Should your business post on Threads or on X in 2026? It sounds like a simple question. But the user numbers people quote to answer it often measure different things, and both apps have changed a lot since Threads launched.
I’m Neal Schaffer, and I have been on Twitter since 2008. I have more than 200,000 followers on X and about 4,200 on Threads, where I’m active but nowhere near as active as I am on X. I also teach social media marketing to executives at Rutgers Business School.
Below you’ll find my own analytics from both platforms next to the numbers Meta and X actually publish. My short answer: don’t pick one yet. Test both, because your audience will engage very differently on each.
Key Takeaways
✅ Threads crossed 500 million monthly active users, according to Meta’s Q2 2026 earnings call. X has not published a global user count since 2022, as I track on my X statistics page, so any “which is bigger” claim is comparing different metrics.
✅ Threads now sells ads. Meta’s CFO told investors its global ads expansion on Threads was completed in Q2 2026. Any comparison saying Threads has no ads is out of date.
✅ X still sends the clicks. Over the past 12 months, X sent my website roughly 135 visits for every one that came from Threads.
✅ Engagement is closer than the old headlines suggest. Buffer’s 2025 data put the Threads median engagement rate around 3.6%, down about 18% from 2024, with X still at the bottom of its table.
✅ My recommendation: run both for 90 days with the same posts adapted to each, then let replies, profile visits and website visits decide where your time goes.
Threads vs X: Which Is Better for Business in 2026?
Neither platform wins for every business. From what I have seen in my own analytics, X still sends far more clicks to a website. Meanwhile, most of the people who see my Threads posts don’t follow me yet. So the better choice depends on whether you need traffic or conversation, and testing both is how you find out.
Way too many brands decide this on reputation. They stay on X out of habit, or they move to Threads because it feels friendlier. I would argue neither one is a strategy, because neither one starts from where your buyers actually spend their time.
| If your priority is… | Lean toward | Why, in my experience |
|---|---|---|
| Clicks and referral traffic to your website | X | X out-sends Threads for me by a wide margin (my GA4 numbers are below) |
| Reaching people who don’t follow you yet | Threads | Most of my recent Threads viewers were non-followers |
| Real-time news and technical B2B conversation | X | I still find people in AI and other technical fields there |
My wife, for one, moved from X to Threads completely, because her people are there. That is the real test for your business too: where are your people, and how do they respond to you? If you’re sticking with X, get the fundamentals of marketing on X right before you add a second platform.
Before you weigh my data, it helps to know which user numbers you can trust, because the headline figures for these two apps rarely measure the same thing.
How Many People Actually Use Threads and X?
X has published no global user count since 2022, as my X statistics page documents, so no head-to-head monthly comparison exists. The most useful independent view, in my opinion, is Similarweb’s estimates, reported by TechCrunch. They showed Threads ahead of X in daily mobile app users in January 2026, but far behind X in daily web visits.
Meta’s own number is the 500 million figure from the earnings call cited above. On that same call, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg put it this way: “Threads crossed 500 million monthly actives, making it the fastest growing conversation app ever.” That is Meta’s claim about its own product, using Meta’s own definition of an active user.
X is harder to size. As I note on that statistics page, the last official count came from Twitter’s own second quarter 2022 results: 237.8 million monetizable daily active users. Everything published since is an ad reach figure, a regional filing or an outside estimate, not a global company disclosure.
| Metric | Threads | X | Who reported it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly active users | 500M+ (Q2 2026) | Not published since 2022 | Meta earnings call |
| Monetizable daily active users | Not reported | 237.8M (Q2 2022) | Twitter Q2 2022 results |
| Daily active users on iOS and Android (estimate, Jan 7, 2026) | 141.5M | 125M | Similarweb, via TechCrunch |
| Daily web visits (estimate, Jan 13, 2026) | 8.5M | 145.4M | Similarweb, via TechCrunch |
Read those rows as four different questions. The app numbers favor Threads. The web numbers favor X by a mile, which probably matters more if your buyers work at a desk all day. The same TechCrunch report adds that Similarweb still has X ahead of Threads in the U.S., though the gap is narrowing.
