Best of / Rust crates / dates and times
Best of · ranked by real use · data Oct 24, 2026
Best Rust crates for dates and times
Short answerBy real use, the top Rust crates for dates and times are time (2.4M a day), chrono (2.4M a day), jiff (982K a day). time is our default pick: 2,434,189 real downloads a day and 6,747 dependents. Gaining fastest against the field: jiff (+34%). 2 of these 5 shipped in the last 90 days.
Our picks
- Default pick: time. The most used that still ships releases, so the most answered questions and the likeliest to already be in your tree.
- Rising: jiff. +34% on quiet days against the field over 90 days.
- Most recently released: jiff (18 days ago).
The ranking
| # | Crate | Real downloads a day | Dependents | Trend vs field | Last release | What it is (its own description) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | time Widely used | 2,434,189 | 6,747 | -4% | 3mo | Date and time library. Fully interoperable with the standard library. Mostly compatible with #![no_std] |
| 2 | chrono Foundational | 2,369,156 | 38,126 | -4% | 5mo | Date and time library for Rust |
| 3 | jiff Widely used | 981,794 | 1,531 | +34% | 18d | A date-time library that encourages you to jump into the pit of success. This library is heavily inspired by... |
| 4 | humantime Widely used | 838,529 | 1,364 | -13% | 4mo | A parser and formatter for std::time::{Duration, SystemTime} |
| 5 | chrono-tz Widely used | 491,997 | 1,135 | +10% | 15mo | TimeZone implementations for chrono from the IANA database |
Rules
Candidates: crates whose own README says they do this job, picked by hand (chrono, time, jiff, humantime, chrono-tz, iso8601, dateparser); 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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