What if your closest friends could be arranged like a cosmic galaxy, and you’d be the radiant center? Snapchat Planets, a colorful feature available only on Snapchat Plus, does just that, turning your top eight friends into a personalized solar system.
Released as part of the Friend Solar System, this feature has thrilled Gen Z users by bringing social connections to life through planetary placements. In 2025, Snapchat Planets remains a growing phenomenon, providing a fun yet revealing means of knowing your connections.
This in-depth guide delves into the order, meanings, and workings of Snapchat Planets, so that you fully grasp this stellar social tool.
What Are Snapchat Planets?
Snapchat Planets is a paid feature for Snapchat Plus subscribers that lists your top eight friends as planets rotating around you, the Sun. A planet symbolizes a friend based on how often they interact with you, with closer-in planets showing stronger ties.
Released to enhance friendships, the feature takes a cue from the actual solar system’s order—Mercury to Neptune—and employs distinct emojis and colors to represent relationship dynamics.
It’s a fun means of viewing whom you snap, chat, and share stories with most, but only for your eyes, ensuring privacy.
Complete Snapchat Planets Order and Meanings
Their positioning (order of the planets) is not variable but directly proportional to our solar system as well. Knowing their position is the key to interpreting your friend list.
Here’s the explanation from Your No.1 Best Friend to Your No.8 and what each position stands for.
1. Mercury (Your No.1 Best Friend)
- Position: Closest to the Sun (You).
- Meaning: This is your unchallenged number one. You snap, chat, and interact most with this individual, and the sentiment is reciprocated. Your interaction is regualr, recent, and extremely two-way. Imagine Mercury’s rapid rotation—this is a speedy relationship and one that is always in close contact with you.
2. Venus (Your No.2 Best Friend)
- Position: Second from the Sun.
- Meaning: This is your reliable runner-up. Although the interaction may be a tad less intense with your Mercury, this pal is still a big deal in your daily Snapchat existence. Priced at often being referred to as the “twin planet” to Earth because of how similar it is in size, Venus is an extremely close and equal relationship, one step behind the leader.
3. Earth (Your No.3 Best Friend)
- Position: Third from the Sun.
- Meaning: Your “Earth” friend is home base. They’re a consisten and dependable figure in your Snapchat universe. You share a strong, cozy level. It’s a life-affirming and central part of your social universe, ranking a solid third in your sphere of friends.
4. Mars (Your No.4 Best Friend)
- Position: Fourth from the Sun.
- Meaning: The “Red Planet” represents a robust and dynamic friendship. You engage with this person regularly, putting them solidly in the top half of your Best Friends list. Not among your top three, but an important relationship that you work to maintain. There’s a plenty of action, but perhaps more distance than your inner-circle worlds.
5. Jupiter (Your No.5 Best Friend)
- Position: Fifth from the Sun.
- Meaning: Being the biggest planet in our solar system, Jupiter symbolizes a large, significant friendship, although it may not be in your immediate sphere of contact. This is someone you have an excellent rapport with but may not talk with each and every day. The contact is significant but not as regular as the inner planets.
6. Saturn (Your No.6 Best Friend)
- Position: Sixth from the Sun.
- Meaning: Saturn represents a secure, established friendship that possesses its own orbit. You may not be in touch with this individual with the same frequency as others, but the relationship is safe and reliable over time. It’s a stable friendship with heritage and security, placed at number six.
7. Uranus (Your No.7 Best Friend)
- Position: Seventh from the Sun.
- Meaning: This is usually a friend with whom you share a less close but still considerable connection. Contacts may be more irregular or have dissipated recently, but are still notable enough to hold onto them in your top eight. Consider Uranus’s distant orbit—it’s a friend who is very much in your system, just with more distance.
8. Neptune (Your No.8 Best Friend)
- Position: Farthest from the Sun.
- Meaning: Taking the eighth position, Neptune is your eighth Best Friend. This is the individual who barely makes the cut. The connection is there but it’s the least recent or frequent among your top buddies. This is a new friendship that’s trending upwards or one that you see less often but still hang on the periphery of your social solar system.
Related: Snapchat Plus Subscription: Detailed Pricing and Feature Breakdown
How Snapchat Planets Work
Snapchat Planets works on an algorithm that monitors shared interaction—sent and received snaps, chats, story views, and streaks. Below is how it works:
- Subscription Requirement: You must have a Snapchat Plus subscription. It is priced at $3.99/month in the US while ₹49/month in India.
