January 1, 2022
Google Tag Manager Limits (account limit, container limit, etc.)
Occasionally, I receive questions about Google Tag Manager limits. How many containers can you have in GTM? How many accounts? And so on. Since there is no official page with all the limitations published in a single place, I decided to post this quick article.
Some information was found in other resources, other limitations were spotted by myself while working with Google Tag Manager.
Note: some of these limits were identified while testing GTM in 2019-2020 (e.g. character length tests) and they might be changed by the GTM team over time. So if you notice some discrepancies, please let me know in the comments.
Google Tag Manager account limit. You can have up to 400 Google Tag Manager accounts in a single Google account.
Google Tag Manager container limit. A single Google Tag Manager account can contain up to 500 Google Tag Manager containers.
Google Tag Manager container size limit. The maximum size of a Google Tag Manager container is 200kb. This means that the more tags, triggers, variables, templates you have, the larger the container will be. When your container exceeds the 70% size limit, you will start seeing an additional column in the Versions section of the GTM interface.
So if you have a question “what is the maximum limit of the tags that I can have in a Google Tag Manager container?”, the answer is “it depends”. It depends on how large those tags are and how much space do they take. For some companies, 500 tags might be a limit (because they will reach the 200kb limit). For others, it can be 1000+ (just like in my screenshot above).
What should you do if you are reaching the maximum size of a GTM container? There is no simple and straightforward answer. You would need to optimize tags/triggers/variables, remove unused items, etc. By enrolling in my Intermediate/Advanced GTM Course will learn various techniques that will help you optimize the container size.
Maximum size of a file that can be imported. You can import readymade containers into GTM (they are also known as recipes). The maximum size of that file can be 10MB (megabytes).
Length of a Constant Variable. The longest text that you can insert in a Constant Variable is 1024 characters long.
Workspaces. In the free Google Tag Manager version, you can have 3 workspaces (one of them is default). In GTM 360, the number of workspaces is unlimited.
The maximum number of symbols/characters in a Custom HTML tag is 102,400.
Google Tag Manager API limits. You can make up to 10,000 requests per project per day and you can make 0.25 queries per second (QPS). In other words, you can make 25 requests every 100 seconds. You can learn more here.
Final words regarding Google Tag Manager limits
There are (most likely) more limits that I haven’t spotted yet, so if you know something additional, let me know in the comments and I’ll update this page.
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2 COMMENTS
Thank you for putting this article together, I really appreciate it. Like you said, things could have changed in the past few years but it's a great starting point so thank you.
I'm trying to figure out one additional limit: do you know if there's a limit to the number of rows you can have in the lookup table?
I'm migrating a few thousand sites to GA4 with custom GA4 events and I'm researching the best way to go about this. I'm leaning towards utilizing one GTM container with the event configurations (the instance installed across all of the sites) with a lookup table with the input of the page hostname and the output of the Measurement ID.
In theory it should work, but my worry is the rows limitation. I'm running a test right now with a sample container import container a list of around 6100 lookup table rows and I'm not able to load the lookup table on the front end (page crashes).
The file is around 102KB and the versions hasn't indicated that I've come close to the 70% size as indicated in your graphic (makes sense considering the import file size).
It still makes me feel however there is a limit to the rows of the lookup table. Wasn't sure if you had any insight from your experience.
If those websites are different in their structure and their set of events is unique (I mean events are fairly unique for each website), one container is very unscalable and you should reach the container limit fairly soon.
I am not aware of lookup table limit but imagining a table with 6000+ rows, I can cleary see it crashing. Another reason why single container for a thousand websites is a bad idea. I mean, a single container is convenient to manage. But you will soon reach the size limit (most likely) and apparently large tables crash.