Should I use utf8mb4 instead utf8?

Question

What practical advantages and disadvantages does utf8mb4 provide, except ability to use Emoji? As I understand it takes more space to store.

Answer 1

utf8mb4 handles Emoji and some Chinese characters that are missing from utf8. There are other, less common, characters. Read about the Unicode planes, realizing that the BMP is the only plane handled by MySQL's utf8.

As for space... For characters that exist in utf8, utf8mb4 takes the same amount of space.