- Activation: Friend Solar System is turned off by default for new subscribers. To turn it on, open your profile, tap Snapchat+, and switch the Solar System option on.
- Checking Rankings: Open a friend’s profile and look for a Best Friends or Friends badge with a gold outline. Tapping it reveals their planet in your solar system. Best Friends means you are both in each other’s top eight; Friends means you’re in theirs, but they’re not in yours.
- Dynamic Updates: Rankings update on a regular basis (daily or weekly) according to recent interactions. Heavy snapping or chatting can shift a friend from Neptune to Mercury after a while.
- Privacy: Only you can view your solar system rankings so that friends won’t know their position unless they look at their own.
The algorithm rewards mutual interaction, so both you and your friend need to actively engage to keep high ranks. Streaks, while powerful, are merely one aspect in addition to chats and story interactions.
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Why Snapchat Planets Matter
Snapchat Planets is not a mere visual trick; it is an engagement strategy. By making friendships into a game, it incentivizes users to interact more in order to “move up” in their friends’ solar systems.
For companies and celebrities, it provides information on follower closeness, so that content can be customized for leading followers. Yet the feature stirred debate in 2023 when publications such as the Wall Street Journal reported its ability to create anxiety in teenagers over ratings.
Snapchat retaliated by making it opt-in and found that fewer than 0.25% of users actively used it, as reported in their Newsroom. So, this is the key to its popularity that it balances out the enjoyment with mindfulness.
Benefits and Drawbacks
Benefits
- Visual Engagement: The use of the planetary metaphor makes monitoring friendships enjoyable and easy.
- Motivates Interaction: Forces users to snap and chat more in order to keep or better rankings.
- Personalized Insights: Provides users with an understanding of their social dynamics and prioritizes important connections.
- Shareholder Value: Influencers can measure audience engagement to boost marketing efforts.
Drawbacks
- Anxiety Potential: Rankings do make users feel anxious, particularly younger ones, when they fall from Mercury to Mars.
- Subscription Fee: Access needs Snapchat Plus, which might discourage some users.
- Scope Limitation: Only monitors top eight friends, possibly missing other meaningful connections.
Optimizing Your Snapchat Planets Experience
Consider the below suggestions to get the most out of Snapchat Planets in 2025:
- Boost Ranking: Snap often, keep streaks going, and respond to stories to rank up a friend.
- Monitor Regularly: Open friends’ profiles to check your rank in their solar systems.
- Control Privacy: Switch off the feature from settings if rankings become stressful.
- Business Use: Influencers can utilize rankings to find loyal followers and create content accordingly.
For instance… snapping every day with someone can promote them to Mercury and interacting with their stories can lock in their Venus or Earth status.
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Troubleshooting Common Issues
Some users experience delay in updates of planets, especially during the period of important interaction pattern changes. This issue might take 24-48 hours to get resolved as the algorithm processes new interaction data and adjusts the ranking accordingly.
If the planets assign incorrectly, verify that your app is updated in the latest version and your Snapchat Plus membership is active. Deleting the app cache also fixes viewing issues that could distort planetary visualization.
For long-standing issues, Snapchat’s support staff offers help through the app’s help menu, where users can report specific problems with the Friend Solar System feature.
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The Future of Snapchat Planes
As Snapchat keeps pushing the boundaries, the Planets feature could get updated in 2025, e.g., with new visual treatments or coordination with other Snapchat Plus benefits like custom app icons or story rewatch counts.
User suggestions include tooltips for more understandable planet meanings or generalizing the system to include “moons” for even closer relationships.
With nine million Snapchat Plus subscribers in Q1 2025 compared to seven million in 2023, the feature becomes increasingly popular among Gen Z users, especially in the US where there are 36 million teenagers using the app.
Conclusion
The Snapchat planet in 2025 provides a cosmic twist on social connections, converting its top eight friends into a vibrant solar system. From the fierce bond of mercury to the distant apathy of Neptune, each planet tells a story of your friendship.
Although only available on Snapchat Plus, its interactive layout and changing rankings are a highlight feature. Knowing its order, meanings, and workings allows you to move through your Snapchat cosmos with ease, building stronger connections and wiser interaction.
Whether you use Snapchat casually or as an influencer, Snapchat Planets is an amazing way to star in the social media universe.
