Difference between VARCHAR and TEXT in MySQL

TL;DR

TEXT

• fixed max size of 65535 characters (you cannot limit the max size)
• takes 2 + c bytes of disk space, where c is the length of the stored string.
• cannot be (fully) part of an index. One would need to specify a prefix length.

VARCHAR(M)

• variable max size of M characters
• M needs to be between 1 and 65535
• takes 1 + c bytes (for M ≤ 255) or 2 + c (for 256 ≤ M ≤ 65535) bytes of disk space where c is the length of the stored string
• can be part of an index

More Details

TEXT has a fixed max size of 2¹⁶-1 = 65535 characters.
VARCHAR has a variable max size M up to M = 2¹⁶-1.
So you cannot choose the size of TEXT but you can for a VARCHAR.

The other difference is, that you cannot put an index (except for a fulltext index) on a TEXT column.
So if you want to have an index on the column, you have to use VARCHAR. But notice that the length of an index is also limited, so if your VARCHAR column is too long you have to use only the first few characters of the VARCHAR column in your index (See the documentation for CREATE INDEX).

But you also want to use VARCHAR, if you know that the maximum length of the possible input string is only M, e.g. a phone number or a name or something like this. Then you can use VARCHAR(30) instead of TINYTEXT or TEXT and if someone tries to save the text of all three "Lord of the Ring" books in your phone number column you only store the first 30 characters :)

Edit: If the text you want to store in the database is longer than 65535 characters, you have to choose MEDIUMTEXT or LONGTEXT, but be careful: MEDIUMTEXT stores strings up to 16 MB, LONGTEXT up to 4 GB. If you use LONGTEXT and get the data via PHP (at least if you use mysqli without store_result), you maybe get a memory allocation error, because PHP tries to allocate 4 GB of memory to be sure the whole string can be buffered. This maybe also happens in other languages than PHP.

However, you should always check the input (Is it too long? Does it contain strange code?) before storing it in the database.

Notice: For both types, the required disk space depends only on the length of the stored string and not on the maximum length.
E.g. if you use the charset latin1 and store the text "Test" in VARCHAR(30), VARCHAR(100) and TINYTEXT, it always requires 5 bytes (1 byte to store the length of the string and 1 byte for each character). If you store the same text in a VARCHAR(2000) or a TEXT column, it would also require the same space, but, in this case, it would be 6 bytes (2 bytes to store the string length and 1 byte for each character).

For more information have a look at the documentation.

Finally, I want to add a notice, that both, TEXT and VARCHAR are variable length data types, and so they most likely minimize the space you need to store the data. But this comes with a trade-off for performance. If you need better performance, you have to use a fixed length type like CHAR. You can read more about this here.

There is an important detail that has been omitted in the answer above.

MySQL imposes a limit of 65,535 bytes for the max size of each row. The size of a VARCHAR column is counted towards the maximum row size, while TEXT columns are assumed to be storing their data by reference so they only need 9-12 bytes. That means even if the "theoretical" max size of your VARCHAR field is 65,535 characters you won't be able to achieve that if you have more than one column in your table.

Also note that the actual number of bytes required by a VARCHAR field is dependent on the encoding of the column (and the content). MySQL counts the maximum possible bytes used toward the max row size, so if you use a multibyte encoding like utf8mb4 (which you almost certainly should) it will use up even more of your maximum row size.

Correction: Regardless of how MySQL computes the max row size, whether or not the VARCHAR/TEXT field data is ACTUALLY stored in the row or stored by reference depends on your underlying storage engine. For InnoDB the row format affects this behavior. (Thanks Bill-Karwin)

Reasons to use TEXT:

• If you want to store a paragraph or more of text
• If you don't need to index the column
• If you have reached the row size limit for your table

Reasons to use VARCHAR:

• If you want to store a few words or a sentence
• If you want to index the (entire) column
• If you want to use the column with foreign-key constraints