The Titanic's lifeboats had a total theoretical capacity of 1,178 persons. The ship carried 20 boats: 14 standard wooden lifeboats, two smaller emergency cutters, and four collapsible boats.
That capacity was enough for only a little over half of the roughly 2,200 people aboard when Titanic sank. It was nevertheless greater than the minimum capacity required by British regulations at the time. Those rules were based on a ship's tonnage and had not been updated to match the rapidly increasing size of ocean liners.
The figure of 1,178 describes the boats' rated capacity, not the number of people who actually escaped in them. Many boats were launched partly empty because of confusion, fear that overloaded boats would fail, and passengers' reluctance to leave the ship. The boats also had different capacities: standard boats were generally rated for 65 people, while collapsibles and cutters held fewer. In practice, only 18 boats left the ship, because two collapsibles floated away during the final stages of the sinking.