTok at 28.6% of the world’s internet users.
• The two reach percentages use different age bases: users aged 13 and above for Instagram and users aged 18 and above for TikTok, which is how each platform’s own ad tools report their eligible audience.

Source: DataReportal Essential Instagram Stats and Essential TikTok Stats, January 2025 ad-audience data; population percentages use different bases, Instagram 13 and above, TikTok 18 and above; the 0.1% parity reading is a February 2025 figure

Source: DataReportal Essential Instagram Stats and Essential TikTok Stats, January 2025 ad-audience data; population percentages use different bases, Instagram 13 and above, TikTok 18 and above; the 0.1% parity reading is a February 2025 figure

Twelve-Month Growth: Instagram Adds 3x More Users Than TikTok

Source: DataReportal Essential Instagram Stats and Essential TikTok Stats, Meta and TikTok ad-planning tools

• Instagram’s marketer-visible audience grew by 90.8 million users (+5.5%) between January 2024 and January 2025.
• TikTok’s marketer-visible audience grew by 31.2 million users (+2.0%) in the same twelve-month window.
• On a quarterly basis, Instagram added 54.4 million users (+3.2%) between October 2024 and January 2025.
• In the same three-month window, TikTok’s ad reach decreased by 96.1 million users (-5.7%).
• Instagram added roughly 2.9x more users than TikTok year over year when comparing absolute change in ad reach.
• The QoQ divergence matters more than the YoY figure: Instagram’s chart bends upward while TikTok’s bends down, and the two lines cross the reach-parity threshold from opposite directions.

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Recent Developments

• August 2026: Meta reported Family daily active people of 3.60 billion for June 2026, a 3% year-over-year increase in its Q2 2026 earnings release.
• August 2026: Meta posted quarterly revenue of $60.80 billion, up 28% year over year.
• August 2026: Meta’s ad impressions across the Family of Apps rose 14% year over year while the average price per ad rose 12% in Q2 2026.
• December 2025: Pew Research published its 2025 US teens survey, recording TikTok’s almost-constant-use share ticking up slightly to 21% this year, from 16% in 2022.
• November 2025: Pew Research’s Americans’ Social Media Use 2025 report found that half of US adults use Instagram versus about 37% for TikTok.
• January 2025: Meta’s head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, revealed that Threads had 320 million monthly active users, of which more than 100 million are active each day.

Time Spent Per User: TikTok’s Durable Attention Moat

Source: Similarweb App Intelligence via DataReportal Digital 2025 Global Overview Report

• TikTok’s active Android audience spent an average of 1 hour and 35 minutes per day scrolling short videos as of late 2024 – early 2025.
• Similarweb data indicates that, despite TikTok’s smaller user base, the total time Android users spend on the platform is only slightly lower than the total time Android users spend on Instagram.
• Instagram Reels format is Meta’s direct response. Reels was designed to keep the time-spent gap from widening even as TikTok’s per-user attention grew.
• Instagram wins on breadth of users; TikTok wins on depth of attention. Advertiser reporting increasingly weights the second metric because attention time predicts ad recall better than impression counts.

US Adult Usage: Instagram Still Leads on Reach, TikTok Wins Young

• Pew Research found half of US adults use Instagram, the only other platform in that survey used by at least 50% of Americans.
• TikTok reached about 37% of US adults in the same survey.
• Daily TikTok usage among all US adults sits at about 24%, while daily X usage is just 10%.
• Roughly half of US adults aged 18 to 29 go on TikTok at least once a day, compared with just 5% of adults 65 and older and 24% of all US adults.
• Instagram usage skews female in the US: More than half of women (55%) use Instagram compared with under half of men (44%).
• Instagram usage also varies by race: Fewer than half (45%) of White adults use Instagram, compared with 62% of Hispanic adults, 58% of Asian adults, and 54% of Black adults.

