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It depends entirely on the format, and the gap runs in both directions. TikTok still leads on vertical video, where Instagram Reels get about 29 percent fewer views and 14 percent fewer interactions. But on carousels the pattern reverses hard: Instagram carousels get roughly 4.7 times more views and 5.8 times more interactions than the same format on TikTok.
Vertical video, average per post:
Carousels, average per post:
Source: Metricool Instagram Study 2026.
Each platform distributes what it was built for. TikTok's entire architecture is a video recommendation engine, and it pushes video to strangers more aggressively than anything else on the internet. Instagram's carousel mechanic, where posts are re served to people who did not engage the first time, has no real equivalent on TikTok.
So the question is not which platform is better. It is which format your business actually needs, and then which platform serves that format.
Be careful. Instagram down ranks content carrying another platform's watermark, and recycled cross platform content is explicitly deprioritised. Export clean and adapt the opening seconds to the platform you are posting on.