Estimates put Karaites at something between thirty and fifty thousand worldwide, the great majority in Israel, concentrated at Ashdod, and present at Ramla and Beersheba. The figures published are not internally consistent, and should be read as an order of magnitude.
The community reached Israel largely from Egypt, where a Karaite population of some five thousand existed into the 1950s and was effectively extinguished within two decades, its members leaving with the wider departure of Egyptian Jews after the wars of that period. Essentially none remain there. A smaller diaspora exists in the United States, chiefly around the San Francisco Bay.
Two structural changes are worth noting. The community is served by a council of sages headed by a hakham, and in Israel a recognised Karaite religious court handles matters of personal status, so the tradition has a functioning institutional life within a state whose religious establishment is Rabbanite. And the historic Karaite refusal to accept converts has been reversed: a Karaite university approved by the council now runs conversion through authorised courts, a change made from the 1990s onward, and one that a community of this size plainly needed.
One distinction should be drawn firmly. The Crimean Karaims, under Russian and later Nazi rule, asserted a Turkic and non-Jewish identity and were treated accordingly. Whether they are Karaite Jews who denied it under mortal pressure, or a distinct people, is a bitter and separate argument, and it should not be folded into the history of Karaite Judaism as though the two were one subject.