US Teens: TikTok Overtakes Instagram on Near-Constant Use

• Pew’s 2024 survey found roughly six-in-ten US teens use TikTok and Instagram, with 55% on Snapchat and 32% on Facebook.
• The 2025 update showed 61% of teens use TikTok daily and 55% use Instagram daily.
• The share of teens who use TikTok almost constantly climbed slightly to 21% this year, up from 16% in 2022.
• Teen girls remain more likely than boys to use TikTok almost constantly (19% of girls vs 13% of boys).
• Instagram usage widens sharply with age: three-quarters of 15-to-17-year-olds use Instagram, compared with 44% of 13-to-14-year-olds.
• Political-lean divergence for TikTok is now stark: 75% of Democratic-leaning teens use TikTok versus 60% of Republican-leaning teens.
• The two platforms sit at the center of the teen-attention economy, and their reach patterns mirror what our Instagram’s largest audience breakdown documents for global Instagram demographics.

Country-by-Country: Where Each Platform Leads

Source: DataReportal Essential Instagram Stats and Essential TikTok Stats, January 2025 (ad-audience data from Meta and TikTok ad-planning tools)

• India remains Instagram’s single largest market at 414 million active Instagram users, with TikTok unavailable due to the June 2020 government ban.
• The United States holds the number-one slot for TikTok at 136 million active TikTok users, compared with 172 million on Instagram, a 21% gap.
• Indonesia is one of the large markets where TikTok’s audience runs ahead of Instagram’s: 108 million TikTok users vs 103 million Instagram users.
• Mexico shows a wider TikTok skew: 85.4 million on TikTok vs 48.8 million on Instagram.
• Brazil sits in the middle: 141 million Instagram users vs 91.7 million TikTok users.
• The UK cut: TikTok’s own data shows ads on TikTok reach more than 25 million UK users, per DataReportal’s April 2025 Statshot.
• The US accounts for roughly 8.5% of TikTok’s global ad audience, per Kepios’s cross-platform analysis.

Meta’s Family Portfolio Dwarfs TikTok’s Standalone Scale

• Meta Q2 2026 posted revenue of $60.80 billion, up 28% year over year.
• Meta Family daily active people reached 3.60 billion on average for June 2026, an increase of 3% year over year.
• Ad impressions across the Family of Apps rose 14% year over year while the average price per ad rose 12% in Q2 2026.
• Total costs and expenses were $42.03 billion, up 55% year over year.
• Threads specifically reached 320 million monthly active users as of late January 2025, of which more than 100 million are active daily. Meta’s own TikTok / short-video adjacency is inside the same portfolio.
• The financial comparison is asymmetric on purpose: Instagram is a single revenue-generating surface inside a five-app Meta portfolio, while TikTok is ByteDance’s Western revenue engine on its own. The gap between the two owners’ balance sheets grew wider through 2025 – 2026, not narrower.

Source: Meta Platforms Inc., Second Quarter 2026 Results press release (investor.atmeta.com)

Cross-Platform Behavior: Users Live on Both

Source: DataReportal Digital 2025 Global Overview Report and April 2025 Global Statshot

• Instagram remains the top social channel for brand research, with 62.3% of Instagram users citing brand or product research as a use reason, per DataReportal’s Digital 2025 Global Overview Report.
• Most users of either platform also use the other, and if India is removed from the equation, where TikTok remains banned, the overlaps are even more apparent per DataReportal’s April 2025 Statshot.
• Instagram’s users have published 390 million posts tagged #dog compared with 303 million posts tagged #cat, a taxonomy of hashtag depth TikTok’s ephemeral feed has no direct equivalent for.
• Sustained content search behavior anchors Instagram’s brand-research lead, while TikTok’s algorithmic feed structure privileges discovery, a difference SEO practitioners now treat as two separate search surfaces rather than substitutes.
• The overlap is high enough that most marketing plans treat Instagram and TikTok as complements. Instagram for brand equity and lower-funnel research, TikTok for top-funnel discovery and cultural resonance, rather than as either-or channels.

The Shorter-Video Sisters: YouTube and Others in Context

• YouTube remains the reach leader by a wide margin: 73% of US teens go on YouTube daily, well above both TikTok (61%) and Instagram (55%) daily rates.
• X/Twitter trails both by an order of magnitude: 17% of US teens use X versus 32% who use Facebook.
• Snapchat sits between the leaders and the laggards: 55% of US teens use Snapchat.
• WhatsApp among US teens: Roughly one-quarter (23%), up 6 percentage points since 2022.
• Reddit remains a niche, stable at 14% of US teens.
• The competitive frame is narrower than headline coverage suggests: On US teen daily reach, only three platforms clear the 50% mark. YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, and each is anchored to a different content grammar.

