What is Base64 and when should you use it?

Base64 is an encoding scheme that represents binary data using 64 printable ASCII characters. Because every byte becomes a safe character, you can embed images, files or tokens inside text-only formats such as JSON, HTML and email.

Where you will see Base64

Common uses include data URLs for small images in CSS, JWT and API tokens, email attachments via MIME, and configuration files that must store binary values as text. In each case the goal is the same: move binary safely through a text channel.

Base64 is not encryption

It is important to remember that Base64 is reversible by anyone. It hides nothing and protects nothing — never use it to store passwords or secrets. To try it yourself, paste any text into our Base64 encoder and decode it right back.