Best of / Rust crates / async runtimes
Best of · ranked by real use · data Oct 24, 2026
Best Rust crates for async runtimes
Short answerBy real use, the top Rust crates for async runtimes are tokio (3.1M a day), futures-executor (2.5M a day), async-executor (429K a day). tokio is our default pick: 3,098,313 real downloads a day and 78,796 dependents. 2 of these 5 shipped in the last 90 days; smol has not released in 2+ years.
Our picks
- Default pick: tokio. The most used that still ships releases, so the most answered questions and the likeliest to already be in your tree.
- Most recently released: futures-executor (2 months ago).
The ranking
| # | Crate | Real downloads a day | Dependents | Trend vs field | Last release | What it is (its own description) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | tokio Foundational | 3,098,313 | 78,796 | -8% | 3d | An event-driven, non-blocking I/O platform for writing asynchronous I/O backed applications |
| 2 | futures-executor Established | 2,492,842 | 417 | -5% | 2mo | Executors for asynchronous tasks based on the futures-rs library |
| 3 | async-executor Established | 428,916 | 166 | +2% | 8mo | Async executor |
| 4 | async-std Widely used | 138,341 | 1,903 | -23% | 14mo | Deprecated in favor of `smol` - Async version of the Rust standard library |
| 5 | smol Established quiet 2+ years | 70,975 | 766 | +34% | 2.1y | A small and fast async runtime |
Rules
Candidates: crates whose own README says they do this job, picked by hand (tokio, smol, async-std, futures-executor, async-executor, glommio, monoio, embassy-executor); one appears when we have 80+ days of crates.io data for it. Ranked by real downloads a day (quiet-day median, release-day spikes removed), crates.io data Oct 24, 2026. The default pick is the top crate that shipped a release in the last 2 years. Downloads measure use, not quality, and crates that other libraries pull in rank above tools you add yourself: read each description for fit.
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