Audience size is only half the picture. Threads has also changed a lot as a product since most comparisons were written.
What Has Changed on Threads Since 2025?
The change that matters most for marketers, in my opinion, is that Threads now sells ads. Meta opened Threads ads to all eligible advertisers in April 2025, and the Threads feed placement is switched on by default for new campaigns using Advantage+ or manual placements. If you already run Facebook or Instagram ads, Threads may already be in your mix.
Ads run through your existing Meta campaigns
Check your placements before your next Meta campaign goes live, so you decide whether Threads is in the mix. As noted above, Meta also told investors that its global ads expansion on Threads was completed in Q2 2026. The 2025 version of this post said Threads had no ads, which no longer holds. I don’t run ads on either platform right now, so I can’t tell you which one performs better for paid reach.
Longer posts no longer require a subscription
Threads posts still cap at 500 characters. But Meta now lets you attach up to 10,000 characters of text to a post, and you can include a link to your full content in the main post. On X, anything past 280 characters requires Premium, which I cover in the next section.
DMs and communities closed the old feature gaps
The TechCrunch report on Similarweb’s data lists what Threads added over the past year: interest-based communities, better reply filters, DMs, long-form text and disappearing posts. The Messages tab now sits right in the left-hand menu of my own Threads account.
So Threads has caught up on features. Where it still trails X, at least for me, is getting people to click through to a website.
What Does X Still Do Better Than Threads?
X still wins on clicks and on long-form options. In my own GA4 data, X sent roughly 135 visits to my website for every one from Threads over the past year. And X Premium lets subscribers post up to 25,000 characters and upload videos up to four hours long on the web and iOS.
X still has a clicking culture
My impression is that Threads does not have the clicking culture X inherited from Twitter. Some people have found ways to drive real traffic from Threads. But I think many more have found it easier on X. My referral data backs up that impression for my own site, even if it can’t tell me why.
To keep that in proportion, neither platform is a big traffic source for me anymore. ChatGPT’s referrals alone were about five times what X sent over the same 12 months. In early 2025 I argued on my podcast that X had turned into political media. I laid out the traffic decline behind that view in my post on Twitter trends.
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B2B people are still there, if you control your feed
There are still some B2B people left on X, especially in AI and other technical fields. And if you control your feeds and skip trending topics, you can tune out most of the political media. That is how I use it now. I would not tell every brand to rush onto X, but I also wouldn’t write it off.
Premium is the reason I pay
I pay for X Premium mainly to upload longer videos, which I use to promote brand collaborations and my own longer content. Free accounts cap video uploads at 140 seconds, per the same help page. X also runs its own ad platform, and promoted posts are the simplest place to start if you want paid reach there.
Those are the structural differences. Here is what happened when I put the same content on both.
What Happened When I Posted the Same Thing on Both?
The same post earned about seven times as many impressions on X as views on Threads, but more profile visits on Threads. I pulled three months of X Analytics and 90 days of Threads Insights, plus post-level numbers for one newsletter post I shared on both. The two apps rewarded completely different things.
My X account: more impressions, less engagement
Over the last three months, my X impressions rose 120% compared with the prior period, yet my engagement rate fell 63% to 0.7%. Only about one in five of my followers counted as active. More people are seeing my posts on X, and fewer of them are doing anything about it.
My Threads account: small, but reaching new people
On Threads, my views more than doubled over 90 days. Four out of five people who saw my posts didn’t follow me. My follower count barely moved, though: a net gain of four.
One post, two very different results
On July 3, I shared the same newsletter post on both platforms. X gave it 273 impressions. Threads gave it 37 views. But the Threads version drove five profile visits, and the X version drove none. The formats weren’t identical, since the X post carried a photo and the Threads post was text plus a link, so treat this as one example rather than a verdict.
What Premium does and doesn’t do for video
My 3:47 video uploaded in November 2025 needed Premium, since it runs well past the 140-second free limit. It reached a 0.4% completion rate and a 12-second average watch time. Premium gets a long video onto X. Getting people to watch it is still up to you.
Across all four screenshots, the two platforms reward different habits, which changes how you should write for each.
