Convert text to Base64 and back, with full emoji and UTF-8 support. Runs in your browser.
Base64 turns any text into a safe set of 64 ASCII characters, handy for embedding data in URLs, JSON, CSS data-URIs and email. This converter handles full UTF-8, so emoji and every language round-trip correctly. It all runs locally, so nothing you paste is ever uploaded.
Base64 is a way of representing binary data, such as an image or a file, using only the 64 printable characters A–Z, a–z, 0–9, plus and slash. It exists because many systems (email, URLs, some data fields) were designed for text and can corrupt raw binary. Encoding to Base64 makes binary safe to travel through those text-only channels; decoding turns it back into the original bytes.
It is encoding, not encryption. This is the crucial point: Base64 provides no security whatsoever. Anyone can decode it instantly, so it must never be used to protect passwords or secrets. It only changes the representation of data, not its confidentiality. If you need security, you need actual encryption or hashing, not Base64.
Where you will meet it. Base64 shows up in data URIs (embedding a small image directly in HTML or CSS), in email attachments, in some API tokens and in configuration that must be plain text. It makes data roughly a third larger, so it is used for convenience and compatibility, not efficiency. The tool above encodes and decodes text and files both ways.