About This Data

Compilation and methodology summary:

• 8 primary and industry sources spanning December 2024 through August 2026 anchor every number in this comparison.
• 4 Tier 1 sources: Meta Platforms Q2 2026 investor release plus 3 Pew Research Center surveys covering US teens and adults, published between December 2024 and December 2025.
• 4 Tier 2 sources: DataReportal’s Essential Instagram Stats, Essential TikTok Stats, Digital 2025 Global Overview Report, and April 2025 Global Statshot.
• 0 market-research seller aggregates. Selection criterion is primary corporate disclosure or peer-reviewable syndicated survey only.
• 3 figures are derived rather than reported: The 2.9x year-over-year growth ratio, the 150 million headline reach gap, and the 21% US audience gap. Each one is calculated from the source figures above.
• Every other figure is reported directly by one of those 8 sources, and none is estimated or modelled. Where a source gives a rounded description rather than a point estimate, this article reproduces that wording. The DataReportal series refreshes quarterly, and Pew Research publishes new editions on a rolling basis.

By the numbers: Instagram ads reached 1.74 billion users aged 13 and above in January 2025, and TikTok ads reached 1.59 billion adults aged 18 and above in the same month, per each platform’s own ad-planning tools. The 150-million gap is smaller than headline coverage suggests, and TikTok’s reach for users aged 18 and above has already surpassed Instagram’s for that demographic.

The two headline reach numbers sit close together, but the composition of that closeness diverges sharply on age, geography, and per-user attention. The next takeaway captures the strategic implication for marketers and creators.

The takeaway: Instagram wins breadth (more users, more markets, older-adult reach); TikTok wins depth (more time per user, higher almost-constant use among US teens at 21% vs 12%). The two platforms increasingly resemble complementary channels rather than substitutes, which is how most marketers now allocate spend between them.

Are TikTok and Instagram Really the Same Size Now?

On global ad reach, yes, Kepios reports TikTok is now within 0.1% of Instagram’s global ad reach on February 2025 data, and TikTok has already surpassed Instagram in reach for adults aged 18 and above. On the January 2025 ad-audience snapshot, the gap is about 150 million in Instagram’s favor (1.74 billion vs 1.59 billion). That comparison sets Instagram’s 13-and-above base against TikTok’s 18-and-above base. On daily time-per-user, TikTok wins outright.

Which Platform Is Growing Faster?

Instagram is growing faster on both YoY and QoQ measures. Instagram added 90.8 million users year over year (+5.5%) versus TikTok’s 31.2 million (+2.0%). The two platforms also diverge sharply on the quarter-by-quarter comparison already tabled above.

Do More US Adults Use Instagram or TikTok?

Instagram, by a wide margin. Pew Research’s November 2025 survey found at least 50% of US adults use Instagram compared with about 37% for TikTok. But the gap inverts for daily use among 18-29-year-olds, roughly half of whom use TikTok daily.

Conclusion

Instagram still holds the headline lead, 1.74 billion ad reach versus TikTok’s 1.59 billion, half of US adults versus about 37%, and a Meta Family portfolio that generated $60.80 billion in Q2 2026 revenue. The near-term growth curves also favor Instagram, and its quarterly ad-reach lead over TikTok suggests the reach-parity moment may be a peak rather than a floor.

TikTok’s advantage runs deeper on the metrics that matter for cultural gravity. TikTok’s ad reach for adults aged 18 and above already exceeds Instagram’s; its active Android audience spends an average of 1 hour 35 minutes per day on the platform, and 21% of US teens describe their TikTok use as almost constant, nearly double Instagram’s 12%. The next twelve months will decide whether Instagram converts breadth advantages into depth (Reels time spent, teen retention) or whether TikTok’s per-user intensity compounds into a lasting ownership of the short-video attention economy.