Best of / Rust crates / databases and SQL
Best of · ranked by real use · data Oct 24, 2026
Best Rust crates for databases and SQL
Short answerBy real use, the top Rust crates for databases and SQL are sqlx (540K a day), rusqlite (505K a day), redis (358K a day). sqlx is our default pick: 540,430 real downloads a day and 4,124 dependents. Gaining fastest against the field: rusqlite (+29%). 4 of these 6 shipped in the last 90 days.
Our picks
- Default pick: sqlx. The most used that still ships releases, so the most answered questions and the likeliest to already be in your tree.
- Rising: rusqlite. +29% on quiet days against the field over 90 days.
- Most recently released: redis (1 day ago).
The ranking
| # | Crate | Real downloads a day | Dependents | Trend vs field | Last release | What it is (its own description) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | sqlx Widely used | 540,430 | 4,124 | +12% | 5mo | 🧰 The Rust SQL Toolkit. An async, pure Rust SQL crate featuring compile-time checked queries without a DSL.... |
| 2 | rusqlite Widely used | 505,001 | 5,597 | +29% | 3mo | Ergonomic wrapper for SQLite |
| 3 | redis Widely used | 358,270 | 1,549 | +8% | 1d | Redis driver for Rust |
| 4 | tokio-postgres Established | 243,640 | 840 | +11% | 4mo | A native, asynchronous PostgreSQL client |
| 5 | diesel Established | 107,307 | 667 | +23% | 17d | A safe, extensible ORM and Query Builder for PostgreSQL, SQLite, and MySQL |
| 6 | sea-orm Established | 59,264 | 535 | -5% | 27d | 🐚 An async & dynamic ORM for Rust |
Rules
Candidates: crates whose own README says they do this job, picked by hand (sqlx, diesel, rusqlite, tokio-postgres, postgres, sea-orm, mysql, redis, mongodb, rocksdb, sled, redb, deadpool-postgres, r2d2); 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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