How to sort Instagram Reels by views

1. Add SortViral to Chrome. It's free and needs no account.
2. Open the creator's Reels tab on instagram.com, for example instagram.com/mkbhd/reels/.
3. Click Views in the SortViral bar above the grid. Reels re-sort in place while the rest of the profile loads in the background; your page doesn't scroll.
4. Click Outlier to see which Reels beat the creator's usual, not just the ones with the biggest totals.

What happens when you click Views?

The bar above the grid has five sort chips: Newest, Views, Outlier, Rising and engagement. Click Views and the Reels you can see reorder from most to least viewed. SortViral keeps loading the rest of the profile in the background and slots each Reel into place as it arrives. You don't have to scroll, and the page stays where it is.

How long it takes depends on how many Reels the creator has posted. In our test, 112 Reels loaded in about 10 seconds. A creator with a few hundred Reels takes longer, and you can read the top of the list while the rest loads.

Hover any Reel to see its numbers in one place: views, likes, comments, outlier score, engagement, views per day and the date it was posted.

Most viewed isn't always most useful

A creator with 5 million followers always has big numbers. If you sort only by views, you mostly see their reach, not which ideas worked.

Outlier fixes that. It divides each Reel's views by the creator's usual: the median views of their 30 most recent posts, leaving out pinned posts and anything under 3 days old. A Reel at 12× stands out from one at 1.2×, even if both have millions of views. Each score shows its baseline, so you know what it was compared against, for example "12× · median of 12 Reels".

Here's a real case. MKBHD (instagram.com/mkbhd/reels/) has 5.3M followers. Across his latest 12 Reels, his usual is 2.6M views. His Reel from 4 August 2026 got 32,010,675 views, which is 12.1× his usual (public data, 6 October 2026). Sorted by views alone, that Reel is simply the top of a list of large numbers. Sorted by outlier, it's clearly the one to study.

Rising works the same way for new posts. It ranks Reels under 30 days old by views per day, so a Reel that's taking off this week isn't buried under one that has had a year to collect views.

Can you sort Reels by views without an extension?

Not on Instagram itself. Instagram shows the view count on each Reel in the Reels tab grid, but it doesn't let you sort another person's Reels. The grid is always newest first.

You can scroll down and read each count by hand. That works for a creator with 20 Reels. For one with 300, it takes minutes, it's easy to miss one, and you still only have raw totals. You'd also need to work out the creator's usual reach yourself to know whether 800,000 views is a hit or an average day for them.

If you want to know how Instagram counts those numbers in the first place, read how Instagram Reels views work.

Where else does sorting by views work on Instagram?

SortViral adds the same bar to these Instagram pages:

• A profile's Reels tab, as in the steps above.
• A profile's Posts tab. A type filter lets you show Reels, Carousels or Photos. Photos and carousels have no view count on Instagram, so they're scored on likes instead.
• Keyword search results and hashtag pages, to find the most viewed Reels on a topic rather than from one creator.
• Your Saved posts, to sort what you've saved by how well each post did.

For a walkthrough on finding a creator's top posts, including their most liked, see most viewed Reels.

What can you do with the sorted list?

Most people sort to find ideas worth copying. A few things make that faster:

• Copy for AI copies the top posts with their captions and numbers, ready to paste into a chat with an AI assistant.
• CSV export saves every loaded post with its numbers for a spreadsheet.
• Bookmarks keep the Reels you want to come back to.
• Watchlist saves creators so you can scan them all at once for their biggest outliers in a date range.

If you want to compare engagement rather than views, the Instagram engagement rate calculator shows how the rate is worked out. SortViral also works on TikTok, YouTube, Facebook's Reels tab and Pinterest; see the SortViral home page for the full list.

Is it safe to use on my account?

SortViral only reads what you can already see while signed in to Instagram. It waits about a second between requests and stops if Instagram shows a limit. It never likes, follows, posts or downloads anything.

Frequently asked questions