How Should You Write Differently for Threads and X?
Write shorter and more timely on X, and more conversational on Threads, then reply to everyone. Buffer’s reply analysis found that replying to comments was associated with 42% more engagement on Threads, compared with 8% on X. Buffer attributes that to Threads giving replies unusual weight in both its interface and its ranking.
| Element | Threads | X |
|---|---|---|
| Post length | 500 characters, plus text attachments up to 10,000 | 280 on free accounts, up to 25,000 with Premium |
| Replies | The biggest lever in Buffer’s data (+42%) | Smaller lift in Buffer’s data (+8%) |
| Links | Fewer clicks in my experience | Still where my clicks come from |
| Hashtags | Not part of my test | A search label more than a reach tool |
On X, I treat hashtags as a way to be found rather than a way to reach more people. As I explain in my post on X hashtags, X’s own help documentation describes them as a search feature and recommends no more than two per post.
If you want more room on X without paying, a multi-post thread on X is in my opinion still the better format. Just don’t confuse that with Threads, the app. And the reply habits that lift engagement on X matter even more on Threads, based on the Buffer numbers above.
Good writing only helps if you can tell whether it’s working, and that takes a simple test.
How Do You Test Threads and X for Your Business?
Run the same content on both for 90 days, adapt it to each app, and compare results in each app’s own analytics plus your website analytics. Using the same posts takes content quality out of the comparison, so the difference you see comes from the platform and its audience rather than from a lucky topic.
As I wrote in Digital Threads, “You want data points, not likes.” Here are the steps I would follow:
- Set up both profiles to match. Use the same name, photo and bio on Threads and X, and put the same link in both bios so any traffic lands in the same place.
- Pick 10 posts you would publish anyway. Post each one on both apps on the same day. Keep the X version under 280 characters unless you pay for Premium, and give the Threads version up to 500 characters with a question at the end.
- Reply to every comment within the first hour. That is the behavior Buffer found most strongly tied to engagement, especially on Threads.
- After 90 days, pull the platform numbers. On X, open Analytics, choose Overview and select 3M. On Threads, open Insights, choose Overview and select Last 90 days. Compare views or impressions, engagement, profile visits and the share of non-followers.
- Check the clicks in GA4. Open the Traffic acquisition report and switch the dimension to Session source / medium, then search “t.co” and “threads”. Read the rows carefully, because a search for “t.co” also matches chatgpt.com and pinterest.com.
- Shift your time, don’t quit. Put more effort where your buyers reply or click, and keep a lighter presence on the other app.
Treat this as one part of your wider social media strategy, not a replacement for it. The goal is to learn where your people are and how they engage, before you commit a year of posting to either app.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes. As covered above, Meta opened Threads ads to all eligible advertisers in April 2025 and told investors its global ads expansion was completed in Q2 2026. You buy them in the same Meta campaigns you use for Facebook and Instagram.
On mobile apps, by Similarweb’s January 2026 estimate cited above, yes. On the web, X is far larger. And as noted above, X hasn’t published a global user count since 2022, so there is no like-for-like monthly comparison.
Threads posts allow 500 characters, and you can attach up to 10,000 more characters of text, per Meta’s announcement cited above. X allows 280 characters on free accounts and up to 25,000 with Premium, per X’s help page cited above.
From what I have seen, X still has more of the AI and technical crowd, and it sends more clicks. Threads is worth a 90-day test anyway, especially if your posts are built to start conversations rather than drive traffic.
For me it is, mainly for longer video uploads, since free accounts stop at 140 seconds. But Premium does not make people watch. One of my longer uploads held viewers for 12 seconds on average.
Conclusion: Start Your 90-Day Threads vs X Test This Week
Pick your 10 posts today. Publish each one on both apps this week, adapted to each, and reply to every comment you get.
Before you start on X, get comfortable with X Analytics, because that is where you’ll read half of your results. Mark your calendar for 90 days out, then compare replies, profile visits and website visits side by side.
If you want help deciding where social media fits alongside search and email in your business, download a free preview of Digital Threads. And if you’d rather have someone run this test and the rest of your marketing with you, take a look at my Fractional CMO services.
